The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

You read that right.

Allow me to explain: when I tried to play the Balance Mod with someone (yesterday, I think), as soon as we got to a battle of Slylandro vs. Earthling Cruiser, we suddenly desynced. This was odd; resources haven't been changed for these two in the balance mod, and I was sure I had the effects package installed correctly because Ur-Quan fighters were correctly green, the Umgah cone was correctly big, and the VUX limpets made that... sound... when enough of them attached. Someone (oldlaptop, I think) stepped in and determined that the problem was on my end.

Now, for reasons I won't go into, I recently installed UQM 0.6.2 to a separate folder (C:\UQM-0.6.2), so I decided to use netplay against myself between our PC here and my Pandora, just to see how well netplay works on the Pandora (note: the latest version on the Pandora is unfortunately 0.6.2). After determining it works, I started fooling around with VUX limpets and Arilou, then I decided to fool around with limpets and Slylandro.

Slylandro was picked, and... desync! I tried again a couple of times, but every time, when Slylandro was selected, it simply desynced.

Then, a moment of brilliance: there was only one difference between UQM 0.6.2 on the PC and UQM on my Pandora: the Pandora version doesn't have 3DO music! I turned off 3DO music on the PC, and lo and behold... it worked!

I haven't asked my opponent at that time (ziper) what his music settings were, but if he had only PC music enabled or didn't have 3DO music installed at all, we have a very strong correlation. So if that's the case, the question, then, is: what does it mean? Why Slylandro, and why not vanilla UQM 0.7 (which worked perfectly when ziper and I played it)? Is this an old bugfix that the balance mod failed to incorporate?

Further testing is probably necessary, but since I got no response in #uqm-arena when I tried to bring this up (and ask ziper about his music settings), I'm sharing what I know here.