The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hello!

So I recently uncovered something I coded back in college - a video game based on The Ur-Quan Masters!
I coded this back in December of 2010 as the final project for my Freshman Intro to Software Development (Java) course, and I thought I should share it here.

This is basically a scrolling shooter game which assumes that the player failed in Star Control 2, and now what remains of the Alliance must stop them directly instead. However, the Kohr-Ah have the Sa-Matra now, and they decide to use it to repel the alliance assault. You play as the Kohr-Ah, piloting the Sa-Matra into battle against waves of alliance ships.

A few notes:
This game runs in a very nonstandard, non-resizeable resolution of 1600 x 800. If launched on a system with a horizontal or vertical resolution less than that, it will display incorrectly, though it may still be playable.
Not every alliance ship is in the game due to time constraints - though I did add the Ur-Quan as enemies, as a figured it would make sense that some would try to stop the Kohr-Ah even after they won the war.
I made some changes to the weapons of the Sa-Matra - the green projectiles act as a directional turret, and the flame projectiles are fired from the front in a spread pattern. The Annihilation Toroid was never shown in-game, though from the art I assumed that it was something generated in the pincers and then projected elsewhere in a larger form.
Before posting this, I went in and made a few minor changes to the original: I made it runnable as an application (it was originally coded as an applet), I added an mp3 player (the original version had all the music in wav format and was much larger), and I made a few minor improvements to the wave spawner.
The game may be prone to briefly freezing up - this is Java's fault (garbage collector overhead), and I'm not going to rewrite the whole thing at this point to try to optimize it. Any desync between the text and audio for the intro also comes from this. If anyone is interested in the source code, I can make it available, though please keep in mind that I wrote this about a month after first seeing Java (or any programming language), and it is the very opposite of an example on how to write good code.

Anyway, you can download it here (http://arrayofqueuestacks.tk/~alexeys/Sa-Matra-Now-and-Forever.jar)
This is a runnable jar file, so just run it and it should work - please let me know if something goes wrong.
The instructions will be given in-game - I hope everyone enjoys it!

EDIT:
Note - Java is required to run the above jar file - most computers will probably have it already installed.
For those who have Windows and don't have Java installed, a native Windows version of the game is now available here (http://arrayofqueuestacks.tk/~alexeys/Sa-Matra-Now-and-Forever-native.zip)

Hello Naismith!


Thanks, that's fine. :) When I upgraded my system from XP to Windows 7 more than 1 year ago, I didn't install Java again and don't want it to due to all those security issues.

Best regards,
Norbert

It's well-made for a student game, however no real strategy involved - just point and shoot.