The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/video-how-star-control-ii-was-almost-a-much-more-boring-game/

There's a well-produced video interview with some interesting tidbits, and some high-res alien art I don't think we've seen before.

This is focused on SC1/2, not the lawsuit or Ghosts.

Awesome! The article shows us a piece of art that didn't make it into the game or the manual - the destruction of Syra.

And by the way, Paul's desire to give SC2 at least some degree of scientific accuracy paid off. I still remember catching a glimpse of the periodic table in a chemistry classroom at school and seeing so many familiar names that I remembered from SC2 - the lanthanides especially. :)

And before anyone asks, I was smart enough to understand that Tzo crystals didn't exist in the real world. The name itself is kinda a giveaway. ;)

By the way, I wonder what that SC1 ship balance chart in CGW was based on. It seems so wrong based on player vs. computer battles, where the Mmrnmhrm just owns everything, though that could be chalked up to the AI being completely braindead. I have no idea what SC1 games are like in player vs. player matches, especially the full game.

Indeed. Awesome!

And indeed, TZO crystals were obviously not existant.
There are other things named in-game where I thought "really?", but hey, it's fiction.
And fiction does not need to be accurate.
Playability trumps scientific correctness (to a degree).


Thanks for the link, Mormont! I would've missed it otherwise.
(Pity Fred and Paul didn't link it on their twitter....
But then again, I fear Stardock will simply claim absolute fraud of FF and PR for naming themselves the creators of Star Control at the start of the video. And misuse of the trademark owned by Stardock, and the accompanying alleged "goodwill" which allegedly also only belongs to Stardock.)


About the content:
I presume the article only contains so many of the original design materials because FF and PR had digged them out for the courtcase anyway.

can someone be so kind to link it here when it gets published???? Thanks in advance!

I'm pretty sure that the SC3 writers based that on SC2. It's mentioned in the Spathi dialogue (the Safe Ones, specifically):

Thanks, PRH. :)
Forgot that the Spathi were giving you access to their waste disposal, but being helpful, forgot to mention where to find them.

Very nice interview... I like how they first had made the ships as different as possible and then tried to figure out what kind of species would fit the ships. Sounds like a very smart strategy.

And here we thought that those Spathi captains were referring to the contents of their toilets... :D

No, really, they were. The quote I gave above is from the Safe Ones conversation, not one with the Spathi captains in space.

Really enjoyed this. You can tell there's a lot of really interesting ideas that never made it into the final game. I wonder how many of those were because they weren't fun or interesting in practice, and how many were just too tricky to implement. I wonder if P&F have any more ideas up their sleeves, 30 years later.

Yeah, I recall Paul mentioning earlier that when he was coming up with a concept for the Druuge, he basically thought that if they used their crew to feed the ship's batteries, then the crew must be slaves.

I learned the planets in our solar system from Star Control 2. I found it interesting when he said that it wasn't known in 1992 when they made Star Control 2 that other solar systems have planets. I guess most of the kids that played Star Control 2 back then started believing this long before the exoplanets were discovered.

Most scientists believed so, just because of sheer math probability.

What do you mean? Probabilities are based upon frequencies in randomized subsets generalized to larger sets. Since we didn't know anything about the probabilities for exoplanets in a randomized subset, how could we determine the overall frequency of exoplanets? It is the same with life now. Since we don't know the frequency of life from a randomized subset of planets, we cannot necessarily estimate the frequency of life in the universe.

Well the expectation was that other stars had planets, we even had predictive models for which ones did and what kind, but it hadn't been proven since we didn't have a way to detect or observe at the time. It would have been a much bigger shock if none of the stars we were observing now had planets after all.


There were observations back in the mid-1980s that very strongly indicated Gamma Cephei had at least one planet, which was a good candidate for study given where it is in the sky at a relatively stable point near Polaris. Ah, here's the paper -- http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1988ApJ...331..902C&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf

I remember reading this at university so long ago now :)

We knew of one system enough to say it does have at least 9 planets. (back then it were nine)

Of billions other solar systems we knew not enough to exclude the existence of planets.

If we had done a linear extrapolation, the result would've been much more massive than what SC2's systems show us.

But how likely would it have been that all the billions systems out there have a total number of planets smaller than our system has?

Math probability dictated that there are billions of systems out there having planets. The real question always was how many would be able to support life, and how many of those would be able to support intelligent life, and how many of those would be able to interact in a meaningful way with us.


it annoys me time and again how you seem to attack those statements, which are quite easy to deduct. But I fear that's just my perception because this is a words only, and not face to face.... Sorry for the rant.

Sure, but you cannot necessarily (or at least shouldn't) do a linear extrapolation from a single sample.....

(https://i.imgur.com/AMwvAIK.png)

https://www.archania.org/biases/#Unreliable_generalizations (https://www.archania.org/biases/#Unreliable_generalizations)

It was actually Paul Rudd.

I don't think you can really separate them at this point. This is a pretty heavy "P&F were the creators of SC1/2" article and interview.

Arstechnica kind of goes out on a limb a little bit even covering it. For a lawsuit of this magnitude, there's been remarkably little coverage. Very few websites seem to want to touch it with a ten foot pole. Youtube personalities too have shied away.

When I did a personality test, I scored almost zero on agreeableness..... apparently I am an extremely disagreeable person.

I need to focus on speaking in a more diplomatic way, otherwise, I am likely to offend people. Sorry about that.

It's only an issue if they advertise themselves as the creators in the context of advertising or promoting Ghosts, where it ostensibly creates formal confusion between "I helped write the game code and setting" vs "I was the publisher". I don't think anyone watching this would be confused and think they were a publisher. And Stardock can't prevent them from talking about their previous work in an objective, biographical sense - they can only stop them from leveraging that as promotion for their new game.

(I'm not saying Stardock is right, merely that this doesn't even cross the line that Stardock themselves has drawn in the sand)

Legal issue vs. PR consideration

Essentially, this sort of article very definitely helps promote the idea that they are the creators behind Star Control 1/2. I'm not qualified to say how much of a legal impact it might have, but arstechnica basically allowing them to go on at length about the intellectual process they went through to produce (create) Star Control 1 and Star Control 2 certainly doesn't hurt the argument legally that they're widely considered to be the creators in the public square.

Does it help that argument legally? Damned if I know. Like I said, not qualified to say.

But I'd have to think that the website in question was at least aware of the ongoing litigation, and allowing them to do a long interview/article heavily hinting that they were the creators and walking their readers through the creation process is unlikely to be an accident.

The actual journalist is aware of the lawsuit for sure. And is one of few people who have spoken directly with both parties to the lawsuit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/star-control-countersuit-aims-to-invalidate-stardocks-trademarks/

I suppose it's equal opportunity when they bring both sides on to talk about big moments in their history. You could even say it's neutral that they let P&F tell their story about SC1 and SC2.

But when Ars Technica says "we've scored big: we tracked down the creators of the Star Control series—none other than Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III", they probably knew that was a shot across Stardock's bow. It's an obvious point to everyone in the world (except Stardock and their lawyers after September 2017).

Is Art Technica biased against Stardock? Or does reality have a bias against Stardock?

Let's not spend too much airtime on this. There's another thread for lawsuit stuff, and this video is a great story that should be enjoyed on its own merits.

Honestly lawsuits are far less interesting than actual games. And coverage of SC:O has been pretty lackluster.

The thing that could have really drawn in the crowds of old fans and (perhaps much more importantly) the media attention was/is an actual sequel to the world and story of Star Control. Which Origins simply is not.

I believe Brad Wardell was correct in his original assessment based on fan reactions that indeed he really needed copyright licensing from Paul and Fred to make a real star control game and not some "alternate universe" fan game. The name "Star Control" is only relevant to people who remember the game (most critically those individuals in the gaming press that would inevitably cover the game) and thus care about the flavor and details they maintain such nostalgia for and interest in. The name by itself is worth very little. Where he fucked up was in convincing himself that a lawsuit against the original developers would improve his situation.

Please don't take my deleting the rest of your post in the reply for not finding it interesting. I do. But I found this piece the most interesting so I wanted to isolate it in our discussion.

There's two pieces to this. First is if this is true in general, and second is if it is true specific to this situation.

I can't claim to know for sure in either case, but I lean towards essentially an answer that differentiates the general target market. Star Control Origins has been released. This is a fact. And yet, there's not a ton of discussion on that game here on a dedicated Star Control board.

That's interesting to me.In terms of Star Control news it's easily one of the most interesting and notable news items in quite a while, but what are we all talking about? Is there a thread dedicated to talking about Star Control: Origins? Or really, even a non-dedicated thread?

Now I should caveat that I'm a very infrequent contributor here to this community so maybe there's some policy that I'm unaware of that specifies that Origins is not germane to the general discussion board. But it does seem like more people are interested in the discussion of this lawsuit than an actual new Star Control game.

On the other hand, given a single sample, it's more likely that it's typical or at least common, rather than rare or unique. You can't derive from that what a typical star system would look like, but you can conclude that other star systems likely include planets.

It was decided that SC:O discussion belongs in the Starbase Cafe section. There are two or three threads about it there, but they haven't seen any posts for a week or two.

Ah thanks. I appreciate the context.

Origins looks like a fan game with an actual budget but without any of the things that make a star control game a star control game, save for the name. If it did not come at such a terrible cost I would say "it's nice that it exists".

But it is still just a reboot, not the next chapter. It is an attempt to cash in on the name, I guess. The game play does not look like it has advanced much from the early nineties, the animations (at least in cut scenes) looks like some disney children's programming from cable television; the soul just isn't there. In other words, the things that could have been updated have remained mostly the same and what should still be there is no where to be found. Maybe I just need to see more let's plays, but I do not think so.

I honestly would have been 10x more excited by a company of Stardock's size taking on its own action/strategy/adventure game with a space opera setting, exploring new game play and developing a world more tailored to its own team's experience and strengths. In trying to imitate the work of another very different artist, they took on a huge challenge. Too much of a challenge it appears.


Origins is an "actual" Star Control game in the same sense as Star Control 3. It has the name. It lacks the everything else. And its egomaniac creator is trying to cancel the continuation of the actual story and world. Likely along with this very forum and project as well if he succeeds. So yeah, you are damn right the lawsuit is the talk of the town around here.

It's okay, we're on the webs here. I just needed to rant a bit about it.

And from a purely mathematical point you're right. One data point does usually not allow the calculation of probabilities. But in astronomy, where the real dataset would be too large for a computer the size of our Solar System, mathematical probabilities have to be based on far too small sets.
Before we had only one solar system data set to guesstimate existence of other planetary/solar systems. Before we could say  the probability of being so is high, abouve 90%, just because the planets seem to be the result of the formation of a Sun, and it is very likely that other suns, especially those similar to our Sun, formed similarily, and thus also formed planetary systems.
Now we know for sure that there are other planetary systems. Now we cans ay the probability of extraterestial life is likely to be above 50%. And it'll take quite some time to prove so.

But even if we knew all about our galaxy, that would still be one data set compared to the multi-quadrillions galaxies out there, and you don't know naught about them yet.
Depending on the actual size and difficulty of getting the full data set, probabilities sometimes have to be guesstimated based on a single know data point.
Well, we'll be for the foreseeable future not in a state to do so, as our subset always will be non-random, as we'll only have data of our galactic neighbourhood, which is a non-random sample.

Anyway, we're off-topic, and I contribted to this sad fact far too much myself.

Leonard French (Your Favorite Copyright Attorney) did two videos on it, and Youtuber Law did three. I don't know enough about that section of youtube to know if any 50 subs or less folks have decided that they could fill a running time of ten minutes and one second about it without having to write a script.

A followup on others who helped them:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/video-the-people-who-helped-make-star-control-2-did-a-ton-of-other-stuff/

Nothing directly on Ghosts or the suit, but I feel like the implicit takeaway is  that it was their team, not Accolade's.

New video! This time P&F talk about the other contributors to SC2, including the guy who directed Minions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw_lnnt52EY

Very nice of them to make all of these videos now... although I suspect it might be somewhat related to the lawsuit...

That, and gearing up interest for a follo-up of the original story.

Well, it does help bury some of the more ridiculous accusations thrown at F&P. And, of course, more trivia about the game's developers is always great for us hardcore fans. :)

I actually find it a bit funny that the developers are represented by constellations, since in SCO there are stars named after some of those developers.