The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

i'm not sure if this is the proper place to post ideas, but i figured it was worth a shot.

star control 2 has always been one of my favorite games, but i've played through it so many times, there aren't many new challanges anymore.  i already know where all the important star systems are located, and where the mineral abundant ones are as well.

so i had this idea that it would be more fun to have the game randomized a bit -- i added a command-line option to change the seed when generating planets, and all of the non-key star systems had completely different planets!  i haven't played through the game like this yet, but it looks like tons of fun.  maybe in the future there could be a feature like this, or maybe a feature to even reorganize homeworlds and other key systems?

You mean you know how to randomize planets? That's cool. I like your suggestion, but you aren't the first person to bring that up here.

The randomization of non-key systems sounds like a fun option. Something like that would probably be considered for post-1.0 release. However, the randomization of the key systems may be problematic, given how parts of the code and content are dependant on the default locations of all of the key systems.

is there a way we can randomize key systems, but omit the key planets within those systems?

Probally through use of C++ classes you could.. have each key planet in some class like 'key', and the rest in classes for their star-system names, and then have a function that randomizes the X and Y coordinates for each non-key class's planets..

..if that made any sense at all.

The problom is that some races have more minerals then others, because thats how they are (or at least thats how I remember it) presented. The Mycon for instance seem like they evolved with alot of resorces, so their planets have alot of them (like the unbelieveable Scorpii system), while the Druuge have little resorces, and so they have evolved to use themselves as such.
I don't remember all that well, so I might be wrong.

Well, I don't see that as a serious problem. If a region is poor in resources, then it could be because they were mined out...

i'm not on the dev team or anything, and i've only looked at the code a bit, but it looks like the key systems are hard-coded in, so they would still be the same.  but i guess it would be kind of annoying if all of the key systems were COMPLETELY randomized... having sol next to the umgah homeworld would be interesting.

what would be cool is if somehow you could randomize the system locations, then create different plotlines to go with it.

That might be a tad more problematic, especially with the coordinates given in speech every here and there...

Though who is to say you couldn't reprogram in a variation of the game with totally different text files and planetary locations. The variation plot lines can be voice-less, after all.

That can be done, but in my opinion would be an extremely non-trivial task.

Agreed - as it stands, we can change the text easily, but we can't change the mechanics or results... if you were to ignore the text and take conversation option #2 at the same time in the other game, it would have the same effect. The data files do not constitute a Starcon version of Unlimited Adventures.

Now, we MIGHT be able to do that with a bit more programming, but I am not counting on it.

Woah, woah, woah. Are you saing that adding new quests,  adding new races, re-writing the game entirely and making an unofficial sequil is out of the question? That's what I was counting the StarCon community doing after UQM was done.

True but the problem is it takes a lot of work, and most people tend to 'burn out' of the concept long before it's done. It's a lot of work with not very much return for the people who program it. Take a look at Time Warp, for example.

No, man. [begin squeeky, whiny, pre-adolescent voice] Timewarps not dead, man. It's just resting. It'll be back. You'll see. [end squeeky, whiny, pre-adolescent voice]

It's possible...but UQM is by no means an easily customizable game engine. Anything like that would require an immense amount of changes to the source code. For something like an unofficial sequel, it would probably be easier to just start from scratch.

Well, one can always hope for new quests and additions to be made to UQM as is, if nothing else.

That's what I was worried of -- if you're going to add more quests, well, you'll have to hard-code in the new switches for them, including a place in the saved game file. It can be done, but it won't be trivial, or even easy.