The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Are there any plans of implementing some form of anti-aliasing in melee mode, to make zooming look even smoother?  This can probably work wonders alongside some of the advanced scaling algorithms. (Or maybe I'm retarded, and this is already implemented, or is mutually exclusive with the advanced scaling somehow?)

Another thing I've been thinking of, is making the ships' rotation look more fluid and natural instead of jerky.  If any of you have played Timewarp - it uses smooth, 360-degree rotations for the ships (utilizing a sprite rotation algorithm with anti-aliasing). The problem with this is that it completely alters the melee gameplay - a ship in Timewarp can rotate itself to any possible angle, while in SC2/UQM the player is limited to 16 standard angles.  Because smooth rotation enables easier maneuvering and aiming, this has the tendency to completely alter the balances of certain ships against others, homing weapons vs. non-homing weapons, etc.

A possible solution to this, that might be fit for introducing in future versions of UQM, is to employ smooth sprite rotation only visually, while the actual physics calculations would still be based on the 16 standard angles (rounding the visual smooth angle towards the closest "standard 16" one)... and to make it so that if the rotate-left/rotate-right key is released while the ship is not in a "standard angle", it would keep on rotating until it hits the next "standard angle", OR it would simply automatically revert to the closest one.  Since the turning rates for each ship will be the same, the affect on gameplay would be minimal, while it would still make the game far more visually appealing.  Hopefully I've phrased myself clear enough here so that at least some of you have any idea what I'm talking about...

Any thoughts?

The current CVS version of UQM has trilinear scaling in melee mode, which looks pretty good when coupled with one of the other scaling methods.  Part of the problem is that the source images are quite low-res, and like they say: garbage in, garbage out.


Nitpicks: Timewarp simply has 64 angles instead of 16 (thus matching SC3), and each angle does have a nice, hi-res bitmap image associated with it (which is why ships like the Yush Ranger and Strivnar Scrutinizer rotate on the Y-axis as well as the Z-axis when you spin them)  Your other points about melee balancing issues hold true, however; the VUX Intruder is an absolutely devastating ship when you cannot sneak inside its firing angles.

I don't like the idea that what I see could not represent what will happen. I'd rather have slightly jerky turning and have the image not be a lie.

Also, even if your screen resolution is higher, the scaling used in melee works using the same simulated 320x240 screen as everything else, which is then scaled up to the real screen resolution. If the trilinear scaling of ships were to make use of the full resolution of the screen, it could look better than the current version. However, implementing this requires some trickery with the graphics. I tried hacking something like this onto UQM earlier, and the results were slow, unreliable and not very pretty. Then again, I'm not very familiar with the UQM graphics pipeline (which is somewhat messy).