Spoil me.

What else would you do with the extra caster?

You can use the Umgah caster.  You use it when you enter the Ilwrath homeworld's star system.

There is a brother of Tanaka somewhere... can't remember where, so maybe Google for him...

Yes!  That is the map I have.  I printed it out on 11x17" paper with a color laser printer.  Turned out NICE.  If you want you own copies, send me a SASE and tell me how many you want!

My only real complaint about the game is that graphical display settings are not saved once the game is exited.  But I noticed I could edit /etc/uqm.conf and so I did.

However, when I do that, the game segfaults. 

I'm using FC4 to play this game if that is helpful.    It seems that whenever I use any command-line options having to do with OpenGL it crashes.  I can, of course, set the setting from within the game.

Interesting question.  I guess it's about what you want to get out of the game.  Since I played it many years ago and had a great time back in the day, being about to play it again on my Linux laptop at work is not about game play so much as it is about stepping back in time a little and reliving the past.  So for me it's a "geez!  this is cool!" kinda thing.  But that said, I too wanted to make the game play much faster.

I played it once and I was using a complete star map showing all homeworlds, the locations of all important items to be found including rainbow worlds.  So I spent a lot of time (the first go-around) just playing around... seeing if I could do anything I never did before.  It was fun and all, but I wasted so much time that the Kor-ah started their tour of wiping out all life in the area... and while I used that to my advantage by following them around and getting the objects that I no longer needed to trade, bargain or fight for, I still didn't make it to the Sa-Matra in time to win.

So my second go around was about building my ship up fast enough to be of use in my galavanting about rather than following the story line too closely.  I still needed to pick things up here and there... do the trading and stuff like that, but really it was focused mainly on building the ship up, getting the utwig bomb, releasing the chenjesu/mrnhrmm and getting myself into range of the sa-matra.

So I'll tell you my way of cheating:

First thing I did was sell off anything I didn't need.  Any extra ships were completely unnecessary to me.  I sold that stuff off, made sure I updated my thrusters to the max (so that I has less chance of being caught in hyperspace) and went straight for the warp pod.  As a resource, I visited as many rainbow worlds as was convenient.  This allowed me to get fuel from the melnorme instead of buying it with collected resources.  Before long, I had no choice but to collect some resources by mining planets, but by that time, I was able to safefy mine without much difficulty and was even more selective about what I was mining so I could get the maximum value for the space I allowed myself.  The goal, again, was to build my ship into a stronger fighting vessel.  With two of the most powerful weapons at the front, three shiva furnaces and two guidance systems, I had enough to destroy any single ship in two blasts.  Battles were short and R.U. accumulated quickly... much more efficiently than through mining.  In fact, at that point in the game, mining consisted of visiting Mycon space and just wiping out as many of those puff-balls as possible.  I got really good at that.  Finally, I sensed it was time to go ahead and take on the Ur-quan.

I then got the Taalo shield, picked up the froggie-guy (which, wasn't totally necessary...if you like to battle, then by all means, fight your way through to the Sa-matra.  I did it once just for fun), freed the Chenjesu/Mrnhrmm who modified the bomb and ship.  Finally, I made my ship battle-ready by adding a single crew-pod, some shiva furnace, tracking and two big blasters... not the BEST configuration I had ever had, but it would do.  I did not include a fuel pod!  I had just enough fuel to pop over to the sa-matra area, then called for help from the melnorme, got re-fueled and then finished my trek to the sa-matra.  I also brought a whole fleet of the avatars with me ... the only time I fought using anything other than my original ship.  I used those to kick the asses of anything that got in my way.  Saved the game at different points so I could play it out in different ways and ultimately battled by way through everything to win.

I played the game to the bare necessities of completion with focus on building my ship up.  Speed is first, turning is second.  After collecting enough RU, I was able to blast anything away without much effort.  Then quickly mop up the details of the game to end it. 

Visiting rainbow worlds was my primary source of technological build-up... it was very important and so you can see why mobility at high speed was of such importance.  Avoid battles until they are useful for collecting RU.

There was an interenet based game some time ago... wish I could remember the name of it -- it was pretty cool though.  It was a 2D game with asteroids/sc2 style action.  You could start with a ship having some basic features and build them up and kill lots of other people.  Sure wish I could remember what that was called... oh yeah!  Subspace!  I guess that thing is still around (I googled it while writing this) too.  I think it would be fairly simple work to get online with subspace and play with the controls while doing a packet capture on the network.  From there you can determine their method of information exchange.

In any case, a "Risk-like" game that has Star Control melee would be great fun against the computer or against another person.  I hope it happens, but all I can offer is "testing" and "complaining" to support the effort.

I'd much rather see the board game converted into a computer strategy game.  If I recall correctly, the original Star Control was a conquest game wasn't it?  In any case, I would definitely love to see that come about.  It is the sort of game that can be played against the computer for hours and hours of wasted time.  That's the sort of game I want to play anyway.  Playing over the net or some other multi-player thing is good too, but basically, I just want to waste time at work and solitaire just doesn't do it for me.

I have this great quality image I found somewhere... wish I could remember where, but it shows the circles of influence for all the species and everything such as locations for specific items and events... a map of the rainbow worlds and quasispace too.

It's a terrific cheat.  It would be just as well if it were without the cheats... I could edit the graphics some by blocking out some stuff.  The image file is very high resolution and I printed mine out on 11x17" paper with a color laser printer which is plenty big enough for me and probably most people.  If someone wants additional copies of it, perhaps I could help out...  All I would ask for is a SASE.  The quality of the envelope has everything to do with the quality of the printout you will receive!  Send one of those mailing tubes and there will be no folds.  Send a standard 8.5"x11 type envelope and it'll get folded in half.

Anyway, let's see who wants this bad enough to go through all the trouble!

BioSlayer:

You would be "The Man" for doing that.

C# would be nice if you could get it to compile under Linux as well.    I run this game under FC4 on my laptop...at work...

I'm not sure how the API is different between the two (Windows and Linux) as far as joysticks are concerned, but I find that the control keys file works just fine as the description goes.  There are likely to be some tips to be gleened from the source code that's already available I'm sure... but the resulting output from any configuration program will likely be the same for Linux and Windows alike.

So my plea is that you somehow make it compatible/portable to Linux.  (If not, maybe it will work under Wine...who knows) but the project is multi-platform and it's pretty nice.  I'd love to see it continue that way.... and I'd definitely like to have a program for changing controls -- editing with a text editor is annoying.

I would like to take a moment to convey my thanks to the people working on this project.  I only wish I had the time, patience and mind-set to do some coding on this project myself (or else I would come up with an interface for configuring the controls such as the joysticks and all...I can do it with a text editor but I'm still more or less getting the hang of it).

I recall the StarControl games from years ago and this faithful continuation is simply terrific.  It works exactly as it did years ago, only now I am running it on a laptop running Fedora Core 4 Linux.  It's good nostalgia but since it has been so long, I have all but forgotten how the stories go so it's almost like playing it again for the first time.

Keep it up!  Love what you're doing and the idea of making a StarControl4 is fantastic and I'd love to see more action in that direction.  Thanks again!