I saw this on the Ars Technica article about the sale:  http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/stardock-acquires-star-control-rights-in-fire-sale-plans-reboot/

What I'd love to see was someone pick up Arne's idea for a game:

http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/star_control.htm

(old page with gameplay and story)
http://web.archive.org/web/20081112232751/http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=sce
http://web.archive.org/web/20070817174408/http://itchstudios.com/psg/sce/intro_story.htm

(an old forum thread)
http://web.archive.org/web/20070608150956/http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/forum/index.php?topic=828.0

(one of his last active UQM forum threads)
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4846.0

There are a few other projects from other groups/people, too, but I never really checked them out.  A good place to also reference is the Pages of Now and Forever website:

http://www.star-control.com/

...I hope StarDock doesn't kill their domain now that they own the naming rights.

Pictures!

Actually, I always thought that UQM would do well on XBox Live.  Once the multiplayer aspect is a bit more robust/polished, port UQM to XNA (if possible) and integrate with the XBox Live MP stuff, and you greatly increase its appeal and audience.  I think XBox Arcade has some free offerings; I can't see why this couldn't be free as well if people (MS, TFB, The UQM programmers) were willing.  It's more content for XBox and more exposure for UQM.  Definitely something you'd want to run past TFB before even THINKING of trying to make this happen, but I don't see any real conflicts of interest in that scenario.  Since it's based on the 3DO stuff, it's sort of geared towards presentation on a TV with a gamepad controller anyway, which is a bonus.

You know, MIE on Windows does the same thing when manually downloading the UQM files.  I had that issue when I ran the installer after downloading the files, it couldn't find the .uqm.zip files that MIE had "helpfully" renamed.

Are these browsers second-guessing the file names based on MIME type?  Why are they renaming files without the users' consent?  Gah!  Such a simple problem but it's obnoxious that it exists at all!

http://www.emuboards.com/invision/lofiversion/index.php/t23494.html

Hey look, a guy named Vilmos talking about SDL stuff!

Some more:

http://www.emuboards.com/invision/lofiversion/index.php/f42.html
http://www.emuboards.com/invision/lofiversion/index.php/t17675.html

Some more digging and it seems that this Vilmos bloke is the author of PalmMAME and Zodiac/PalmOS5 are related somehow, though Zodiac is a development environment? with some application libraries for stuff (TNA?) but is now no longer supported.  So TNA got ported to PalmOS5 and called PNA:

http://www.emuboards.com/invision/lofiversion/index.php/t25079.html
http://www.emuboards.com/invision/lofiversion/index.php/t26978.html

"Vilmos the author of PalmMAME is on vacation. I recommend for the time being that you check out Vilmos' Pocket Dimension board. There is a thread for PalmMAME 17.1 there with detailed installion instructions and help. http://www.pocketdimension.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi "

You might be able to make an account on either emuboards or pocketdimension and see if you can contact him.  Or ask other people about SDL since they may know.  Or with an account you might be able to 'private message' him or access his email address in his forum account, if he has it.  OR download PalmMAME and see if his contact info is in the documentation.

Hope this helps.

This may help:

http://dcemulation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=30946

http://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=1022.0

Yes, it's about possibly porting UQM to the Dreamcast.  But there are references to UQM not being fully optimized (still, 3 years later? maybe?) and the memory footprint, etc.

Seems like UQM is still in the 'fix bugs' and 'implement features' phase, not so much the 'optimize for speed and memory usage' phase.  I hope this helps or at least holds you over until one of the devs pops in a comment.

Actually, here's a thought.  Have each new game create a random seed to generate where everything is.  You'd have to modify all the static text and item locations into something that could be replaced with a variable (I have no idea how the source code is doing it, just thinking aloud).  You'd also have to put some constraints on certain things, like the Mycon planets probably shouldn't be in Yehat space, that kinda stuff.  Anything that needs to refer to the location of the Shofixi survivor, for example, could just reference one variable instead of static descriptions/locations. 

Put it as an option at the start, warn the player it might take a few moments to generate a dynamic game map and locations, and you've got a whole new game.  Or at least, the same game but one you have to do actual detective work with again.

Potential problems I see with this include dialog that gives specific coordinates and dialog that mentions specific constellations as locations.  You might be able to get around this by defining certain structures for the randomization, i.e. you can randomly move a constellation, but the constellation shape itself must remain the same and certain locations within the constellation must remain, maybe just move it to a different planet or start within the constellation.

Sounds like it'd be a bunch of work to get the information available for someone to code, i.e. find out where in dialog certain locations must be mentioned/replaced, determine what star structures and relations must be kept, that kinda thing. 

Extending the content is awesome, but randomizing the original content would have the benefit of keeping the original canon intact without it remaining static.  Plus, if it's done well, code-wise, extended content could probably take advantage of the same system so that it, too, could be randomized if the player so desires.

Anyway, a ton of work and probably will never happen, but thought I'd throw the idea out there in case no one else already mentioned it.

I do not know if this is possible to do with the Windows installer, but I thought I'd throw this out here anyway... if anything, maybe it will make it into a FAQ.

Downloading the content packages, I right-click the links and "save target as" and MIE starts to download the .uqm files.

Then I went to install the program.  I had all of the content files in the same location as the installer.  But the installer started to download the packages again?  What the heck?

Turns out that MIE decided to rename the .uqm files to .uqm.zip files because it felt they should be ZIP.  The installer of course was looking for .uqm, not .uqm.zip files. 

Might be something to check for in the installer, i.e. look for .uqm.zip files, rename to .uqm if present, continue installing.  Or, put a "hey you idiot windows users with MIE!" disclaimer on the download page.  It's probably a windows/MIE specific issue since I don't think them there hippy opensource browsers do the random renaming thing. 

Oh, for the record, latest patched MIE 6 plus Win2K Server is the platform I'm using.

p.s. thank you all so very much for working on UQM!