The Ur-Quan Masters Home Page Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
February 19, 2025, 03:57:05 pm
Home Help Search Login Register
News: Celebrating 30 years of Star Control 2 - The Ur-Quan Masters

  Show Posts
Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 8
1  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Starbase Café / Re: Yay, my book is out! on: March 04, 2015, 06:40:26 pm
Translating the reviews in google translate I got a good idea what the book is about.
Reminds me a bit of ghost in the shell, seems like something I would read Smiley.
Gratz on getting your book published!

Thank you, sir!

GITS has definitely been an inspiration for me. The manga is nice, but the first movie really rocked my world. It's one of the most perfect blends of atmosphere, action, ideas and... well, coolness.
I do admit that the convoluted story of the manga condensed into a short-ish movie makes the plot hard to follow at places. But just the incredible soundtrack alone is enough to outweigh that.

The first season of the Stand Alone Complex is perhaps even better. There's enough space in all those episodes to develop an intricate detective-story and blend in a ton of cool scifi-ideas as well. And talk about that intro theme... However, the second season was too convoluted to my taste.

Hope my publishing house gets the ball rolling on translating my book. It's too good to stay confined in the boundaries of our narrow linguistic niche! Wink
2  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Starbase Café / Re: Yay, my book is out! on: February 06, 2015, 09:11:07 am
Whilst it might take while for the thing to get translated, here's at least something to help catch the mood of the story:
The one and only Original Lemen Soundtrack!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1O2xEV8ohg&list=PLUs0JR3B6TEYhc2wJKMjSfnDBVmDupMK3

I put that together while writing the book. Most of the chapters just seemed to have an inherent "sound" to them. An atmosphere, a feeling. A mood. This is my best attempt to catch that sound.
Some of the tunes are a bit on the *nerdish* side (think Amiga 500 from 1991), but I don't think that's gonna be an issue to any of us here Wink
3  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Starbase Café / Re: Yay, my book is out! on: February 06, 2015, 08:55:18 am
Thanks, guys Smiley

Lemen is the name of an important character in the story... namely an AI that has plans (of the potentially ominous, long-range variety).
The name doesn't literally mean anything in Finnish, but the word's etymology might have linguistic significance...

"Näkemiin" is pretty apt for this case: The scene of the story is Soheba City, and "soheba" translates roughly into "goodbye" in a certain japanese dialect.
4  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Starbase Café / Yay, my book is out! on: February 04, 2015, 02:51:27 pm


Ur-Quan Masters HD programmer here, hello.

I just wanted to let you guys know about the fact that my action-packed, thought-provoking, lyrical, epical, philosophical and gut-wrenchingly intensive cyberpunk thriller Lemen has been published!
And that I'm e.g. super happy and buzzed about it.

Currently it's in Finnish only, but I expect that publishing people abroad will come to see its inherent greatness real soon.
This will in turn lead into them having it translated into a bazillion other languages as well.
Movies, series, fanfics and Broadway musicals will naturally follow and a sixty-foot statue of me will be erected in my honor.
The press will flock around me like starving flies wherever I go and critics shall burst into spontaneous tears of happiness at the very knowledge that I exist.
Foundations keep hurling Nobels, Bookers and Pulitzers at me whilst all other novelists resign to committing a quiet, desperate suicide.
I shall become stronger than the foundations of the earth and treacherous as the seas and all shall love me and despair.

The two Finnish-speaking people in the world can take a look at the book's description here:
http://like.fi/kirjat/lemen.
The rest of you can try google-translating that stuff. Be warned though: I tried that and the results vividly reminded me of the Orz Kiss.
5  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: 3DO movies do not work at 1280x960 resolution in UQM HD Beta 0.7.0 on: January 27, 2015, 01:13:02 pm
We are planning to release UQM-HD 'Gamma' before new year, with this fix included!

Which new year, 2016? At sourceforge it's still the HD-Beta1.  Sad

Sorry about this. Dczanik's computer exploded so the development has frozen on the graphics front.
I think I'll refrain from making public statements about release dates from now on  Tongue
6  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: 3DO movies do not work at 1280x960 resolution in UQM HD Beta 0.7.0 on: November 19, 2014, 08:04:19 am
Hi, GPANemesis!
You are correct, I fixed the movie issue in r1363. The fix is available already, providing you can compile the game from source code.

If you don't wanna go through that hassle, have no fear: We are planning to release UQM-HD 'Gamma' before new year, with this fix included!
7  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: Ur-Quan Masters HD Mod on: October 27, 2014, 07:07:40 am
Hello, Pikant!
UQM-HD programmer here.

Thanks for the feedback! We really appreciate it.

- Whilst I'm a lowly coder guy I can't say much about the space plastic-surgeon stuff... But as for the nebulae, some of them are a bit too bright to my liking also. Especially one of the green nebula variants. One tends to get lost in it.
I've been thinking that maybe darkening the nebulae a bit could help? That's something even I could do. Or, if I can coax Damon the graphics master to whip out some new nebula graphics, even better!

- The main menu music could be extended to the melee menu. Maybe not the load menu, as it would intrude the "original game" feel IMO. What I mean is: Some people have been a bit cross about the in-game-keys graphic in the starmap or the mineral value chart on planets as they don't belong to the "original game". Whilst I'm totally ok with them. However, I feel somewhat apprehensive about extending the music to the load game menu, for some reason. Strange folk we are, we humans  Smiley

- Good thing you reported the missing Utwig text problem. Although we have fixed it already, it wouldn't have been found if there hadn't been another player like you that took the trouble to report the bug to us recently Smiley. (By the way, here's our official buglist: https://code.google.com/p/uqm-hd/issues/list . You can report any new bugs you find there also. This forum is great for reporting stuff, but once they're in that list they shall not be forgotten. Which might sometimes be case when there's a lot of activity in this forum).

- The Arilou ship behavior with the Sa-Matra is definitely a bug. It might be caused by the new graphics modes because I haven't witnessed that behavior in 320x240. Also, recently upon starting a battle, a VUX ship jumped right inside a planet in 1280x960 mode! Got to take a look at these.
(Even if these have occurred in the original 320x240 version I think that behavior is just plain stupid and I wanna stop it  Wink .)

- The "Hard mode" is a good idea. I got to take a look how easily that could be implemented!

- However, the survival mode is out of scope for us in UQM-HD. I think the Star Control Timewarp has something like that, was it called "GOB"?


We are currently preparing a "Gamma" release of UQM-HD with (hopefully) all the bugs found after releasing the latest Beta fixed. We are hoping to release it before the start of 2015.
8  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: No ending on HD? on: October 03, 2014, 10:58:09 am
The slides.spins.xx lines enable thip introduction videos from the 3DO version in the Supermelee ship selection.
(Start adding a ship into your fleet and instead of hitting enter, press alt. Or maybe it was some other key...)

Without the slides.spins.xx lines, or if the viedo files aren't there, then the regular ship introduction picture is shown.

I'm not sure about the usage of the .nfo files. They might be/have been used for checking the version in the original non-HD UQM. Or then again, not.
9  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: Ur-Quan Masters HD Mod on: October 03, 2014, 07:08:44 am
Got a stupid newbie question. I downloaded uqm-hd source code and tried compiling it the same way I compiled "base" uqm, but cannot get it done. (mingw+msys on Windows 7)
I get complains about "build/unix/build_functions:line 164: svnversion: command not found
and after that :
obj/debug/src/libs/graphics/drawable.c.o Error 1
I admit programming is not my strongest area, but usually I can understand clear instructions and get things done  Grin
But clearly something very obvious is wrong with something somewhere...

svnversion is a tool related to the SVN version control system that we use for keeping track of the changes to the source code (and other files). It adds the revision number that you see upon starting the HD version in the lower right corner of the start menu.

I would wager that you don't have svnversion or your mingw building system can't for some reason find it even if you had it. At least on OSX, if I type "svnversion" on the command line, it outputs "exported" or appropriate revision numbers if svnversion is, indeed, installed.

You could either make sure it is installed, or then, remove the lines that invoke svnversion from build/unix/build_functions, and other places where they might be. I'm at work now, though, so I can't check all the places where the svnversion commands might be hiding...
10  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: No ending on HD? on: October 01, 2014, 09:17:47 am
Yes, those lines are the culprits!

By removing them everything works like a charm.
11  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: CTD on saving in UQM HD Beta on: September 30, 2014, 11:16:15 am

...the cheat mode just prevents the Kohr-Ah death march.

Ah ok, that should give me also enough time to explore all star systems making screenshots of them and all their planets and moons. It'll be only a bit more "dangerous" within the Ur-Quan space then. What I want to design with those screenshots is a huge star map based on HTML for the use with a browser, where you can open a popup by pointing on a star, thus showing the picture of the whole system, where you can click on the planets and moons to show up the associated screenshots with all the orbiter infos. But I think, regrettably all this work will last rather long until it's finished. At least one year, maybe much more. I've already made almost 1,600 screenshots, and that's not even the half of the whole galaxy.

Preview of some unedited pictures; borders and navigation bars etc. still have to be removed.


That is a commendable effort! A huge one too... BTW are you able / have you tried to compile the game from source code?
You see, if you can, compiling it in debug mode enables cheat keys, most notably F9, which you can use to jump around the galaxy in the starmap without having to travel. Also, you could increase your ship's speed beyond its normal limits in the solar system view by editing some magic numbers in the source Smiley

But then again, setting up the compilation environment and getting the darn thing to compile at all is quite a complex task. It might wind up taking longer than it would benefit  Embarrassed
12  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: No ending on HD? on: September 30, 2014, 11:09:17 am
Hello hello!

I'm happy to report that I've fixed this issue, too. (In revision 1361 of the source code if you're interested: https://code.google.com/p/uqm-hd/source/detail?r=1361)
It was a minor issue to fix: Just removing the lines pointing to non-existant intro/ending video files was all that it took.

I, too, hope we will name our next release Gamma  Cheesy!
13  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: CTD on saving in UQM HD Beta on: September 24, 2014, 08:36:45 pm
Hi, Jugger!
UQM-HD main programmer here.

Sorry for the long wait. I have been focusing on writing a novel and been completely away from UQM-HD business for almost a year. The novel is pretty much finished now and due to be published next January, so we've been ramping things up again on the UQM-HD front!

That indeed is an annoying bug with the savegames you've encountered. Luckily I've found and fixed the cause and with our next release it will be fixed.

You see, the original UQM code reserves only 10kB of memory space for constructing a savegame file. That is plenty for the original, but since HD version also keeps track of mineral amounts left on the planets' surfaces, the memory can run out if one has landed on many planets.

This is just the kind of bug that is hard to track down when playtesting... I've bumped the amount of memory reserved to 30kB per savefile, that should do it!

14  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: Ur-Quan Masters HD Mod on: September 10, 2014, 11:06:06 am
You're welcome  Grin

With so many constant numbers to be multiplied in the code, one was bound to slip through the cracks...
15  The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / Technical Issues / Re: How to use CFLAGS when compiling in OSX 10.9.? on: August 27, 2014, 01:56:47 pm
Thanks! I'll try the patch out this evening.  Grin

BTW, would you feel like coding some stuff for UQM-HD? There are still some annoyances in the game that are ...annoying.
Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 8


Login with username, password and session length

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!