Wow! That looks absolutely gorgeous! Does that engine of yours zoom like the original interplanetary i.e. does it have fixed points in space in which it zooms in/out? Or does it have some kind of smoother zooming?

That is an interesting idea, though I'm pretty sure I cannot manage such a feat with my feeble coding skills. But then again I could try to scroung the code from orbiting that generates the rotating planet, and maybe toy around with it...

Hmm, I guess I'm either blind or kind of slow, but more likely both
You wouldn't happen to have a "hyperspace stars and interplanetary gfx in high res"-package lying around as well?

Ah! That's just great!
So I'm kind of reinventing the wheel here

On the other hand, if I figure out a way to make the comm screen gfx appear the correct size in 640x480 without resizing the PNGs, it could be feasible to make all the other aspects of the game 640x480. Now, that would be su-weet!

Yeah, if this try ever gets finished I'll make it an optional addon, stuffing the larger gfx to Addon folder and keeping the originals in their correct place.

After some source code tweaking I managed to get this UQM rig running in real 640 x 480 mode:
 - not 320x240 scaled to 2x, but actual 640x480!
Check out the screenshots (that's modded Cedric's project6014 in case you're wondering...)
http://img22.imageshack.us/i/73978869.png/
http://img402.imageshack.us/i/54749918.png/

Basically I introduced a Resolution factor to most of the constant numbers within the code that are related to drawing stuff on screen.
Some of the status screens are still in the wrong place, but that's a small thing to fix. Bigger issue is to get the planet exploration to work well. Correcting the weapon ranges etc is a lot of work, but easy to do.

Now, pimping up all the PNGs to 640x480 would be too enormous a task (mostly because of the comm screens and anims), but it'd be cool to offer people a chance to play at least supermelee with sharper rez.

There are these threads,
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=2899.0
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=2666.0
which have some of the ships resized and redrawn in gorgeous quality.

 I was wondering did you guys finish all of the ships? Are the makers of these ship drawings still alive? I'd love to have those sprites and if possible, in every orientation with the lighting coming from the correct angle. If you read this rambling and want to participate, could you send these to me?

Then I could use those for the full size melee sprites and either resize 'em for the med and small sprites or use the current big/med sprites as med/small.

Hey, wow! This is great!

The Ilwrath one has great sounds, especially the bass, which has that "in your face"-attitude in it. The song would benefit from a little variation here and there though, it is a bit monotonous right now as Draxas pointed out.

Again, the Vux piece has the best bassline I've heard of the Vux variants there are and the drums have just the right kind of energy in them. I do prefer the Precursor version's choir section though, perhaps because it sounds more "seamless".

The one I really loved was the Arilou remix/master. Especially because I haven't been able to find other Arilou remixes that would actually be based on the original and not completely different songs (referring to Precursors 'mix).

Check your PM for more!

Self-answer:

Full-screen to the rescue!

Running the program with -f switch did the trick, yay!

Hmm.. too bad, the same behavior occurs.

Strange, the 0.7 starts OK with ./uqm-debug, but this 0.6.4 directs input to terminal with both ./uqm-debug and ./The\ Ur-Quan\ Masters.app/Contents/MacOS/The\ Ur-Quan\ Masters after installing...

Hay,

tried running Cedric's project6014 on OSX but hit a brick wall:
Starting ./uqm-debug from terminal starts it, but all the keyboard commands stay in the terminal shell. No input goes to the program itself.

Launching the app from the icon crashes!

Tried something lame like ./uqm-debug < /dev/stdin , but that didn't do a thing...

Any OSX wizards around?

Thanks for the comprehensive example and SW tips, you guys are full of good advice!

So far I've used a separate orzspace.ani since I've got some new graphics in the orz space in addition to some of the hyperspace gfx. The way I've done the colors for them is to simply switch off the colormap specifying number in the .ani file, forcing the PNG's own palette to be used.
This is OK for single frames, but with animations of multiple frames I think I'll go for the way you described in the example.

My ultimate dream is to make a real sequel out of this thing eventually, but then again, that might never happen... So as the first step I'm taking the route someone (Angelfish?) suggested in another topic: Make it a small add-on for the original UQM. This shouldn't take too long and it would also let you guys see what I've been able to accomplish!

Hmm, interesting!

The ctconv was already there in the tools of my current subversion so I can use it as a starting point if I want to create a tool for changing the colortables.

Currently I've been fiddling about with the hyperspace stars and spoor graphics. Planting the normal hyperspace graphics into the Orzspace leaves and ugly red glow around the graphics. A most efficient way of eliminating this would of course to define in something like orzspace.ani that the graphics in orz space use a different color table.

This color table is specified by a number after the .png file name and its transparency color index in the .ani file.

Where in the .ct files it is defined which number it is? For example, hyperstars. ani specifies the graphics to use colortable number 54.

Also, when editing the .png files with photoshop, the 4 kB files always bloat into 50kB+ files after saving. I specified that PS doesn't add color profile (the original game gfx don't use these) but even that only lowered the filesizes from 57kB to 53kB.
This isn't major issue, but I like to optimize things, a nerdy idiot that I am.

Doc would be nice, docs are good!

Hmm, so no shortcuts here. Well, it wasn't too hard a thing to do to modify the quasispace green colormap to that Orz space blue, 20 minutes about with a Hex editor.
Things might get hairy though if there was a need to do some more intense stuff like producing graphics for a new race.

But I guess it's just a matter of then doing it in photoshop with a 256 color palette and copying the palette values to a .ct file. Perhaps it is even possible to copy the whole chunk of 256*3 bytes from .act to .ct instead of copying them one-by-one!

As for the something better...  



Currently the *Below* a.k.a ORZ space hosts only one portal at 600.0:600.0 that leads back to hyperspace 100.0:100.0 but all kinds of crap can now be thrown in there!

BTW. Is there a better way to modify those colortable files than hex editor and painful labor   ?

Hehh, changing build.config file in build/unix did the trick, now the joystick is disabled by default.

I can clean, config, compile and run with two keystrokes now. Oh, the joy, elation, rapture, delectation plus happy days and jubilation.

Success! 

Thanks yet again for advice! Now Talana literally has a 'place in the sun' at otherwise empty and void Alpha Lyrae...

The empty solar system was easy to make work partially: Just define number of planets for the sun] as 0 at the special star system generation code's GENERATE_PLANETS case. Already this would work otherwise, but if battlegroups were generated inside the system the game would crash.

The problem was in the point in grpinfo.c where all the battlegroups were placed in certain coordinates in the star system. The code would place their coordinates regarding to planets and when there are no planets, it's trouble time.

To correct it, I wrote special cases in grpinfo.c's GetGroupInfo() in couple of places which would work like if (number of planets==0) {place battle groups in about middle of the screen.}

---

Intersecting with the sun worked by changing that "can't intersect with sun" bit of code to work like "can't intersect with sun except if there are 0 planets in the system". To test it I put the syreen conversation code in GENERATE_ORBITAL for Sundesc[0].

At first that crashed, but it seems that when I put GenerateRandomIP for GENERATE_MOONS, GENERATE_ORBITAL and GENERATE_PLANETS and only after the GenerateRandomIP I defined the numplanets=0, the conversation would start upon hitting the sun.

Now the game would crash only when exiting the sun. This was due to DrawOrbit function in solarsys.c. I Changed
pPlanetDesc->image.frame = SetAbsFrameIndex (OrbitalFrame,
               (Size << FACING_SHIFT) + NORMALIZE_FACING (
               ANGLE_TO_FACING (ARCTAN (
               pPlanetDesc->pPrevDesc->location.x,
               pPlanetDesc->pPrevDesc->location.y))));

to

pPlanetDesc->image.frame = SetAbsFrameIndex (OrbitalFrame,
               (Size << FACING_SHIFT) + 2;

in case there were 0 planets in the system so it wouldn't try to read the pPrevDesc's location since I guess there is no pPrevDesc for the sun. This piece of code decides how much zoomed the star should be when drawn on the screen, just a graphical thing.

---

So all in all, it works!
Only thing is that the battlegroups are very insistent on moving from the very center to the left edge of screen to circle some invisible point there. I guess that is because GroupPtr->dest_loc given as a number of planet and when there are no planets...

I Didn't yet try to give -1 as the dest_loc since that just might be the sun (if it works like sortPlanetPositions at solarsys.c) so that's what I need to try next. Oh, and instead of syreens, make it a transition to hyperspace or something better

Again, I sounded like a technical manual here... I hope this post will be helpful to some modder out there!

Hi again!

The game obviously doesn't like it when I try to force a star system to have no planets or moons at all there. (Crashes when trying to enter such system).
I haven't looked too closely into GENERATE_PLANETS and the function it's calling, but maybe I could change something there to make zero-planet systems work.
Would anyone know what is the particular cause for crash and where in the jungle of code it lies hidden?

Also:
Regarding the same star system tryout: Is it possible to change the star itself into an object one can interact with? I'd like to create a "portal" system of sorts that has absolutely nothing in it except that portal in place of the star and perhaps some Orz ships flying around.(Dang, now I gave that away!)
One way to emulate the effect would be to stick a planet with MIN_PLANET_RADIUS in a super giant system, but it would seem just... half-assed.

Just tell me if I'm bothering you too much with all these questions... It's just that if someone has managed to do this already, it would be kind of waste of time to re-invent the wheel