This looks really amazing, good work!

My only complaint is the star map.  The contrast between bright stars and black background is a bit much, and makes it difficult to read the text.
Also, as a purist and assuming this is supposed to be HyperSpace, I think I'd prefer a reddish backdrop. =P

But that's a minor quibble.  Let me know when there's something vaguely playable (even a beta version or demo) and I'll be ready and willing to give it a go for you!

Personally, I'm offended by how easily people get offended about fictional creations in a 20 year old video game.  The obvious solution is to stop creating works of fiction immediately, so that 20 years from now, no one will be offended by them.

Bonus points if we can put together some kind of rally to destroy all existing copies of anything fictional.  I'm thinking fire would work best.

All future video games, movies and books, etc, should be based on true stories.  Reality is never offensive, because it's true.

[expect]

1. It's my understanding that Fred and Paul are not directly involved in the game Stardock is making.  They have been contacted by Stardock and have given their blessings, etc, but they aren't actively writing the game's story themselves.

2. Stardock has already made it pretty clear that the game they are making is a prequel, close to or during Earth's First Contact with the Chenjesu.  So any plot details from the new game would be overlapping SC1, if anything.

3. P6014, as awesome as it is, is not an official Star Control product, nor was it ever intended to be.  Neither Stardock nor Fred and Paul are under any obligation to adhere to the content of a fan project.

4. Even if they wanted to use elements of P6014, that would require them to enter into legal negotiations with the people working on P6014 for creativity rights on anything that can't be traced directly back to Paul and Fred.  (Even the stuff than can be traced back could still be touch and go due to extrapolation.)  It would be far cheaper, easier and wiser to just make up their own story.  For anyone in the fanbase to expect P6014 to be integrated into the official SC products is the height of arrogance, IMHO.

Showing respect to the fanbase is one thing.  Stardock has already done that in spades.  They've told us their plans, they've said they won't harass UQM.  They've even set up links to UQM on their official page.  That's already way more than I would have expected them to do.

Like all fanbase projects, P6014 is a labour of love.  You do it because you want to be part of it, not because you expect to get anything back from it.  "Getting anything back" includes recognition from the official license holders, FYI.

To be fair, the formatting makes it very hard to read.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure this guy is just a troll.

Dude I've had the project for a year, I just haven't gotten back to it in a long tie and I already contributed some art and sound. In fact I recently completed my version of the entire plot-line with many loose ends closed up like ho the captain escapes, how to defeat the Lurg, what their plan is, why the Orz act the way they do,  now on the wiki page that Awakened directed me too, now they just need to decide if that's the plot-line they want to go with. I would suggest if you're a standard fan who is eager for this project to come out that you avoid the wiki page because it contains many spoilers of what can possibly put in the game, though it won't start being worked on for at least a month due to the scheduling in the lives of the main programmers.

There's a difference between contributing and taking over to do it all yourself.  Maybe the reason that people are slow to respond is (a) it takes them 5 months to read through all the stuff you wrote and (b) they'd like to find ways to incorporate their own ideas, too.

In any case, a fan project like this isn't going to be finished in a few months.  This is the sort of thing that takes years, dude.  UQM has been going for at least 10 years (probably longer) and it's still not completely finished.  Hasn't even reached "version 1.0" yet.  I would expect P6014 will take even longer since they're making up all-new content and writing all-new code, not just cleaning up and updating an existing program.

I merely posted this topic in case like before they would take 4-5 months to respond to me. Secondly, I purposely said "Star Control 3" because I hate the other Star Control 3 created after Paul and Fred were fired and wish it never existed and hope p6014 can replace it and wash away those terrible memories.

Suit yourself, but if you insist on using the name "Star Control 3" to refer to a project commonly known to the community at large as "Project 6014," don't be surprised when mere mortals such as myself get confused.  I don't have any love lost for the "official" SC3 either, but I have better things to do with my time than hate it into the ground and pretend it never happened.

By "Star Control 3" I presume you mean Project 6014.  I don't mean to sound judgemental or anything, but you'd probably make faster progress if you at least knew the name of the fan project you're considering making contributions to.

The second step would probably be e-mailing someone in charge.  Here's the project page, complete with what looks like a few important email addresses: http://code.google.com/p/project6014/

I found that link by clicking on the first forum topic I saw with "Project 6014" in the title, btw.  It's not hard to track these people down.

None of this changes the status of the Ur-Quan Masters or Star Control on GOG.

That's all I needed to hear.  Whatever the future may hold, I'm glad to hear that Stardock won't be saber-ratling the poor volunteer army of UQM. =)

I'm excited by the news that the Star Control license is once again in the hands of a company that cares enough to do anything with it.  I honestly don't even care what Stardock's plans are, as long as it's something more than "stick it on a shelf and only dust it off often enough to keep the legals nailed down."  I think it's safe to say Stardock has something more than that in mind.

Reboot, remake, sequel, prequel, whatever.  I already know that any forthcoming Star Control game won't be exactly the same as the old one - it literally cannot be.  Just as the new Star Wars trilogy couldn't possibly have been the same as the original - it's a product of a new generation, for a new generation.  Time has changed everyone's perspectives, including Paul's and Fred's, to some degree.  Even with them involved to the hilt, it would be different.  As long as it's got enough similarities, I will be satisfied to know that the franchise is not dead anymore. =)

Rock on, Brad.  You hold a palpable piece of my heart in your hands, all I ask is that you keep the dream alive.

Good point about the *outside* reference.  I had indeed forgotten that. =)

We've just added your recordings into UQM-HD with Damon, and they're gonna be in the game in the upcoming Beta release!

PM me if you wanna be in the credit roll with your real name. Otherwise I'll just credit you as Soul Reaver?

Best news of the week!

Yes, they have.  The answer is that they apparently can't pursue it right now do to legal obligations to their company.
There's another, much longer, thread around here somewhere discussing the idea of a new SC kickstarter.

I'm not sure that I agree with onpon's dimension counts, but I do agree that the TRUE form of the Orz is basically indescribable.  I'm sure their realm is equally unknowable.

As far as the Arilou go, is there any evidence that their origin is extra-dimensional?  They use Quasi-Space most heavily than any other race, but their homeworld looks to me like it's still in TrueSpace on the other end of the portal.  I'm inclined to think that the Arilou's true form is exactly what we see in the game, unless I've forgotten some pertinent bit of lore...

@IcaAge:

Avidemux is the freeware video editor I use these days to split and merge video files on Windows.  VirtualDub is another from ages past, though it seems somewhat finnicky in Windows 7 (I don't think it's been updated in quite a while.)

Don't you mean break away from... was it Activision? I forget...

If they wanted to use the actual name "Star Control" for such a project, they would need to get the rights for it back from Accolade.  That's the one thing that isn't open source, and Accolade seems to be holding onto it with an iron death grip for nothing better than spite, from what I can tell.

However, TFB as it's own company is more than just Fred and Paul these days so they'd probably need to break off from their own company as well if they wanted to do something like this.  TFB is currently knee deep in Skylanders, to my understanding.

Just one more thing to add on top of the great advice others have given here:

UQM is a "sandbox" game - one of the things I love about it, btw.  Meaning that the game allows you to go basically everywhere from the word go.  Just because you CAN go into Ilwrath space doesn't mean that you SHOULD go into Ilwrath space.  In general, if you find the enemies in one area of the game to be too hard, go someplace else instead, until your ship is more powerful and capable of defeating/escaping from them.

Re: finding stuff on the starmap, most of the really important things in the game come along with a set of coordinates which indicate the approximate direction, if not the exact location, of the thing you're looking for.  When you're on the starmap, the coordinates in the upper right indicate where the cursor is on the map, so you can use that to find the general area that whoever was talking about.  (If the coordinates go by too quickly in conversation, you can hit spacebar at the end of the speech to get a static text review of everything that was said.)

so if the search feature really isn't working, there's always that.

Sounds good to me!