[[EDIT]]

...they attempted theft and the destruction of online communities who objected...

Which communities did they destroy?

They did say "attempted", and the legal relief requested in Stardock's legal filings did include an injunction that could have required the UQM project to shut down.  That's enough to count, IMHO.

[EDIT]: Parsed a little more closely, the 'attempted' might be read to apply only to 'theft' and not 'destruction', but that may be a little too pedantic of a parse.  In any event, no actual community destruction occurred.

Well, don't those two comments look suspicious next to each other? 1 comment each, but no spam links. I wonder what could be going on.

Create a user, post once to avoid rules that autodelete accounts with no posts, wait around until the account ages a bit to avoid rules that limit new posters, then spam everything?

Serge says this should be fixed now.

I have progressed to the point that I've discovered Fwiffo and his ship on Pluto, which apparently is supposed to be helpful in fighting these ships, but I've been having a lot of difficulty with them still to the point where, if I encounter one, it's a 50/50 chance if I have to restart from the last save.

Just to note, you can save the game at the start of an encounter (before you talk or fight).

If you've just discovered Fwiffo, you're still very near the beginning of the game, so unless you've taken a very long time clearing Sol, there shouldn't be too many probes (yet).

If you max out your engines, you can just barely outrun the probes.  I always max out my engines first, even selling back my weapons to do so.

I guess what I'm looking for is advice with combat. I am nowhere near the point where I can travel to the planet to disable them, so I need to be able to deal with them.

It is possible to fight the probes with Fwiffo, but it's an annoying fight.  The probes are halfway decent at dodging the B.U.T.T. missiles, so you either need to be patient and land lucky hits, or get good enough with the Spathi's forward gun that you can spin and shoot the probe as you flee.  The probe knows where your front gun is pointed, and when you spin it will tend to back off and/or try to flank you.

If only the exe-file has changed in version 0.8, then the roguelike-version will work with it.

It's been nearly 10 years since 0.7.0, so I'm pretty sure that more than just the .exe has changed.  The save game format, for one thing.

The roguelike-version was developed for a long time, and when it was almost ready, version 0.8 appeared. And now, in order to adapt to 0.8, most of this work needs to be done again.

If you did a git clone and branch of the repo, you could apply the 0.8.0 changes through an automatic merge (though you'd have to resolve the conflicts).  If you just copied (forked) the code, then yeah, you're looking at a manual merge/rewrite.

I recommend that all modders start by doing a git clone and branch; git was designed to help with this problem.

I think it should be fine; a video like that probably falls within fair use.

Even if it did not, UQM's content copyrights are under a Creative Commons Non-commercial license, so as long as your own video was under a compatible license, it would be permitted.

I'm not sure whether this was prior behavior, but there doesn't seem to be any way to interrupt the victory credits and get back to the main menu.

I'm testing on Win7.  Clearing the condition did not happen as easily as releasing and tapping the button, but it did eventually clear - although it cost me the fight.  If it happens again, I'll try to do a more rigorous dissection of the cause and clear conditions.

BTW, is there any chance of getting the bugzilla back online?

Stuck keys could be two things, one of which is definitely OS-based and another of which was an SDL2-sepecific bug that was supposed to be squashed.

The one that's OS-based is that if something takes control or focus away from the main window -- a popup, or Alt-Tab, or something like that -- UQM doesn't always get told about the key-up event. This can usually be repaired by pushing and releasing the button again after focus is regained. Recent Macs may be subject to this if you do not grant UQM the new permission to "receive keystrokes from any application", but I haven't experimented thoroughly with this.

The one unique to SDL2 is that SDL2 simulates keyrepeat on its own and this interferes with UQM's own keyrepeat and keychord detection systems. This should have been disabled in the code at this point, but it could be reliably triggered just by, say, thrusting continuously for ten seconds.

I'm doing a playthrough, and a few times now, I've gotten "stuck" keys, where the thrust and turn behave as though I'm holding them down, even when I'm not.  I'm not sure on the exact trigger for the glitch, or if it's something specific to my machine.

Testing on Win7:

Installer:

• The first content download site failed to connect (the second mirror worked).  It would be nice to have "Abort Install" and "Retry" options if a network operation fails.
• If the content download fails, the installer continues running, trying to install other packages and ending up with a non-working game.  Failure to install the content should probably be fatal.
• The download initially failed because I had an outbound firewall.  It would be nice if the installer could diagnose this.
• It would also be nice if there was a non-net installer.

Game:

• If you try to rename your captain while in orbit around a planet, the flashing rectangle appears in the wrong place.

I know Fred and Paul have said that Babylon takes from them, but I cant find anyone pointing out the episodes or plots or what have you.
Anyone know what this is about?

I believe the origin of this was here.

The idea of a super-tech precursor race ("first ones") is common to both.

What is almost certainly the longest-ever playthough of UQM has just concluded after over 4.5 years.  I think that this is probably the only game of UQM where the RL time exceeded the in-game time.

Congratulations and thanks to "The Troglodyte" for his highly entertaining recounting of his long journey.

it's rather interesting to see that Brad now says that common law trademark claims to alien names are "iffy".

Indeed.  For the last year and a half, he's tended to ridicule anyone who dared suggest such a thing.

In any case, I'm expecting UQM2 to be released in 2021.

I don't think that's realistic.  If, as Brad says, they are now back at Activision, they probably will not be able to start work on it until after they have been able to arrange another leave of absence.  And then it will take several years to put a team together and produce a game.

But a new announcement would cause new consumer confusion, and therefore is a new case, with a new alleged harm, and therefore not covered by this "with prejudice"....
That's what I'm afraid of....

I wonder if this was a motivation for Stardock requiring a change of name away from GotP.  Now any future announcement for a "new product" can justify a new lawsuit that circumvents the "old" and unrelated settlement.  At least in the mind of a CEO so experienced in the nuances of the law.

Presumably, the settlement document includes language prohibiting Brad from interfering with UQM2, as long as P&F don't use the phrase "Star Control" to announce it.

But I am concerned about the possibility of the disclosed settlement terms having been sugar-coated to make them more palatable to P&F's fans than the actual settlement language would be.  Why keep the document itself secret when all of the terms are supposedly public?  If there were business-sensitive numbers in it, those could be redacted, but not releasing the document at all just creates an opening for suspicion that there's something material being left out or misrepresented.