Actually, donations could be spent on commissioning extra artwork/music or renting server space.

UQM's regular installer is made with NSIS. There's an .nsi script located at trunk/build/win32_install/uqm-installer.nsi which can be compiled into an .exe using the makensis tool (IIRC, makensis ./uqm-installer.nsi; on windows, you can probably rightclick on the .nsi file in Explorer and click "compile"). The .nsi script contains a few functions for picking a random mirror and doing the downloading/handling of packages.

Mirror for onpon4

Okay, I located the source of the issues I was having.
It was a DLL issue. The DLLs you distribute at https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/downloads don't seem to work correctly, even when using your ISO/VM to build UQM. When I used the DLLs from a vanilla UQM installation, it worked. I'm guessing it was an issue with libpng and sdl-image, because the errors I was getting were about unsupported image formats:

Code:

Couldn't get cel data for 'base/ships/arilou/skiff-icons.ani'
'base/ships/arilou/skiff-meleeicons.ani' -- 66 bytes
_GetCelData: Unable to load image!
Gfx Driver reports: Unsupported image format

Very cool. I've had quite some issues with compiling for Windows before; either MSVC is being shit, MSYS doesn't want to coöperate, or MinGW conflicts with compilers on a proper Linux host.. This could be quite useful!

However, I thought that the entire workflow of this VM was a bit annoying with too much manual fiddling required, so I made a fork that uses Vagrant, Fabric and Puppet. It's available here.

The only requirements for the client are Vagrant and Fabric (and Virtualbox). Vagrant is very easy to install, but Fabric can be slightly annoying to install on Windows. See the readme.md file on GitHub for details.

To set up a build system via this new method, clone the Git repo and run the following command via a commandline shell:

Code:

fab init

This command will automatically download an Ubuntu 12.10 image, which will then get provisioned via Puppet and prodded to coöperate via Fabric itself.

To download the UQM source and extract it on a location that's accessible by your Host operating system (e.g Windows):

Code:

fab download_uqm_src

To build UQM:

Code:

fab build_uqm

EDIT: compiled .exes currently seem to crash due to some resource loading issue.

We've been talking and working amongst ourselves. The artists have been working hard, we're talking story, I'm closing in on finishing a revamped dialog system, improved from the one described here:
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=3233.msg41124;topicseen#msg41124

A demo editor/player for this format can be found here (which is what I've been working on lately). Supports most things, with the exception of advanced expressions. If you just want to see pretty graphics and an example dialog, hit that shiny 'load example dialog' button. I don't guarantee that it follows the specs 100% completely, but it should be fairly close...

Ah, that's it. Thanks.

Hmm. I've tried getting a standard PlanetInfo file by making the debugHook point to DumpUniverseToFile, but whenever I press the Debug key the DumpUniverseToFile function doesn't get called at all, even though the other stuff that I have assigned to the Debug key does happen (I get new ships, see all Spheres of Influence, etc). I don't see anything related to the DumpUniverse thing at all either in stderr or stdout. With some printing to stderr/stdout I've determined that debugHook isn't ever not NULL (in starcon.c) but I don't know how to solve that little problem.

Say, does anyone know how I could get a Project 6014-version of the Planetary Database? I'm assuming that it's an automated process largely based off of the game code, but I'm not awesome enough with C to be able to pull it off myself without pulling my hairs out a few times. Can anyone (Elestan?) enlighten me on this subject? It could make p6014-development a lot easier.

I would suggest that when zooming, the size of the stars should remain constant, and just the distance between them should change.  That way, you can zoom into tightly packed star clusters like Vulpeculae to see the individual stars more easily.

There, it should be easier now to zoom into tightly packed star clusters. The size doesn't exactly remain constant, though, because that just looks a tad too odd at extreme zoom levels.

Also moved some of the styling out of the code and into CSS. Currently, only Spheres of Influence can be altered this way, though, but my eventual goal is to be able to style the complete starmap via CSS.

I would suggest that when zooming, the size of the stars should remain constant, and just the distance between them should change.  That way, you can zoom into tightly packed star clusters like Vulpeculae to see the individual stars more easily.

Good idea. I'll keep that in mind, but I'll probably do it in such a way that stars will still get bigger as you zoom in, only the rate at which they get bigger when you zoom in gets lower the more zoomed-in you are.

As a firefox user I can't pan or zoom or anything, but I do think it is a very pretty map and nice work.

Yep, that was a known issue. It has also been fixed.

Just found a mistake on the map. It lists Beta Vulpeculae II as the Androsynth homeworld. The actual Androsynth homeworld is Eta Vulpeculae I.

Whoops. Fixed.

How do I download this for offline use without a browser?

Grab a .zip off of the GitHub page or clone my repo, then open index.html in your favorite browser. This currently works just fine, because I don't make any XHR calls and all starmap data is static. I can't however guarantee that this method will continue to work in the future.
EDIT: if you actually meant "without a browser": you can't.

You should bring Vela in front of Zeeman.

Fixed.

I've just made some updates that allow users to pan and zoom the starmap, like on Google Maps. Also added some performance improvements so that stuff doesn't have to be recomputed when recoloring the stars or showing/hiding sets of Spheres of Influence. Unfortunately, the panning doesn't appear to work on Firefox and Safari. Probably has to do with the way I load SVGPan.

This change however means that IE8 and below are completely unsupported now. I recommend Chrome over FF as it seems to be quite a lot faster. Haven't tried Opera yet.

Here's something I've been working on for a while: a Star Control 2 starmap, rendered and searchable in the browser!
You can try it out here. The project is also on GitHub here.

Everything should be pretty self-explanatory. Use the search box to search for alien homeworlds, stars, or the location of devices. Click on a star to display some additional data about the planets orbiting that star (courtesy of Elestan's planetary database). Several star highlighters are available that highlight stars with a neat pulsating animation.

Enjoy!

Now how could I possibly know that?

This tells me that you're either not working for Human Head, or you're not very clever.

EDIT: Have you ever even played Star Control 2?

Right, I just realized that you were talking about the resource unit map, not a 'normal' map of the universe.

Luckily, I was just working on creating a version of UQM's starmap rendered with Javascript/RaphaelJS, and adding in colorization via resource units didn't seem too hard.

Here it is. Click on the "colorize via available minerals (value)" button. Legend/scale is the same as the one in the map you linked to.
Added bonus: biological data. For the legend/scale of the biodata, see source.

In Chrome, RaphaelJS renders via SVG. Maybe it's possible to copy the SVG data over into some other file and then edit it with some vector graphing tool to make it printable on a sheet of paper.