You are awesome!

I have started using a chromebook rather heavily at home and when I want to play a game, there are never many choices. But UQM for NaCl is great! I am totally in favor of putting that in the Web Store, but I'll be bookmarking your page in the meantime.

As for the web trimmings, I think they're fine. I'm sure you could probably make things less spartan on one hand, but at the same time, it serves its purpose and gets out of the way otherwise. I especially like the use of the progress bar to let me know when things are loading.

I quite understand your desire to see if the upstream people want to manage the Web Store submission and/or code, though I note the Android port is not maintained by them.

My favorite ship from SC3 is the flagship when I use a memory editor to lock the battery at full charge. Then I just hold down the button for the point-defense and away I go!

Off hand, I have no clue which ship the AI plays better than a human. The Druuge for sharpshooting accuracy? But the AI will burn Druuge crew like there's no tomorrow. The Yehat for better shield battery usage? The AI won't raise the shield sometimes. The Ilwrath because the AI actually knows where the ship is? That doesn't make the Ilwrath a good ship.

Not sure.

As for the ship I pick? Um, the Broodhome? But I know its weaknesses. Slow (though at least it doesn't have to fight getting caught in the planet's gravity well like it did in SC1), poor battery recharge, and half the time the DOGIs are either useless or an actual hindrance. Still they can tear apart a Druuge and ruin an Utwig's day.

Very nice! The bubble is translucent, I see. Are you planning to add any interior? I really like the writing around the ring of the ship. Reminds me of Stargate.

Anyway, good job.

The intro for SC2 (especially the 3DO movie, but even the slideshow intro for the PC) seems to imply the B5 method, though without jumpgates.

Hyperspace, according to Commander Hayes, the Arilou, the Orz, and the Androsynth, is another dimension. Of course, the Arilou, Orz, and Androsynth are talking more about general Interdimensional Fatigue (IDF) and the ability to open portals to other (creepier) dimensions, but they all start off by saying, "It's like hyperspace, except we're opening a portal to a different dimension." So hyperspace works on the principles of IDF.

No problem! I can produce as many abandoned single-player mods as you want!

Hm. Got an abrupt endgame. I was playing a game and got to the point where I go to Zeta Hyades, but when I reached the Druuge, I didn't hear the red alert sound (might just be me not paying attn), and after speaking with the Druuge, I got dumped immediately back to the New Game / Load Game / Melee / ... screen. No battle, no nothing. Immediate game over, I guess.

Since I hadn't been saving, I can't reproduce the error quickly, so don't know if it was a fluke or not.

Also, if you want a minor bug report, when i go to the pkunk starbase, orbiting their hw, when i finish speaking to them, i end up in orbit of their planet, instead of remaining at the starbase. don't know how much this applies to other races' starbases.

not the biggest deal, but figured i'd mention it.

[Alvarin]

Or if you want to do it the hard way, you can also just open the file uqm-0.6.4-ee/src/sc2code/planets/Makeinfo and add the line with the + sign in between the other lines as shown.

For the record, your patch works fine for me. Alvarin, you'll want to do a clean first (./build.sh uqm clean), before you do a new build.

^ I downloaded the tar.gz myself and got the same "undefined reference" errors listed above on my ubuntu 8.10 box which compiles both the original code and shiver's balance mod just fine. So I think there's some include or something that's out of whack. If I think about it later I'll try to debug (can't now), but just wanted to confirm the error on a separate box.

I'd want to do it in Javascript also, just for the universality of js. Of course, these days I use GWT for big js projects since it's so much more convenient. And GWT allows you to write Java code that gets compiled into Javascript, which brings us back to interest in a Java port.

But I agree that you're basically starting over. You could keep some of the logical structures intact, but a well-designed Java app would have a different organization than the code currently has. For example, a lot of the global game state would be better placed in other places. Conversation stacks would go to its particular conversation class, and for the most part they don't need to be public.

I'm not sure I'd want to give every race a special, and I don't know what would make sense. I mean, sure, you could make the Ilwrath have an Arilou ability, but what would make sense for an Umgah? Or a Chenjesu? And you could say that an Earthling's point-defense means that it'd take out fortifications pretty easily, but that suddenly makes the Earthling a much stronger ship than it's worth.

And sorry if the SC2 stuff was tmi. I got the impression UAF was soliciting ideas for any ships, SC1 or SC2.

Actually, there were two special abilities per side:

Hierarchy:
Ur-Quan: instant besiege of fortifications
Mycon: full crew after every battle without recruiting from a colony

Alliance:
Arilou: fortifications do not hinder Arilou movement
Syreen: destruction of a Hierarchy colony gives the Syreen full crew

I had thought about what the SC2 races should get, if anything, if they played in an SC1 scenario. Since most ships don't get anything, I decided only a few should get special abilities. Here are my thoughts.

Kohr-Ah: Instant besiege (like Ur-Quan)
Chmmr: Instant besiege (like Ur-Quan)
Druuge: Full crew on an enemy colony destruction (like Syreen (but not quite as useful))
Utwig: Full energy on enemy fortification destruction (sort of like Syreen)
Slylandro: Er...

Well, I've had a number of thoughts on Slylandro. Since they're totally mechanical, it seems to make more sense for them to be able to recruit more crew on a mine, rather than a colony. Because in SC2 they're only a destructive force, I don't think I'd let them colonize, mine, or fortify planets. But because they use their destructiveness to replicate, I think I'd also make it so that when they destroy an enemy's colony, mine, or fortification, a new probe is created. (I've also considered making that the case for any battle they emerge victorious from, but I'm not as sure about that idea.) Obviously, if you exceed the maximum number of ships, than you wouldn't get an extra Probe, and you could always scuttle if you wanted to build a different ship from your starbase. I realize this is pretty radical compared to the way the rest of the ships work, but, then, that's true of the Probe in general.

So yes, if I were writing an SC2 version of SC1, that'd probably be the special abilities I'd give to SC2 ships and I'd leave the rest of the ships alone.

[Vertex]

Not much of a graphics person myself, but I do know Java, so I'll give quick answers.

Vertex, as you may remember from geometry, is a corner. In a cone, the vertex is the point that everything converges to. In a square, it's one of the four corners. Vertices is the plural of vertex.

JNI stands for Java Native Interface. Java is designed to be run against its own virtual machine, so that it can achieve that write-once-run-anywhere ability that lets you write a Java program on Windows and run it on Linux. Unfortunately that means you can't use any non-Java libraries in your program and you can't get access to the real machine that's running the virtual machine. So JNI is a way for you to be able to do that. It lets Java talk outside of its little box to the actual computer. JNI is not normally a preferred solution for a lot of things (because it is expensive and breaks the run-anywhere part).

GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix, which will make your head hurt if you think about it too long. It's a project to rewrite all of Unix into a free version. If this sounds like Linux, you're not wrong (Linux is sometimes called GNU/Linux), but the actual history is more complex and confusing. As much as Java is free to download and use, the GNU project decided to write their own version, calling it GCJ, the GNU Compiler for Java. I don't know too much about GCJ as Sun's Java Development Kit (JDK) is the de facto standard, and what I use for all my work.

To rephrase Dragon's last post, since Java3D is crap, he'd have to go outside Java's virtual machine for graphics, which would really slow things down because Java forces checks to make sure you're passing in and getting back what you think you're passing in/getting back. However (and I find this interesting), Dragon believes the overhead on making JNI calls is at the language level, not the virtual machine level, so it should theoretically be possible to make JNI calls that are much less onerous. Apparently GCJ had a good take on this problem as well, but the GCJ project seems to have not had much activity recently, so that's not a good sign. But even if JNI did work like he wanted, all his JNI stuff would still have to manage its own memory/resources. Java's garbage collector can't handle memory/resources allocated through JNI.

Dude, Smalltalk? Wow.

I remember Smalltalk from college, but I didn't see much interesting it, except for the old 1 := 2 insanity. Then again, the prof teaching that class also loved wikis, which I thought weren't going to go anywhere either.