I'm happy (and proud) to report that UQM is currently featured on the home page of downloads at Maemo.org as the newest app to make it through the testing portion and become available on the general repository. A comment on the download page is already showing that it's a success (by my criteria).

What does this mean to the vast majority of you who don't have a Maemo 5 device (ie N900)?

• Well, first of all, it means you should go out and buy the awesome N900 phone.
• There is now code in UQM that will throttle it down and auto-pause it when the game window loses focus. This is disabled by default but could be enabled for ports to other mobile platforms capable of multitasking.

What does uqm for Maemo 5 add?

• A build of the latest svn version, meaning it has all the fixes up until now. This is tagged as version 0.6.7 (0.6.2 was the last official release).
• Some control mapping improvements, with tilt control coming soon.

The question of "why" came up on IRC a few weeks ago when i was asking questions relevant to the port, so i gave it a thought and here is what i came up with. I ported it to Maemo 5 because (in no particular order):

• i think UQM is a fantastic experience akin to reading the better works of classical sci-fi
• seeing UQM on a phone holds a sick fascination
• i needed a test subject to learn debian and maemoification
• i want to see Maemo succeed so there remains a (superior) alternative to both old and new mobile OS behemoths (Win mobile and Android)
• it's cool having a game available in the loo (you had to be there for that one to make sense...)
• a new generation of would-be uqm fans are more apt to discover it on a mobile device (pun not intended)
• i've always wanted to help out with uqm dev and this was an open niche

I'd like to thank the uqm maintainers, especially fossil, for answering so many questions.

I think well-managed palettes will prove useful if you plan to use special effects like the one at the very beginning of UQM, when the Starbase has a radioactives shortage. Other than that, I have no idea.

Hi guys. It's good to see people actually working on new Starcon material. Regarding palettes: i believe that if you browse the bug database, there's a discussion of this issue (been through a lot of random UQM documentation recently in the process of contributing some patches and porting to maemo). IIRC the gist of it was that the paletted animated images are finicky to edit (because of the paletting) so unless you need that, just use standard color values and it will work fine.

Best not to maintain legacy handicaps and limitations in new material unless there's a good reason for it.

Keep up the good work. I'd help out proofing and editing dialogs for consistency but don't really have time to come up with fully new material atm. Send me a message when you have something for me to look over.

I use Kubuntu, and started with the most recent release.  Except for the fact that the installer is a bit retarded, it's quite impressive.  Everything i have needed to use on my Thinkpad T42 has just worked from the default install plus about three or four easy tweaks:  standby, hibernate, 3D acceleration (although ATI drivers are terrible), CPU scaling, sound (including volume buttons), 1400x1050 res, touchpad+the Thinkpad button, brightness control, usb mouse, dual boot (a bit of a hassle there, though), and wireless.  My biggest complaint is that wireless is NOT very functional, in the sense that only cli commands seem to work (ie the Kwireless panel seems to do nothing but mislead one) and i still can't get it to work with my work AP (which has no encryption or anything tricky)--just my home AP.

Man that game is addictive.  Went to bed at 5:00 

I knew it had to be something stupid on my part.    What i don't understand is why the CVS install still failed, since it includes the content.  When i created a packages subdir in content in the CVS tree and added the voices and music packs, it worked fine, but i thought those were optional. 

In any case, OpenGL and in fact, any command line options seem to break it still.

Thanks for catching that error- i was so preoccupied with it saying version 0.3 in unixinstall that i overlooked the full dir.

It seems that a more informative error would be useful, since it's clearly not the missing key file that caused this problem (eg in the CVS tree it exists outside of a package already).

Code:

me@hubris:/usr/local/games/share/uqm/content$ ls
uqm-0.4.0-3domusic.uqm  uqm-0.4.0-content.uqm  uqm-0.4.0-voice.uqm  version

I did discover uqm in multiverse yesterday, but it was an earlier version, so i was trying to get 0.4 to work.  I'll try it out since it seems that no obvious solution is making itself known.

The "suggestion" i got on the Ubuntu forums was to download sc2 and run it on a DOS emulator.  I'm reminded fairly often there why it was that i liked gentoo forums.  If only gentoo on a laptop wasn't such a pain, i would be using that instead.  The jury's still out, though.

Edit: Okay, i installed uqm from multiverse (version 0.3) and it works fine with default parameters.  However, if i try to set OpenGL mode, i get an audio error.

Code:

OpenGL renderer: MOBILITY RADEON 9600 Generic version: 1.3.5272 (X4.3.0-8.16.20)
Initializing SDL audio subsystem.
SDL audio subsystem initialized.
Initializing MixSDL mixer.
MixSDL using driver 'SDL_audio'
Unable to open audio: a101, No available audio device
Sound driver initialization failed.
This may happen when a soundcard is not present or not available.

Weird.  Audio also fails with custom resolution set, even though that fails and defaults back to 640x480.  And now, it doesn't work at all.  I had it running twice by simply running uqm, but now that doesn't work!  Aargh...

Uninstalling and reinstalling has fixed it, but such Microsoftesque behavior in a linux app is strange.  What do command line switches do to the default install?

It seems stupid to have to run 0.3 when 0.4 has been out for months, and is a great improvement.  I hope something comes up to fix this.

Waaaaah

Code:

The Ur-Quan Masters v0.4.1 (compiled Nov  9 2005 22:34:05)
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY;
for details see the included 'COPYING' file.

Initializing base SDL functionality.
Using SDL version 1.2.8 (compiled with 1.2.8)
Initializing Pure-SDL graphics.
SDL driver used: x11
SDL initialized.
Initializing Screen.
Set the resolution to: 640x480x32
Screen scalers are using SSE/MMX-Ext/MMX code
0 joysticks were found.
Error: Could not copy default key config to user config dir: No such file or directory.

I tried using the content from 0.4 and opengl and etc, with no better luck:

Code:

me@hubris:~/dev/uqm-cvs/sc2$ ./uqm -o -r 1400x1050 -f -d 16 -n /usr/local/games/share/uqm/content -C /home/me/dev/uqm-cvs/sc2/cnfg
The Ur-Quan Masters v0.4.1 (compiled Nov  9 2005 22:34:05)
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY;
for details see the included 'COPYING' file.

Initializing base SDL functionality.
Using SDL version 1.2.8 (compiled with 1.2.8)
Initializing SDL with OpenGL support.
SDL driver used: x11
SDL initialized.
Initializing Screen.
Set the resolution to: 1400x1050x32
OpenGL renderer: MOBILITY RADEON 9600 Generic version: 1.3.5272 (X4.3.0-8.16.20)
0 joysticks were found.
Error: Could not copy default key config to user config dir: No such file or directory.

Man, i need my SC2 fix!

Actually, the version file exists, but its contents are:

Code:

0.4.0

$Date: 2005/05/17 01:11:26 $

I tried removing the $Date line, but it doesn't seem like that fixed the problem.  I noticed that the unixinstall file is out of date: it mentions version 0.33 files and .zips instead of .uqms.  Is it otherwise correct?

Edit: i checked out the CVS and am trying to build that at the moment.  One thing i noticed is that during the build script there were a couple things not found:

Code:

Symbol 'strupr' not found.
Symbol 'stricmp' not found.

I didn't notice this in the 0.4 build, but since it didn't make a lot of noise i may have just missed it.  Could this be the cause of the problems?

This sounds like you have the content in the wrong directory or the content for the wrong version of UQM. Without information on where you have placed the content and exactly how you are starting UQM it is hard to tell what's wrong. Have you tried manually specifying the content directory with the --contentdir option?

Yes, i tried that.  It makes no difference on the behavior.  I downloaded the packages (including source) from the 0.4 version download page: http://sc2.sourceforge.net/downloads.php
All of them specified in the name that they were version 0.4.  I placed all the .uqm content files in the content subdirectory of the source tree before executing the build script:
sh build.sh uqm

After building, i installed with:
sudo sh build.sh uqm install

I tried using the default directories, and then deleted everything, rebuilt, and tried specifying different directories when that failed.  Every time i got the same results.

I couldn't find UQM in the repository for Ubuntu, so i downloaded the source and content and followed the directions to build it and then install it.  When i try to run i get the error

Error: Could not copy default key config to user config dir: No such file or directory.

This has been mentioned here before, and the typical response is that it's due to unzipping the data files, or not having the content available at all.  I've checked and double checked, and the content files are all in the right place, just as downloaded.

I extracted the .key file manually and put it in my config directory, and now i get this error:   

Kernel failed to load!

The window opens, but stays blank.

Any ideas what's going on here?