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Author Topic: 0.7.0  (Read 10191 times)
lakota.james
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0.7.0
« on: October 28, 2007, 02:36:42 am »

What are in the plans for 0.7.0? Here are several suggestions (from me and others that posted them in this and in other threads)

  • netplay lobby
  • ability to watch netplay
  • sc1 full game mode with optional rotating 3d map
  • different music in different places of hyperspace
  • ability to use music other than ogg
  • Somehow make it less likely for newbies to get stuck in the full game, like adding parts of the gameplay FAQ to the manual, or including the scanned starmap perhaps.
  • Use UDP in netplay (to compensate for alephresh's lousy intarwebs)
  • Get permission to use the name "Star Control"
  • ability to record/play back melee matches
  • The inclusion of the alternate Utwig voicepack, by Lance_Vader and Vlaagar, as a bonus package (similar to the remix packs), would be a really good idea in Vlaagar's opinion
  • Melee recordings should preferably either be stored as human-readable "scripts" (so that we can make up recordings we didn't actually fight) or a utility for converting them to and from such scripts should be provided.
  • Ability to name savegames



post more ideas, I would like to see them.
« Last Edit: November 04, 2007, 03:37:26 am by lakota.james » Logged
Resh Aleph
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #1 on: October 28, 2007, 02:58:29 am »

  • Somehow make it less likely for newbies to get stuck in the full game, like adding parts of the gameplay FAQ to the manual, or including the scanned starmap perhaps.
  • Use UDP in netplay (to compensate for my lousy intarwebs).
  • Get permission to use the name "Star Control".

Okay, so I'm a little obsessive about words. Sorry.
And why do I keep ending my messages with 7 pt. text? o_O
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #2 on: October 28, 2007, 04:22:37 am »

Great ideas!  Please let us know when you have playable versions ready for us to test.
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #3 on: October 28, 2007, 10:09:57 am »


ability to use music other than ogg


Two words: Open Source .

Explanation: Ogg is an open source format, formats like MP3 and WMA are not (please correct me if I'm wrong).
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #4 on: October 28, 2007, 12:48:39 pm »

netplay lobby
I intend to start work on that in November. I'm slightly overloaded at work right now (as usual).

Quote
ability to watch netplay
Not in the immediate future, but may appear as a lobby feature.

Quote
sc1 full game mode
rotating star map  Wink
Not likely in the near future. The rotating star map of SC1 was IMHO the most annoying aspect of it, and implementing the SC1 full game is a lot of work.

Quote
different music in different places of hyperspace
As Meep-eep notes, this is easy, once the music has been composed.

Quote
ability to use music other than ogg
UQM also supports the original MOD music. Adding support for other MOD-likes shouldn't be too hard since UQM uses MikMod.

Quote from: alephresh
Use UDP in netplay (to compensate for my lousy intarwebs).
I don't think using UDP instead of TCP is going to miraculously compensate for a bad connection. What sort of problems do you have?

Quote
Somehow make it less likely for newbies to get stuck in the full game, like adding parts of the gameplay FAQ to the manual, or including the scanned starmap perhaps.
I've seen lots of starmaps in previous conversations, could we pick one (spoiler-free, preferably with content equivalent to the map included with PC SC2) and include it in UQM?
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #5 on: October 28, 2007, 01:24:00 pm »

ability to record/play back melee matches
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #6 on: October 28, 2007, 01:34:56 pm »

I just HAD to register back to say this!

1. The inclusion of the alternate Utwig voicepack, by Lance_Vader and me, as a bonus package (similar to the remix packs), would be a really good idea in my opinion.

2. Melee recordings should preferably either be stored as human-readable "scripts" (so that we can make up recordings we didn't actually fight) or a utility for converting them to and from such scripts should be provided.

P.S. I'm probably not going to delete this Redux account, though I'm probably not going to post anything else either.
« Last Edit: November 14, 2007, 05:42:55 pm by Valaggar Redux » Logged
lakota.james
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #7 on: October 28, 2007, 05:57:50 pm »


Quote
sc1 full game mode
rotating star map  Wink
Not likely in the near future. The rotating star map of SC1 was IMHO the most annoying aspect of it, and implementing the SC1 full game is a lot of work.

The rotating star map was a joke.  sorry for not making that more evident.
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #8 on: October 28, 2007, 07:05:14 pm »

Ability to name savegames
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #9 on: October 28, 2007, 10:53:08 pm »

I don't think using UDP instead of TCP is going to miraculously compensate for a bad connection. What sort of problems do you have?

Frequent packet loss. Netmelee would work fine for a while, then freeze, then go back to normal, and so on and so forth. I don't think going UDP would fix the freezes, but the crazy thing is that they are often very lengthy -- sometimes five seconds, sometimes ten, sometimes over a minute(!). IIRC, meep-eep suggested that using UDP might alleviate this.

Quote
I've seen lots of starmaps in previous conversations, could we pick one (spoiler-free, preferably with content equivalent to the map included with PC SC2) and include it in UQM?

I'm afraid I'm too young a forum member to know these. Undecided


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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #10 on: October 29, 2007, 02:20:40 am »

Frequent packet loss. Netmelee would work fine for a while, then freeze, then go back to normal, and so on and so forth. I don't think going UDP would fix the freezes, but the crazy thing is that they are often very lengthy -- sometimes five seconds, sometimes ten, sometimes over a minute(!). IIRC, meep-eep suggested that using UDP might alleviate this.
I see. Taking over handling retransmission could help if TCP at either end switches to ridiculously long timeouts, which makes sense if you experience connection losses of a few seconds often. Still, even in this case, I suspect you'd still get similar delays with UDP (i.e. some link on the way is just plain dead). Another thing is, you'd essentially have to reimplement the functionality of TCP on UDP to get UQM running on UDP (you need to prevent reordering and loss of packets, anyway); the only obvious improvement I can think of right now is starting retransmission earlier if a packet is missing; tweaking some TCP parameters might help, but that would take some looking into.
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #11 on: October 29, 2007, 11:23:58 am »

What are in the plans for 0.7.0?
You can see some of the work already done here.

Quote
  • netplay lobby
Desirable, but noone of the core team is currently working on it (because this one can be done by people with relatively few knowledge of the UQM internals, and there are enough other things that do require such detailed knowledge).

Quote
  • ability to watch netplay
  • Use UDP in netplay
  • ability to record/play back melee matches
All nice wishes, and certainly things that are on our long term todo list, but you'll be lucky if you'll get even one of these by 0.7.0.

Quote
  • sc1 full game mode
This is beyond the scope of the UQM project.

Quote
  • different music in different places of hyperspace
This ability is useless unless someone will actually make this music. Noone has indicated any intention to do so. But if they do, the code will be trivial (at least for a single alternate track).

Quote
  • ability to use music other than ogg
This should not be too hard to add, but it is not a high priority for us, as Ogg Vorbis currently suits our needs. I can understand that people would want to substitute their own mp3 music, but mp3 support is a legal quagmire. We might at some point support an external music library, but probably not for 0.7.0.

Quote
  • Somehow make it less likely for newbies to get stuck in the full game, like adding parts of the gameplay FAQ to the manual, or including the scanned starmap perhaps.
AngusThermopyle is working on a brand new manual, which is looking to be very good. You can see what he's got so far here.
A new starmap containing the same information as the original paper map should be included in 0.7.0. In later versions, we may even make it possible to view such a starmap from within the game itself.

Quote
  • Get permission to use the name "Star Control"
Maybe around 2009, when the trademark expires, if TFB picks it up.

Quote
  • The inclusion of the alternate Utwig voicepack, by Lance_Vader and Vlaagar, as a bonus package (similar to the remix packs), would be a really good idea in Vlaagar's opinion
I don't think a voice pack which replaces a single voice should be an official add-on. Maybe as part of a larger project. Although this is just my personal opinion, not speaking for the core team, and I might be persuaded given sufficient arguments.
And I haven't even listened to this specific voicepack; it would have to be of substantial quality to get the core team's seal of approval.

Quote
  • Melee recordings should preferably either be stored as human-readable "scripts" (so that we can make up recordings we didn't actually fight) or a utility for converting them to and from such scripts should be provided.
You do realise that such a script would contain just the input events, and if you chance some input somewhere, you might need to change every input that follows?
I think that you'd really want some more advanced tools, like having UQM extended with save states, extreme slowdown, frame-stepping, and input macros.
Either way, this seems more like a separate project, for another team.
It would be nice to see some UQM video(s) on tasvideos.org though.

Quote
  • Ability to name savegames
If there's one todo item that must eventually be completed, it's this is it; this is the only functionality that the original SC2 had (the PC version at least), but UQM still lacks.
But we made this item dependant on some other functionality, which won't be in 0.7.0, so this one will have to wait too.

Frequent packet loss. Netmelee would work fine for a while, then freeze, then go back to normal, and so on and so forth. I don't think going UDP would fix the freezes, but the crazy thing is that they are often very lengthy -- sometimes five seconds, sometimes ten, sometimes over a minute(!). IIRC, meep-eep suggested that using UDP might alleviate this.
I see. Taking over handling retransmission could help if TCP at either end switches to ridiculously long timeouts, which makes sense if you experience connection losses of a few seconds often. Still, even in this case, I suspect you'd still get similar delays with UDP (i.e. some link on the way is just plain dead). Another thing is, you'd essentially have to reimplement the functionality of TCP on UDP to get UQM running on UDP (you need to prevent reordering and loss of packets, anyway); the only obvious improvement I can think of right now is starting retransmission earlier if a packet is missing; tweaking some TCP parameters might help, but that would take some looking into.

It can take a long time before TCP starts resending dropped packets. By using UDP UQM can decide when to resend. And the data that UQM needs to send per frame is so little that one UDP packet can contain data for many UQM frames, so each packet can duplicate the data for a number of past frames. This means that even if a packet is dropped, the next packet may already be available and contain all the information that is needed to continue.
Increasing the delay in between the generating of the input event and the processing (the "input delay"/"net delay" setting), will then reduce packet-loss induced lag (in addition to the latency problems it serves to solve now).
As long as we use TCP, duplicating data is useless, as TCP packets are always received in order. (Subsequent packets are delayed until the preceding ones have arrived.)

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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #12 on: October 29, 2007, 11:57:37 am »

- Remix pack 4 completed? IIRC, It seemed to be missing *only* 2 songs, of which one sure is going to receive a lot of flak.
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #13 on: October 29, 2007, 01:48:47 pm »

And the data that UQM needs to send per frame is so little that one UDP packet can contain data for many UQM frames, so each packet can duplicate the data for a number of past frames. This means that even if a packet is dropped, the next packet may already be available and contain all the information that is needed to continue.
You have a good point there; the IP header is about an order of magnitude larger than the actual data (including game state checksum), so there's little reason not to retransmit the five last frames or so.
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Re: 0.7.0
« Reply #14 on: October 29, 2007, 07:55:58 pm »

I think that a very important UI issue to be solved is, in melee when you are picking ships on a blank space, it should default to the previous ship that you selected. If you have 3 or 4 of one ship on a team, (or 14!) it makes such a huge difference in terms of time and repeated tasks to not have to move all the way down with the ar row keys to pick the same ship over and over.

In the PC version of SC2 this was the default behaviour.
Please fix this!

Thank you
-psydev
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