I first played this game eons ago and loved it to bits. Recently I've been thinking of a possibility for making some sort of Star Control meets Elite type game...I'm thinking here though- rather than re-inventing the wheel a thousand times over (not too hard...asteroid clones are simple to knock up and apart from AI thats the hardest thing I'd iamgine) could it perhaps be possible to mod UQM to meet my needs...
Now. This is just a far off dream of a idea of course. For now though I am interested in just making minor modifications to the existing SC2 UQM- inserting dirty words in random places and other silly stuff just to figure out how it all ticks.
So I'm wondering- 1: Most important of all in whether this is possible. What is the source written in? C/++? Assembly? 2: Just how easily moddable is the source? Is it all horribly written stuff or is it a simple case to change things so upon first meeting you the earth station master declares he fancies a ham sandwich?- if even something so simple as this takes a lot of work then it won't be worth bothering with anthing.
I'm a bit put back by the fact that no one else has ever made a mod for it so I'm doubting the possibility of this endeavor even for far better coders than myself but still, I'd be interested in giving it a crack and seeing how much damage I can do.
UQM is written in C. We've cleaned up the code somewhat, and rewritten some parts, but there's still a lot of dirty stuff in there. Replacing simple strings isn't a problem. You don't even have to change and recompile the code for that; it's all in the content. Changing the structure of dialogs won't be such a big deal either, though it would require modifying the source. There have been some mods, mostly small things. A few people have modified melee ships. Unless you're satisfied with just modifying game strings, I'd recommend you start with getting the unmodified code to build, and then modify small things as you familiarize yourself with the code.
Logged
“When Juffo-Wup is complete when at last there is no Void, no Non when the Creators return then we can finally rest.”