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Topic: New / old mods for Ur-Quan Masters (Read 6745 times)
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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I started writing mods for UQM many years ago, meant to share them with everyone then, and had a series of catastrophes and distractions. Finally I decided to pull out what I had remaining of those 0.5.0 changes and update them for 0.7.0 and actually release them in stages. I learned just enough on the usage of git to start making separate changes so that people can pull any of my mods that look useful or interesting. Currently I only have 4 of my original mods ported and up at :
https://github.com/CheatingZelnick/Ur-Quan-Mods
I don't yet have any executables up; I'm only building Windows debug versions myself at present, but I did switch from Visual Studio to MinGW this time.
My current mods are:
Display ship ID in hyperspace (each valid ship type has a single letter identifier above the little black dot on radar)
Display a count of ships remaining to fight in the battle window (currently in the upper left of battle space, though I probably should move that to a different context)
Left and right arrows act to minimize or maximize fuel and crew counts
Lander mineral nodes get two for one mods:
minerals above the lander's max capacity get left on the planet so you never have to worry about wasting a nice node when you're almost full
minerals that are better than what you have in your full cargo bay get picked up to the max capacity of the lander, while those on the main ship get automatically discarded!
I have a number of others that were in various stages of completion years ago. One of my favorites, and probably next on my list is the "hyperspace jammer", originally intended to be a cloak but designed to let you keep from getting swept into wave after wave of attacks or conversations with the Pkunk...
Many of these mods were intended to allow an expansion to the Melnorme purchase "tree", with possibly some random modules found on worlds. I never created the structure for that, so for now my mods have no drawbacks intended, like extra fuel costs for the jammer while it's in use. Other plans would require very incompatible save files, not just for new modules but for my planned database of visited star systems, so you can see where you've been AND what's still on the system, including the danger levels.
I make no guarantees that I'll not get distracted again, but I have tested the code reasonably on my Windows 7 machine. I'm open to ideas as well, but development is likely to be haphazard, especially on the larger projects.
Some of the things I'd previously done or considered, besides allowing myself to easily change all sorts of stats to landers and ship modules, were things like
"hospital bays" (with a % chance of saving a patient) because I always hated how many people "died" just to pick up some elements (done).
Make time pass while at a planet so you can't zoom past and take all the resources and avoid a fight despite time passing (planned)
Lander shots that don't destroy minerals (since when do tranq darts take out nodes? At least our Melnorme enhanced ones!) (done)
Planetary "shield" offering some or complete protection from collisions (%#$@ planet) (done)
Planet edge visible at ALL times regardless of distance on combat screen (planned)
Push button travel to any planet or moon in the system (planned)
Various stages of long range scanners for planet stats, complete with on-screen display, so you can enter a system and see if it's worth your time without hitting every planet manually (planned)
keep hyperspace momentum between encounters? (considered)
reselect ship after each combat (considered)
statistics for number of ships killed, ships lost, crew lost, saved (in my hospitals), planets visited or scanned, minerals taken, minerals lost (without lander enhancements), bio taken, etc. (done but only displayed in debug window)
Display which rainbow worlds you'd visited (on the starmap or system display) (planned considering how easy it was to forget which save I was on)
So there are some areas, besides general ship enhancements, that I might consider working on (after my jammer to get around talking to the Pkunk 20 times and fighting Ilwrath 20 times all with one Fwiffo). Any other suggestions or requests are welcome, Just keep your expectations very low. for follow through. 
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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I tossed up a Windows executable with the first 4 mods combined for those that don't want to compile themselves. It should work okay in your regular directory, and won't overwrite your regular executable.
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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Judging by the crickets it may not matter, but I didn't add any sort of readme yet. The lander mod changes the mineral display to show 3 numbers, the first being the original number of minerals picked up, the second being the number of minerals that are replacing minerals aboard your main ship, and the third being the number of minerals that are excess and being left on the planet. I haven't decided whether to combine any of those numbers, but for now they are useful in displaying exactly what's going on.
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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Thanks for the encouragement.
New mod pushed up, I had some troubles adding an extra key and getting it fully detected where I wanted, so I overloaded the Escape key (in hyperspace) for now. I also don't have a nice display location picked out, so I put a short-lived "J" in the upper left of the space window if the jammer has been activated. While active, your ship won't be pulled into hyperspace encounters. Hitting Escape again in hyperspace will deactivate it.
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Defender
Enlightened
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Gender: 
Posts: 817
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All your mod ideas sound great...waiting for thier release.
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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I haven't made a proper readme. I was fiddling with displaying the planet in combat even when it's "offscreen", to some hilariously bad results when I was sidetracked by inevitable distractions for most of the week.
Here's what I have in my old source code for radar display, though of course some of it would count as spoilery: (In fact, my original long-term goal was to have the letters be learned once the module was added to the main ship, so there would have been something else like '?'. Actually, I should add that to my list of proposed modifications.)
'A',//0 Arilou
'-',//1 Chmmr
'-',//2 Human
'O', //3 Orz
'P',//4 Pkunk
'-',//5 SHOFIXTI
'S',//6 Spathi
'x',//7 Supox
'T',//8 Thraddash
'G',//9 Utwig
'V',//10 Vux
'Y',//11 Yehat
'N',//12 Melnorme
'D',//13 Druuge
'I',//14 Ilwrath
'M',//15 Mycon
'L',//16 Slylandro
'h',//17 Umgah
'U',//18 Ur-Quan
'Z',//19 Zoq
'-',//20 Syreen
'K',//21 Kohr-Ah
'R'//22 Yehat Rebels
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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Just a "I'm still here" post. I found a potential place in process.c and can test for the planet, but I don't really understand the viewport code well enough, and I really need to before trying either a cheesy text indicator of off-screen planet location, or something like adding a line prim element pointing towards the planet. I've been too busy with other things to focus enough to get a firm handle on the use of the elements and different coordinate sets. I also owe oldlaptop an examination of his escape code. It looks like it'll be at least a week before i have much time for either of those tasks.
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danzibr
*Many bubbles*
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Posts: 109
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Oh man, I can't believe I haven't read this sooner. Very exciting.
Can you explain the "Push button travel to any planet or moon in the system (planned)"? So like, you enter a system, open up a menu and just go straight to any planet or moon you want?
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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Oh man, I can't believe I haven't read this sooner. Very exciting.
Can you explain the "Push button travel to any planet or moon in the system (planned)"? So like, you enter a system, open up a menu and just go straight to any planet or moon you want?
That was the idea. Without any special AI to avoid enemies (or friends) that you don't want to talk to, so if you wanted to do like I always did, dart in and steal resources around enemy ships, you have to do it manually. But I was thinking of using the underutilized sides of the planetary system display to display scan results and provide quick access (though since mouse support doesn't exist, not as easy as click and go, and I would probably wind up reusing the menu area). You'd get a list of every planet and moon by name, and at least if it was a gas giant, in my original planning, and choose which to go to. The list would also track the last time you went, if ever, as well as what minerals or life you left on it, if you'd been there before.
Note that allow-retreat is undergoing some major changes in the Balance Mod repo right now, so that pull request is quite out-of-date. I'll try to update it once things settle down a little.
That lets me procrastinate, thanks for the update.
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CheatingZelnick
Zebranky food
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Posts: 13
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Just an update that there probably won't be any updates until January. I'm not even looking at the code currently with so many other December distractions. Barring a series of visitations from Spathi, Pkunk, and Thraddash ghosts, new mods are going to have to wait.
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