The Ur-quan Masters V0.5.0 Released


EvilDragon

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Foehammer released a new port of The Ur-Quan Masters v0.5.0 (basically a Star Control 2 remake with many enhancements)

ur-quan.jpg


The datafiles of v0.5.0 (you can download them also from the official homepage for free) are already included.

Download: The Ur-Quan Masters v0.5.0
Download: The Ur-Quan Masters v0.5.0 Sourcecode
Official The Ur-Quan Masters Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sc2
 
Just a quick note. If you like the 3do music, it does work with the port. Just grab the uqm-0.5.0-3domusic.uqm file from the official site and put it in the content/packages directory. Edit the uqm.cfg file and set the 3domusic option to yes and you should get the new music.

Hope everyone enjoys it as much as I have for these past few hours! Time to get back to playing... I have a New Alliance of Free Stars to build! :)
 
Can you put up a readme with a button configuration? Once I get the game started I can't seem to actually do anything. Also, I'm not sure why, but I can only start the game once, every time I try to start it after that all I get is a black screen. I noticed that a "game" directory appears in the root of the SD card after the game is run for the first time. Is that the cause?
 
Can you put up a readme with a button configuration? Once I get the game started I can't seem to actually do anything. Also, I'm not sure why, but I can only start the game once, every time I try to start it after that all I get is a black screen. I noticed that a "game" directory appears in the root of the SD card after the game is run for the first time. Is that the cause?

Bah... I should have put that in the package. I meant to document it in the keys.cfg file, but forgot all about it.

The joystick operates the menu and button A selects options on the menu.

Start will pull up the menu or take you back a step in the menu.

The joystick left and right turns in flight / lander modes and button R thrusts. A is primary weapon, Y is secondary weapon, and B is escape (to get the lander off the planet).

I think that's about it.

Make sure that the game is installed in /games/uqm or you might get some odd results.
 
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Yeah I figured that all out just now, I was actually just about to edit my post. Is there a way to stop the ship too or do I have to spin it around and thrust in the opposite direction?
 
First ship upgrades I do are maxed out turn jets then thrusters. Just can't stand moving slow. :lol:
 
Wait, so completely working, fullspeed without any sound lag (like v0.4 had: there was about a second delay between keypress and sound) at 266mhz and maybe 200mhz too?

If so, that'd be awesome, as SC2 is the best game. ever.

Tip: Ditch the Earthling Cruiser and the Ion Cannon from the Flagship, and use the credits gained for upgrading thrusters and turning jets. Preferably maxing out thrusters before turning jets.

Edit: well, it seems it works nicely without any sound lag on 200mhz, although sometimes when a lot of samples are to be played while on 200mhz (say, when an Ur-quan Dreadnought uses the fusion blasts rapidly, or when a Chenjesu Broodhome tries to fend off nasty Dreadnought fighters by repeatadly shooting shards) it kind of stutters a bit. But at 266mhz, things are fine. :)

However, one bug: the game does not quit properly when you hit the quit button in the main menu after coming back from the main game. It wil just stay black.

Also, savegames didn't seem to work for me. That might be because I already had two savegames (both from Feb18 2155 I believe) in there, but saving to a new slot, exiting the game and then trying to load the slot wouldn't work, as the savegame didn't appear ("Empty slot") in the slot I saved my game to. Weird... :/ hmm.. Reading from the posts here, it seems that the guy that made this port *is* able to save the game. Hmm.. Weird..

About the human vessel (earthling cruiser): It's main weakness is it's slow speed and acceleration. The Cruiser is simply way too slow to be able to outrun enemies. Therefore, doing a 'gravity whip' (find the planet, accelerate towards it and let go of the thrusters once you're close and you'll do a gravity whip that greatly increases your speed) is a MUST with the Cruiser. And this goes especially against Ur-quan Dreadnoughts. The first thing the Cruiser wants to do is find a planet and do a gravity whip....

Another edit: Are voices implemented, too, or did you disable them? I figure they should work since they're .ogg files and all of the other content in the game are .ogg files, so... Voices are pretty much a must if you have the bandwidth and the SD card space, since they greatly increase the value of the game. Sure, the actual soundquality of the voices is crap, and it's all very cheesy, but they just fit so well with the game and make the game a whole lot more alive. Besides, the Ur-quan are a joke without spoken dialogues, but they're certainly terrifying with spoken dialogues.. :p I do not have the time to check wether voices work right now (I'm at school!), but for anyone who wants to try, you can get the voices package at http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sc2/uqm...ce.uqm?download

edit again: I just tried voices. They work, but the text stops winding forwards (they stay at the first line all the time).. :/
 
Sorry to hear that you're having some trouble with the saves. They all seem to work perfectly for me. Try this... delete the save folder and let UQM remake it. Might have been flagged read-only or some such.

The screen going black on exit doesn't happen to me because I use the wrapper from gmenu2x. If you are using the menu that ships with the GP2X, add 'exec /usr/gp2x/gp2xmenu' to the end of your uqm.gpe file. I added this to mine and disabled the gmenu2x wrapper and it works for me.

The voices do work, but the subtitles only seem to show the first frame of the conversation. The voice continues to play and it sounds good, but I'm not sure what's up with the subtitles. They seem to work fine without the voices. The voices don't really "do it" for me though. I do like the Ur-Quan, but many of them I don't like so I prefer to just stick with reading the text. ;)

I'm working on an updated package that will have these little fixes plus button define comments in the keys.cfg and a README that has install, configuration (how to enable music / voices, etc), and some "getting started" play tips. I'll also look into the voice / subtitle thing and see if that can be fixed with my limited skills. :p
 
Sorry to hear that you're having some trouble with the saves. They all seem to work perfectly for me. Try this... delete the save folder and let UQM remake it. Might have been flagged read-only or some such.

The screen going black on exit doesn't happen to me because I use the wrapper from gmenu2x. If you are using the menu that ships with the GP2X, add 'exec /usr/gp2x/gp2xmenu' to the end of your uqm.gpe file. I added this to mine and disabled the gmenu2x wrapper and it works for me.

The voices do work, but the subtitles only seem to show the first frame of the conversation. The voice continues to play and it sounds good, but I'm not sure what's up with the subtitles. They seem to work fine without the voices. The voices don't really "do it" for me though. I do like the Ur-Quan, but many of them I don't like so I prefer to just stick with reading the text. ;)

I'm working on an updated package that will have these little fixes plus button define comments in the keys.cfg and a README that has install, configuration (how to enable music / voices, etc), and some "getting started" play tips. I'll also look into the voice / subtitle thing and see if that can be fixed with my limited skills. :p

I just want you to know that you've made me a very, very happy man. Loki666's version of this didn't seem to work for me at all.

Thanks for everything!

Allan.
 
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If you'd like to be able to use the joystick to thrust and have the diagonals work, here's the new key.cfg file contents that will be in the update. Seems to work well for my tastes. I left 'R' mapped to thrust as well, so you can thrust with either the joystick or 'R'. Just copy all of the text below and make a new keys.cfg.

# Default UQM input configuration file.

# This is a VCONTROL version 2 config file (UQM 0.5 or later).
version 2

# This is the GP2X Joystick configuration file.

# JOYSTICK UP (0)
# JOYSTICK DOWN (4)
# JOYSTICK LEFT (2)
# JOYSTICK RIGHT (6)
# JOYSTICK UPLEFT (1)
# JOYSTICK UPRIGHT (7)
# JOYSTICK DOWNLEFT (3)
# JOYSTICK DOWNRIGHT (5)
# JOYSTICK CLICK (18)
# BUTTON A (12)
# BUTTON B (13)
# BUTTON X (14)
# BUTTON Y (15)
# BUTTON L (10)
# BUTTON R (11)
# BUTTON START (8)
# BUTTON SELECT (9)
# BUTTON VOLUP (16)
# BUTTON VOLDOWN (17)

joystick 0 threshold 2 # How far to move before it counts; 0-30000
Menu-Left: joystick 0 button 2
Player-1-Left: joystick 0 button 2
Player-1-Left: joystick 0 button 1
Player-1-Left: joystick 0 button 3
Lander-Left: joystick 0 button 2
Lander-Left: joystick 0 button 1
Lander-Left: joystick 0 button 3
Menu-Right: joystick 0 button 6
Player-1-Right: joystick 0 button 6
Player-1-Right: joystick 0 button 7
Player-1-Right: joystick 0 button 5
Lander-Right: joystick 0 button 6
Lander-Right: joystick 0 button 7
Lander-Right: joystick 0 button 5
Menu-Up: joystick 0 button 0
Player-1-Thrust: joystick 0 button 10
Player-1-Thrust: joystick 0 button 0
Player-1-Thrust: joystick 0 button 7
Player-1-Thrust: joystick 0 button 1
Lander-Thrust: joystick 0 button 10
Lander-Thrust: joystick 0 button 0
Lander-Thrust: joystick 0 button 7
Lander-Thrust: joystick 0 button 1
Menu-Down: joystick 0 button 4
Menu-Cancel: joystick 0 button 8
Player-1-Special: joystick 0 button 14
Menu-Select: joystick 0 button 12
Player-1-Weapon: joystick 0 button 12
Lander-Weapon: joystick 0 button 12
Menu-Page-Up: joystick 0 button 10
Menu-Page-Down: joystick 0 button 11
Menu-Zoom-In: joystick 0 button 10
Player-1-Escape: joystick 0 button 13
Lander-Escape: joystick 0 button 13
Menu-Zoom-Out: joystick 0 button 11

# And now the POV hat controls.
#Menu-Left: joystick 0 hat 0 left
#Player-1-Left: joystick 0 hat 0 left
#Lander-Left: joystick 0 hat 0 left
#Menu-Right: joystick 0 hat 0 right
#Player-1-Right: joystick 0 hat 0 right
#Lander-Right: joystick 0 hat 0 right
#Menu-Up: joystick 0 hat 0 up
#Player-1-Thrust: joystick 0 hat 0 up
#Lander-Thrust: joystick 0 hat 0 up
#Menu-Down: joystick 0 hat 0 down


Thanks. Both the wrapper/gpe editing and the deleting of the save folder worked. :)

You might want to remove the save folder from your next release to fix this with people who let their archive programs extract as read-only/archives, though... :p

Also, make sure you don't forget to include the following links in your readme:
http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/Non-Spoiler_Hints
http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/First_Things_To_Do

Thanks a ton for the feedback and for the links. I'll certainly include those in the readme. Good stuff!

Muncher666: Thanks for the kind words. I'm just happy to be able to give some small something back to such a great community. The real guys to thank are Toys for Bob and all the coders that worked so hard to make these ports possible. :)
 
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Does this version now support landing on planets? Iirc that was one of the bits missing from the last port/release. I've never played SC2, so don't know how essential it was, but it sounded crucial enough to put me off until it worked...
 
Does this version now support landing on planets? Iirc that was one of the bits missing from the last port/release. I've never played SC2, so don't know how essential it was, but it sounded crucial enough to put me off until it worked...

Yes, this does support planet landings and it is very essential to the game. As far as I've played, everything has worked. I've made an effort test encounters with several races, planet types, combat, saves and it all seems to work well for me. As noted earlier, if you download right now you'll need to delete the "save" and "team" folders before you start playing. Otherwise you may not be able to save games (if the save folder is flagged as read-only). I'll be uploading a new version with that stuff fixed + the 3do-music content packaged in and a new keys.cfg file a little later today.
 
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The 3DO Voices work with this release. However, two bugs:

- Adjusting Voice volume in the Audio Setup menu (from the UQM startup menu Settings options) does not actually adjust voice volume. I had to take off the headphones during Commander Hayes' braying about "radioactives".

- Pressing Right during dialogue ought to "skip" to the next speech segment and subtitle page. Instead, pressing Right jumps to the last subtitle page while the speech continues without jumping forward.

BTW, this may not be part of the official codebase, and therefore may be a hard feature, but it would be nice to adjust the master volume with the GP2X volume control.

Great port, well done, and a perfect fit for the GP2X! This is worth some serious geek cred - I doubt the PSP or NDS can do this.
 
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