Awesome seeing this here. Star Control II still ranks as my favorite game of all time.
When I was younger I hacked a new star system into the code with my girlfriend's name, then gave it to her to play and discover. Here's a post showing how - the content got a little mangled due to forum changes over the years but is still decipherable: https://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=1596.0
This follow up shows how to add a new Melnorme trader to our system: https://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=1597.0
Never got around to tailoring his dialog, but the idea was to add myself as an easter egg character offering a hot tip and witty dialog.
Not sure I knew yet what procedural generation was, but found it clever how each solar system is generated from a random seed derived from it's X/Y coordinate.
The original team is working on a sequel: https://pistolshrimpgames.com/uqm2/
I love this game to death. I didn't discover it until the late '90s, but it's just tons of fun, despite (without walkthroughs) requiring multiple playthroughs to get enough "virtual clairvoyance" to beat.
On top of that, the super-melee mode is a plenty-fun spacewar alike for two players.
Hey! My friend alerted me to this thread, but it's been a really nice read seeing everyone's experiences with the game.
I'm one of the team working on the sequel now! If you have questions or want to learn more, please come join us: https://pistolshrimpgames.com/get-involved/ - we have a pretty active Discord, we've released our Super Melee prototype freely, and we are even making and releasing a pretty neat (I'm biased) gameplay engine that the whole thing runs on. People have made their own ships and even their own games with it!
Check out the new nightly of DosBox as well it's got a really cool new adaptive CRT monitor emulation that seems to do the right thing for EGA and VGA monitors. Also includes 3dfx Vodoo support now as well.
Be still my heart. Star Control II and Ultima 7 were my childhood version of Balder's Gate 3 is to this generation. No single aspect of those games was impressive for its time per-say, but the sum of the parts was an incredible experience. Star Control II felt like I was playing the perfect Star Trek RPG.
Related:
The Ur-Quan Masters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066445 - Jan 2022 (130 comments)
Wasn't Mass Effect sort of a soft reboot of SC2? I played SC and SCII to death when I was a young 'un, many afternoons wasted blowing away friends with weird alien technology. I had one buddy who had mutant reflexes who would just bap the hell out of EVERYONE with his Arilou skiff.
Has somebody tried to Emscripten the super-melee side of it and allow peers to battle using a browser? That'd be awesome :)
There is an HD mod for The Ur-Quan Masters - UQM-MegaMod. It is beautiful and really improves the experience with redrawn graphics and crisp fonts.
Star Control 2 is still one of the best stories and universes/settings ever.
I played the original game this was based on, and loved it. One of the best games ever made IMHO. I'm kinda glad this exists and has the kind of long-tail life most properties SHOULD be allowed to have.
What's particularly cool about this project is that since the game is fully open source, it's just available as a package in standard Linux distros. Like, in Fedora, just do 'dnf install uqm' and you've got it.
Played it many years ago while trying out the few open source games that where out there and loved it, especially the sound track and voices.
It's not a remake, it's based on the original source code.
I also like retro gaming and run a decently sized DOS gaming account on Instagram.
But why is a 2002 remake of a 1992 game interesting to HN?
Why post this again now when the previous post a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32426892) gained no votes or comments?
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I played Ur-Quan Masters for the first time earlier this year. Despite its age, I found it to be one of the finest games that I'd ever played. The story, in particular, is just perfect, and has just the right mixture of seriousness and comedy, very much in the same style as another (even older) classic, Starflight. Being able to build the game from source and read through the code was a nice bonus.
I highly recommend checking it out; if you can get over the rather dated graphics and gameplay mechanics then you'll find this to be a real gem.