User:Nic

I'm one of the great unwashed masses of people who submit patches and bugfixes to the game for coredev's approval. Sometimes they take them, other times they laugh at me. It's a delicate dance, really. ;) I'm also the guy who makes the MacOS X release, although that honour is mostly an accident of history.

I generally loathe to talk about myself.

Patches/Features I've Written that are included in Ur-Quan Masters

• Made the game recognise add-on files that have the extension ".uqm" as well as ".zip", so that the game can distribute its content as ".uqm" files instead, to try and avert the uncontrollable impulse some people have to unzip their content files. The "official" version of this feature is different from my original patch, but I'll take credit for it anyways. ;)
• Fixed it so that sending the self-destruct code to a Slylandro Probe causes the "combat summary" screen to appear. This should put to bed the persistent rumours that the self-destruct code causes you to not receive the RUs for the kill.
• Went through all the dialogs and synchronized the speech and the subtitles, and corrected all the timings. The line between "fun" and "work" was crossed on several occasions during this time.
• When you explode a Shofixti Scout, any Orz Marines on board used to survive it. This was deemed a bug, so I fixed it.
• Improved the slave shield graphics in the orbital screen
• Fixed a bug with the planet lander, where it would display the wrong amount for the fuel required to land (it would say 1.10 instead of 2.0)
• When you send the Mycon into the Syreen ambush, now you don't hear of their glorious victory until after the attack; previously, they would tell you all about it before the Mycon had moved an inch. Additionally, the Syreen ships didn't become available after the attack, despite the dialog saying they did. Fixed that, too.
• Made it such that you could hear the righteous indignation of Commander Hayes at the beginning of the game whether you had radioactives in your cargo hold or not
• Fixed various small graphics glitches in various parts of the game (colour cycling problems, ghost pixels, etc.)
• Added the SC2-style ship stats in the Outfit screen
• Fixed the positioning/alignment troubles with the subtitles
• Helped a little with the PC-style menus
• Made the MOD player in the game respect the "repeat" command, like the original SC2 did

Patches/Features I've Written that are NOT included in Ur-Quan Masters

• Made a dialog box for Mac OS X that displays at game startup, and allows Mac users to set their configuration options, which is not otherwise possible when starting the game through the Finder. It was rejected because the in-game setup menu makes it (mostly) redundant, and because they think that these types of things should be stand-alone programs rather than built-in to the game. I disagree with their decision, but their house, their rules...
• If a Shofixti Scout defeats a Pkunk Fury by using its "Glory Device", and the Pkunk is "reborn", the victory ditty for the Shofixti plays, rather than the "hallelujah" sound. I fixed it, but doing so was controversial; I honestly do not understand their objections to it, and it's not for lack of them attempting to explain it to me. In this case, I guess I'm just slow.
• Made it such that some gas giants (e.g., including Saturn but excluding Jupiter) have visible rings in the coarse scan. It was rejected because it falls outside the "straight port" doctrine.
• Made pressing the Left and Right controls in game adjust fuel/crew 10 at a time. Some grumblings were made with regards to the approach I took in making this happen, but for the most part I think this patch was ignored.
• Made a "progress bar" for the initial load screen. It was rejected because they thought accepting it would reduce their impetus to make the content loading faster. I can't say I disagree with that... ;)
• Fixed a bug from the original SC2; the Androsynth Guardian captain special doesn't affect the captain portrait in the same manner as it did in the original Star Control. In Star Control, when you activated the special, the guy on the right would flip his switch and hold it until the Blazer mode turned off; in SC2, the guy on the right would flip his switch for a split second and return to normal. I did a little "three card monte" with the captain potrait frames in order to make it look like SC1, and this gave coredev hives. They rejected it outright as an ugly hack. They're probably right. ;)
• It always bugged me that when you shoot the tractors on Earth's moon, they just disappear. I always thought since they only exist for target practice, that when you shoot them they should blow up or something. So I took the frames/code for when the planet lander explodes, and applied it to the moon tractors; which made the Luna mission quite a bit more fun for me. Coredev rejected it on the grounds that it fell outside the "straight port" doctrine.

A version of the sources with all these features/patches applied is available here.