User:Zeracles
G'day fellas, for a long time I've been an interested observer of changes to the ultronomicon. Still young (although, I'm not sure if it's still very young, as it says on the main page), but already great! I'm a research student in astrophysics. Star Control II was one of the first games I ever played. I am a unix stalwart and protoss executor - cricket is my frungy.
My page at the school of physics
I can be reached via my talk page, or by email (see my page above). Cheers to everyone for all the great work so far!
Current Projects
Planet Landing Risk-Reward Formula
PsiPhi first mentioned this idea in 2005 (not that I was around, or even knew the ultronomicon existed at the time), and in october 2007 got us working on it here. This is an excellent idea, but as he said back then, it's ambitious. We (PsiPhi, Fyzixfighter, Valaggar and yours truly) have been discussing it since, and many interesting and challenging issues have come up. This is one of those problems which I think gets more interesting the harder it gets. From my perspective it's great that some of the things I've learned in research are finding a use in Star Control.
Planet Landing Risk-Reward Formula Discussion
History of the Star Control Fan Universe
History interests me. I have written a complete history of the world and I actually update it based on current world events (I don't really know what I'll do with it). I think it would be cool to do a history of the Star Control Fan Universe (SCFU). I'm a relative newcomer though, and only appeared in mid 2007. Sure, anything I write is unofficial and actually it doesn't really concern the ultronomicon. But I'm not a controversial figure and never will be. But hey, write your own history! Below I discuss a tool which would help any aspiring historians.
What is the SCFU? Currently its online presence seems characterised by the Pages of Now and Forever (PNF), Star Control Discussion Board (SCDB), Ur-Quan Masters Forum (UQMF), Ultronomicon, the SourceForge page for the UQM remake and apparently also a collection of LiveJournal communities. I think those are the main ones. Apart from the aesthetic reasons, a history is useful to gauge progress and catalogue the various ideas which have come up - threads in forums don't do a great job, though they are good for currency. How does one know if a question or idea has been posted before?
As far as this does concern the ultronomicon, there are some things which would go in anyone's history, and so can be included objectively. Still, I don't think this could go in the main body of articles, so it could be time for some user pages.
History of the Star Control Fan Universe
Balancing the Prices of UQM's Ships
This was initiated by Valaggar. Valaggar's implementation is clever, though he acknowledges the input of Elvish Pillager. See here.
Deconstructing the UQM Source
This one is supposed to be a helpful guide for any who would like to mod the game or simply know how it works. I don't know anything about C, so if it's all up to me, it will get done but really slowly. Also, this is a prerequisite for two of the above projects
- Completing the planet-landing formula, as we need to know exactly how everything works.
- Balancing the prices of UQM's ships, because it will be useful to have solid quantitative ship-to-ship data. This is so whether we obtain this data with iterative modeling or some kind of learning AI.
Miscellany for Dragon's SC1 Remake
This is some procedurally generated art, and starmaps I worked on for Dragon's SC1 remake.