prog | (no subject)

Spent the whole freaking day playing The Ur-Quan Masters, the open-source modern-computer port of Star Control II, a classic and much-celebrated space adventure game from 1992. (Not a clone -- an actual port, based on the original code for the game's 3DO version. Pretty cool.)

It keeps you strung along through the usual mix of RPG elements: explore, gather treasures and fight baddies, become more powerful. Repeat until endgame. Extra crack-points since you have full control over your power growth, not by raising numeric stats but by customizing your starship, pimping it out more and more as you become richer. Even with humble VGA graphcs, it can't help but tickle anyone's geek-pleasure centers. One more mining sortie and I can afford that second fusion blaster!

I'm probably spent on it for now. I hope.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think my college roommate skipped a whole semester playing that game. I was a sucker for the "melee" part of the game, a very well-balanced head-to-head. I had to look at their FAQ to see if network melee was added. Fortunately (for my free time), not:

What about network play?

Network play is one of the most requested features. We would like to include it, but as it will take a lot of work to make the existing code work on a high-latency network (such as the internet), we have decided to put our time in more important aspects of the project for now.