Collaboration of Ideas

[TechnoGoth]

its a bit unclear, but their both sort of the things I had in mind, the idea was that you would be able influnce events outside of just computers. Such as adding a name to employee roster so, the person you hired can install a wireless lan in a company.  Or hacking into the international air traffic computer to divert a CEOs jet to a diffrent destination.

[bhsieh]

I was thinking along the lines of some improved GUI (Graphical User Interface) I like the Start-menu type layout already. But the Memory Bank could do without the individual gigabytes, and just have a percentage hard drive space used, or an actual number of gigabytes used. Sometimes I don't like scrolling.

Other things to look at are the way Links are set up, the HUD MAP, and email system (as mentioned by other people).

[Joe96669]

another thing that would be nice is if after you bounce your connection, it stays saved. maybe as some kind of file on ur hard drive (uplink). that way when you start up again you dont have to bounce ur connection again. especially when you use 40 different things.

[JohnWho]

I think the bounce route should go into the user file. A good (flexible) format for the user file would be necessary anyway, when people start developing add-ons. Otherwise, you'd probably have to create a new user for each add-on... (The user file should allow for binary data and text data (config style, key=value pairs)...)

[Alias20]

Quote: from elDiablo on 1:52 am on May 13, 2003[br]or, he could mean like the idea IV had on the (snip - spoiler). as in, someone is gonna rob a bank, and they need you to cut the power to the alarms etc

You could grab some kind of hardware upgrade that let you communicate with the guys making the robbery.  Like a Voice over IP upgrade.  Then you would get audio cues to do certain things.

"Ok, drop the power... now."
"We're done here.  Bring the power back up and crash the system to cover our tracks."

From a development standpoint you would just need the pre-recorded radio transmissions.  Missions would then just need triggers to signal when various audio messages should be received by the player.

---Totally Unrelated Suggestion---

Change programs like the trace tracker and bypass software to only require a certain amount of processing power.  As it stands right now, there's no real penality for running the trace tracker or voice analyser at a tiny percentage of cpu, and you get no benefit for dedicating more system resources to these programs.  Instead, they could run on a "minimum requirement" system, whereas you must dedicate 20gq (varies for program type and version number, later versions needing more) of processing power to these types of programs.  When they are run they only use this much processing power since increasing it would do nothing and decreasing it would prevent the program from running.

This gives a tangable penality for running multiple bypass programs at the same time.  It also keeps programs that don't benefit from additional system resources from taking them away from other programs that could use it.

[idiot]

check my lottery topic

[Ergol The Ineffable]

I was thinking... How about a program that automaticly bounces through all of your visible links? You just select the IP you want to get in to, and the program does the rest. Would save a lot of time

[Agent BlackBird]

Got 37 idea under your topic.

BlackBird, eat bulleyes.

[Luca Rescigno]

I mistakenly put this in General. So here are my ideas:

1. Arrow keys should work.
2. There should be keyboard shortcuts (for example, control-A to select all, or control-C to automatically open File Copier and copy the selected file, or the Delete key to automatically open File Deleter and delete the selected file)
3. A save function would be nice, although with a game like this it also might make it too easy. Maybe restrict its use somehow. Until then I just have to back up my user file every now and again.
4. Allow a few shortcuts for bouncing... for example, have a "randomly bounce through every public server" or "randomly bounce through all servers for which you have admin access" button that lets you insert a random series of bounces through all of the public servers. Maybe even have some way of scripting a series of bounces - have boxes you could fill in for the number of bounces, the type of servers used, and other parameters. This could be inserted after InterNIC or UTS, and before your destination.
5. Have a way to highlight important locations on the map
6. Make the map less cluttered by abbreviating the labels. For example, instead of saying "e-Trade Solutions Public Access Server" it could say "e-Trade" and have a color-coded dot. Perhaps a blue dot for a public server, a green one for an internal machine, and orange for banks or something.
7. Allow you to change the text size. Right now I have to set my computer's LCD to 800x600 to read everything, but that makes it fuzzy. At 1024x768, everything is sharp but it's way too small. If the text size could be made bigger, I could have the extra screen area and sharpness provided by 1024x768 but I'd still be able to read.
8. Have more help in the tutorial. As it was, I was completely lost when I was done with it and I had to ask a bunch of people at the Ambrosia Software (publishers of the Mac version) web forum for help. Perhaps at least point you to InterNIC as a good starting point to find lots of public servers to bounce between. The help topics in the Uplink Internal Services are good, but perhaps they could be expanded upon just a bit for those who have never played before.
9. Minor speed/performance improvements would be much appreciated.
10. Maybe make it a tad easier to copy, move or delete multiple files at once. Deleting is easy provided you know how to work the console, but the others are tedious tasks that would be much quicker with some sort of drag-selection thing.
11. Allow prioritizing of various tasks for the CPU to handle. Being able to change it is great... but it would be nice if I didn't have to up the Password Cracker way above the Trace Tracker every single time I use it. I'd like to be able to set very low, low, medium, high, and very high priorities to certain programs, so whenever I open them, they automatically use as much CPU as I want them to and I don't have to adjust them.
12. Allow saving of multiple routes in persistent memory. Right now, you can save one route until you quit the game. When I re-launch the game later, I have to reset my route, which takes forever because of the inefficient display on the map view. And if I make a mistake, there's no way to go back so I have to start over from the beginning again.
13. And of course, many have mentioned this, allow the option of turning off the music while keeping the sound on. I think you can kind of hack the PC version to do this, but it doesn't work with the Mac version at all.

[ToRmEnToR]

good work CyberNetic ...

[ToRmEnToR]

bump

[Vain]

I think a cool idea would be to include airports. You could hack into their system and delay flights, change their destinations etc. You could have new missons where you had to free convicts or sumthing by changing their flight destination to secure airways. Or if you wanted to take out a rival, you could hack into their flight listings to see which flight they where taking and then have the plane drop its fuel so it'll crash.
 I watch too many movies

[Laxori666]

i used to back up my user file every once in a while. i recommend you don't do it. it takes away from the significance of getting caught.

[TechnoGoth]

Any of these ideas been implemented or attempted?

[Rkiver]

CyberNetic: Your point number 7 has already been done, months ago, by myself. If you checked www.modlink.net you would have seen this.  Also the cutting of power has also been done in the FBI Mod by neott. Perhaps you should have researched your sources a bit better before posting such a large topic?

Ignoring the errors however it was a good idea to group all the ideas together, and it is nice to see people are still thinking of ways to improve Uplink.

A lot ideas are currently been worked on by those of us in the Dev community, and we are considering coding all our mods into one large mod that contains everything to date. So keep an eye out on Modlink for any updates.


(Edited by Rkiver at 4:50 pm on Nov. 12, 2003)