Thu Jun 03, 2004 5:20 pm
The Complete Ship Mod
After going through all kinds of trouble trying to make battleship encounters and pilotable capital ships work correctly, I've decided that a SINGLE mod just for that purpose should be made. It should be a mod that makes gunboats and capital ships fit comfortably with the rest of the original Freelancer universe. No add-ons, no fifty-something extra ship packages, no three-way thruster config with weird weapon mounts, just the ORIGINAL content.
It wouldn't be hard, since all the resources needed are already available, either being used in mods similar to what I mentioned above or the concepts waiting to be used. All one would need to do would be to put it all together and get a group to test it.
The main objectives of this mod should be to allow all original capital ships to be purchased at logical locations and at realistic prices, have capital ship traffic occur in all the House capital systems, and introduce a new docking procedure for capital ships. (It's about time someone put that in a mod.)
What's below is unnecessary, but would make it all worth-while if implemented.
At the moment, my idea for the planetary docking method would be to disable the docking rings to players with capital ships and force them to use mooring fixtures. When the capital ships dock, they then become immobile, and in the landing sequence, you would see a generic shuttle land, instead of seeing a cruiser coming in and hitting every building it could in one run and "sinking" into the landing pad.
For stations, capital ships would use the mooring fixtures, and, similar to the planetary docking procedure, you see a generic shuttle about the size of a freighter in the landing bay.
Now, what happens to the capital ship outside? My idea for this would be to make it hover off to the side of the mooring fixture, immobile and indestructible like base battleships. When the player launches, the shuttle should be seen flying out, and then the player is back in control of the capital ship. No fancy shuttle-docking-to-capital-ship scripts, just a simple method of making a believable dock.
This method would work okay for SP, IMO, as you wouldn't have to worry about other people coming and seeing your capital ship docked or a shuttle launching and vanishing as you return to your ship's controls, but I believe it could work similarly for MP as well.
Please give your thoughts or comments. I don't have that much experience in Freelancer modding. All I've done was replace a few files and change some values. Believe me, I would make this mod myself if I could, but this mod calls for some more experienced modders that know what they're doing.
Hmmmmm . . . After reading some of the tutorials (had to view some from the past year), I believe I can do some of this. Just give me a few hours to put together a good capital ship encounter and test it, and maybe someone could help with the pilotable capital ships or docking procedure.
Holy crap, can anyone tell me how to view .ini files normally??? The word wrapping is terrible and finding separate blocks of code is like impossible, not to mention that there are odd symbols covering about 3/4 of the file. Please help me.
OMG I found the answer to my own question! FL SDK-v1.3 is the latest version, right? Oh well. I'll use it anyway.
________________________
Border Worlds Bounty Hunter
Edited by - Forinec on 6/3/2004 6:23:55 PM
Edited by - Forinec on 6/4/2004 8:32:17 AM
It wouldn't be hard, since all the resources needed are already available, either being used in mods similar to what I mentioned above or the concepts waiting to be used. All one would need to do would be to put it all together and get a group to test it.
The main objectives of this mod should be to allow all original capital ships to be purchased at logical locations and at realistic prices, have capital ship traffic occur in all the House capital systems, and introduce a new docking procedure for capital ships. (It's about time someone put that in a mod.)
What's below is unnecessary, but would make it all worth-while if implemented.
At the moment, my idea for the planetary docking method would be to disable the docking rings to players with capital ships and force them to use mooring fixtures. When the capital ships dock, they then become immobile, and in the landing sequence, you would see a generic shuttle land, instead of seeing a cruiser coming in and hitting every building it could in one run and "sinking" into the landing pad.
For stations, capital ships would use the mooring fixtures, and, similar to the planetary docking procedure, you see a generic shuttle about the size of a freighter in the landing bay.
Now, what happens to the capital ship outside? My idea for this would be to make it hover off to the side of the mooring fixture, immobile and indestructible like base battleships. When the player launches, the shuttle should be seen flying out, and then the player is back in control of the capital ship. No fancy shuttle-docking-to-capital-ship scripts, just a simple method of making a believable dock.
This method would work okay for SP, IMO, as you wouldn't have to worry about other people coming and seeing your capital ship docked or a shuttle launching and vanishing as you return to your ship's controls, but I believe it could work similarly for MP as well.
Please give your thoughts or comments. I don't have that much experience in Freelancer modding. All I've done was replace a few files and change some values. Believe me, I would make this mod myself if I could, but this mod calls for some more experienced modders that know what they're doing.
Hmmmmm . . . After reading some of the tutorials (had to view some from the past year), I believe I can do some of this. Just give me a few hours to put together a good capital ship encounter and test it, and maybe someone could help with the pilotable capital ships or docking procedure.
Holy crap, can anyone tell me how to view .ini files normally??? The word wrapping is terrible and finding separate blocks of code is like impossible, not to mention that there are odd symbols covering about 3/4 of the file. Please help me.
OMG I found the answer to my own question! FL SDK-v1.3 is the latest version, right? Oh well. I'll use it anyway.
________________________
Border Worlds Bounty Hunter
Edited by - Forinec on 6/3/2004 6:23:55 PM
Edited by - Forinec on 6/4/2004 8:32:17 AM
I'm now working on some capital ship fleets in all the main systems, but I may put some battles in places like Kepler later on. 
Otherwise, it seems to be working quite well, although I did have some problems getting a Bretonian fleet in New London and a Kusari fleet in Kepler had a freaky formation of Bretonian capital ships with Kusari gunboat escorts. I had to relocate the Bretonian Fleet to Leeds, but I added Nomads, and when I launched from Leeds after changing my starting point in OpenSP, the entire planet was under siege by battleships. What did the Bretonian patrols do? They flew right by without even noticing them! I wonder if that's because they never really encountered a Nomad fleet in the story mode and their reputations are just neutral.
