General questions about Modding

Fri Dec 16, 2005 2:51 pm by Freedom9

Hi again..
I have hundreds of curious questions about what is and is not possible when modding freelancer, im not a modder myself, but I do like to generate occasional ideas that are worth discussion, i wont write a million questions all at once, but rather, one at a time.

Question No.1
Randomizing Commodities and Prices

One of the problems ive always had with freelancer is that the trading system always remains the same, for instance, its always the case that you can buy luxury goods at planet Manhatten and you will know that you will get a good price for it on planet New London

Anyone ever made an application that randomizes the commodities on the different planets, along with randomizing the prices? The idea being that, the players of the community, would need to run.. say, an auto-update from the server host each week... the auto-updater replaces your commodity files with the newly generated ones regularly.

That way.. the trading system changes each day / week / month, and nobody gets bored of being a trader... Is this idea even possible? is it something that has previously been achieved?

cheers
Noel

Fri Dec 16, 2005 5:37 pm by blackhole

Yeah, it requires the use of an external updating program called a Frontloader.

Sat Dec 17, 2005 2:38 am by -Trail-

Yeah AliminiumHaste made one.. i think thats his name

Sat Dec 17, 2005 5:53 am by Freedom9

Well, its interesting that people have already done this before.

I would have thought that this type of thing would have been applied to most mods by now, but its obvious that this is not the case. Why is this feature being, i guess.. ignored by the vast quantity of mod makers.

Using the same auto-update idea, wouldnt it then be possible to:

Randomize / change / commodities / prices
Randomize AI Traders (AI traders go different places each day)
Randomize AI Hostiles (they attack in different places each day)
Allow players to build faction-based stations (one auto-update)
Allow players to upgrade the station with new features (one auto-update)
And much more

All you need is a sophisticated program that manages and changes such things but also allows specific input from the admin, and just so long as everybody gets the auto-update, then everybody has the same files and nobody gets kicked from the server for incompatible files.

In my oppinion, mod makers are in a constant struggle to create mods with even more ships and even more guns and even more commodities, which isnt a problem.. it is after all their mod!

I would be automatically more attracted to the auto-update feature way before I would be attracted to "yes this mod has 200 new ships and 5000 new guns so come and play because this mod is clearly better"

Honest

Freedom9

Sat Dec 17, 2005 7:22 am by -Trail-

well the way i took was to the auto-updater, no randomiser stuff, ill change small things by hand,

if you want to go and make a randomiser then go for it, sounds like it would be good but im not helpin ya lol

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