I've used the FL Explorer to resize a few systems with some limited success. One system I had created spanned 1 million from center point. (that's a 2 million total X and Z. I guess it also included the Y.) I had some big ideas of making an all inclusive star system with 5 solar systems to represent the 5 major houses.
A player could actually travel from one side of Sirius to the other without using jump gates or jump holes.
Still, I'd throw in nebulas and debris fields along with isolated "criminal" bases. Then add encounter zones at various places near key traffic areas.
I had to use a specially modified speed mod to get across the system without using the tradelanes I had put in it. However, for some odd reason it kept crashing when I tried to look at the nav map. I'm guessing the nav map should have been scaled too but haven't figured that part out. **
Needless to say, I'm learning this the hard way.
EDIT** This was done using the older version of the FLExplorer. The newer versions seems quite more stable.
I've got over thirty ships I'd like to add to this and a few new stations. (One is a massive 8 ported shipyard that has a radius of nearly a planet to handle the larger Capital and Transport class ships I created *).

(*on a side note...Capital ships and large transports should never dock on a planet, much less a station. They should be limited to large "shipyards" that can accomodate them. Even the stock Freelancer shipyards are too small for some of these ships...so I had to get creative.)
I favor the use of the BW09 starsphere since it has less attributes to tinker with and a nice view of the Pleiades Cluster. (Gives me that way out adventurer feeling when I go there.)

So..I'm working on it.


Edited by - Rankor on 10/15/2006 12:37:48 PM

The primary concern with very large solar systems is that ships will begin to rattle when they are far from the system center. I continue to believe that this is inherently due to the floating point precision (or lack thereof) in Freelancer's matrix transformations, and if I'm right then there is no feasible solution short of obtaining the source code and modifying it. As a general rule I try to keep ships within about a million meters of the system centerpoint; beyond that, fighter-sized ships tend to rattle too much for my liking.

Also, if you are just trying to add more systems to your universe, there is essentially infinite space on the universe map. The pos values in universe.ini are floating point numbers, not integers. For example, pos = 4.5, 6.7 is totally valid and will actually put the system at (4.5, 6.7) on the map.

Just to add to Dev's point about system size, in MP there is a limit to the size you can have, iirc at about 1000k from the center ships start to rattle and then explode if you don't turn around.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Indeed I have noticed the "rattling" of both large and small ships begining usually somewhere around 40k from center. When I first noticed this, I knew there was a connection to how the engine draws things and immediately knew there would be problems.
I doubt that more than 1 center is possible, but if that were to be addressed in some way, it might resolve the issue.

to the system coordinates. This should be implemented in FLE so you can place system anywhere.