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Where *are* the files?

The general place to discuss MOD''ing Freelancer!

Post Sat Nov 25, 2006 12:54 pm

Where *are* the files?

Hey all - long time since I last stepped in here!

I'm currently flicking around FreeLancer,as I intend to be speed-modding it later this year. I've been rooting through the files, these forums and various tutorials seeing what can be done with the game and such forth, and how easy certain things are to implement.

One thing is seriously bugging me though, and this is vast quantities of seemingly unlocateable data, or data structures / archives that could possibly house the missing things. I've tried rummaging around the web, but haven't found any information on this at all.

Hopefully I'm just overlooking something stupid and it can be pointed right out to me.

The first thing I'm looking for is where the audio is located that is used when the player talks to NPCs outside of the story mode. I thought it may possibly be contained on the CD, explaining why it seems to be missing within the FreeLancer folders themselves - but this doesn't seem to be the case from examining No-CD cracks - it's just mysteriously not there, but has to be in order for the game to use them, for obvious reasons. This is my main confusion, because there's a large amount of rogue audio to be accounted for.

The next thing is the graphics. A lot of these are missing - any game uses large quantities of textures and suchlike in order to display everything. FreeLancer seems to use a lot of proprietry file formats, but things like NPCs appear to only have one file - in their case a small 'dfm' file which simply cannot contain all of their geometry and texture details - or does it?


Anyway, I'm hoping people can clear a lot of this up, as I'm perplexed. Even if such data structures aren't currently moddable, it'd be nice to know where they are, so I can at least have a hack at them.

Thanks,

Ambershee

Post Sat Nov 25, 2006 8:40 pm

Freelancer SDK...latest release. (See Downloads section)

Get it, install it, use it.
It will open up the world of opportunities.

Post Sat Nov 25, 2006 8:45 pm

Unless I'm missing something, the "FreeLancer SDK" is just cleaned and decrypted ini files - have that already.

I'm talking about actual sound files for example, that *aren't in the FreeLancer directory* - for example Trent's dialog when picking up a rumour or mission from an NPC in the bar..

If they are there, I sure as hell can't find them.

Post Sun Nov 26, 2006 12:43 am

what you are looking for is the UTF files....i have no idea how to edit those...but the UTF's have compressed audio data for the space chatter, i am assuming the bar talk as well...mostly all the ingame voice chatter...minus the dialogue from characters for story mode.

Search around the forums you might find a tut for extracting the audio in the UTF's and change em.

"To live is to die....but living is to die slowly..why waste time on trivial things just play as hard as you can"

Post Sun Nov 26, 2006 12:55 am

You can use the XML toolkit to extract the contents of the speech UTF files.

Just make sure you copy them to a new folder somewhere first and be warned.....I have tried it and extracting all of them resulted in hundreds and even thousands of files

To make things go from bad to worse the files are named as just CRCs or random numbers....giving no clue as to what the speed is.

Good luck

Post Sun Nov 26, 2006 7:53 am

That's great guys, thanks for clearing that one up for me =)

Post Sun Nov 26, 2006 12:03 pm

Hmm, Quickshot (i think it was) produced a tutorial about 2-3 years back on the speech in freelancer issue.

Never got around to giving it a go, but he basically taught you how to add new sounds to the speech, and then get NPC's to use said sounds. Walked you through all the references to UTF files and sound files.

Can't remember what his website is though

Edited by - Chips on 11/26/2006 12:02:56 PM

Post Sun Nov 26, 2006 12:37 pm

Viper, do you mean Sir Lancelot's (bless him, wherever he is) XML project?

The XML toolkit was a fun mod, and Argh's attempt to move the community in a smarter, more powerful modding direction. it mostly failed to do so because everyone around here is soooo supportive of each other *bone dry sarcasm* he just couldn't concentrate on his work, with everyone offering to help him all the time

Edited by - Cold_Void on 11/26/2006 12:37:59 PM

Post Sun Nov 26, 2006 3:37 pm

That would be it

I can think of no other essential tool for modders

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