I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that such a thing is pretty much impossible. The maximum size for a system, to be safe, is around 750000. If you make it larger than that, you run into the problem that some v1.1 flserver.exe's decide to make the player spontaneously blow up. However if you have a v1.0 flserver, you can get away with systems that are as large as you want them to be.

The shaking, however, cannot be altered in any way and is there to stay.

If your willing to ignore the shaking, you could probably make a system thats pretty large, provided you don't upgrade to 1.1 (your players can, its the server that can't).

Planets can be as large as you want them to be, as far as i know.

I would be careful putting so many players in the same system however... There may be preformance issues, as freelancer was never built for such large scales.

Edited by - blackhole on 11/29/2006 8:36:00 PM

I've been experimenting with "larger systems". With current upgrades, the most stable size I built up to is about 500,000 across. (250000x250000) .
Actually, that's a pretty BIG system. Now, add depth to the system by spacing objects around it above and below the Y plane.
You probably already know that when you place any object into a new system, they are always on the "level". (position = some number, 0, some number) .
What I would suggest here is to add "depth" and scope to your systems by changing the middle "0" to a positive or negative integer.

In the long run, instead of a system that is 250000x250000........by adding a 3rd dimension you increase the overall "cube" of the system by another 250000. SO it becomes effectively, 250000x250000x250000.

The catch to this: You have to go into the system ini file and manually edit the Y number to change the height. For every object you elevate, you must also elevate the corresponding entity that goes with the object.
In other words, Planet death goes with Planet as well as the docking ring. Sun death goes with sun. Since stars don't give off their own system lighting effects, you add a system light matching that stars color and move it along with the star.
Zone populations as well unless a zone population encompasses the entire system.

It's tedious work, but in the long run, your systems will be much more realistic and "breathtaking".

I am currently working on a mod in which I am doing this along with alot of other things. When I'm done with it, I'll release it to the public.



Edited by - Rankor on 11/29/2006 11:18:02 PM

What InI file do u edit to make the system bigger. I searched for it but I am lost, also what is the scale for the y axis. how much is aprox 1k and 100k. If u don't have an answear don't worry aobut it.

What I've used so far in editing the size of a system is the updated FL explorer.
By left clicking on the particular system, you'll get a drop down menu where you'll see a few choices. One of them is "Rename System". click on that and you'll get another submenu that lets you rename it and also change it's scale. It has some standard scales already loaded, but you can manually change it to what you want.
As far as how the scale works between the FLexplorer and the actual game, it seems to be about close to actual as measured from dead center. A scale of 60,000 is actually measured from the center of the system, so you actually have a total scale of 120,000 across. (quite large)
A planet that is 4,000 in diameter is going to show up as 4, 000 in diameter. (A large planet) .
While in FLExplorer, if you click on "Show Scale", it will display the map scale at the range you selected or manually entered. But it will show it measured from dead center. What you thought was 500,000 is actually 1 million total across...and that's where we run into "shaking" and exploding issues (Although, I've never had a ship explode on me in Open Single Player, I have had some crashes to desktop that was related to something simple I overlooked)


Edited by - Rankor on 11/30/2006 10:46:43 AM

is there a way to make asteroid fields higher than the usual 2 dimensional frame? How big and how big is your ship in fl, in rl he beginning ship is about 15 feet tall (when juni gives you the ship in the movie), so I can make accuratly scaled planets... this will proboby end up with me needing to remake the entire universe with one planet to a system, and can gravity exist in fl, and people have talked about orbiting planets (as in actually moving) but I haven't seen it.
Anyone have any ideas?

EDIT: oh look... another post about orbits... wheeeeeee im stupid.

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Edited by - lancerlover on 11/30/2006 1:25:09 PM

In the particular system.ini file you'll find the dimensions of the field you're looking for. To make it "higher" adjust the center value to a higher number.
I'm going to be testing this out on some nebulas I just edited.
If the field has a "zone", you might want to consider also adjusting the zone to match it.
As far as ship sizes go, I try to adjust the size of my ships to match those that are seen in the cinematics and in local space.

Nebula resizing = success.
When I entered the systems with the resized nebulas, it suddenly brought to mind the shapes of the Nebulas I've seen on "The Void" server within the Europa System. I remember how significant that looked.

I realize now, that I can reshape a nebula into practially an entire wall.
What I plan on doing next is build up a set of nebulas with stars near the outer fringes to give it that realism like you would see in some stellar "nurseries".

I'm not sure if was mentioned here, however the FLCE, Freelancer Combat Evolved mod, complete Halo conversion, does has immensly huge systems!

The planet Earth in that mod is quite literaly 600K!!

The systems are billions of K's wide!

So yes, it is very possible however, I'm not sure of that.

The FL:CE mod does exactly what i described - makes 750k large systems. Actually many of it systems are significantly smaller than that, which simply goes to show that you don't need insanely huge systems in order to make things look big. Its larger systems that start causing problems. Planets can probably get pretty large, although any planet larger than say, 2 billion k wide would naturally overflow the integer FL is using to store the data. If you've got planets _THAT_ big, however, you need to get your head examined

A 750k radius system, if Y values are introduced, would probably be pretty damn big. A good configuration if you were going to stick systems within systems would be a central system, then a system at each of the 6 corners of the cube. That would be 7 systems all in one, and without players exploding too. It'd take freaking forever to get from one place to another too

Edited by - blackhole on 11/30/2006 8:32:31 PM

@ Blackhole:
I've been doing just that and it's made it really interesting.

Yeah, it does kind of take a while to get from one solar system to the next.
I was thinking of a couple of tricks to make inter solar system travel faster.
One was to introduce intersystem jumpholes and gates. Not quite as challenging as the next idea..
A challenging idea would be to introduce tradelanes that are "tilted" toward some central point between solar systems. They do have individual position numbers and they can be rotated.
I think this would involve some fair math skills to figure out the precice angles to make them work concurrently in a straight line.


Edited by - Rankor on 12/1/2006 5:51:58 AM

The FL:CE mod's systems are very large indeed, becuase of the new physics it has, we did a speed and distance run on it, we hit 70,000K in speed, thats about 130K a sec and we travelled 500,000K+ from a planet

Cheese On Toast:
Like the name
Beware the player

*rolls eyes* someone went so fast in that mod they crashed the server. Its hard to beat that

Tilted tradelanes have been done. However you don't *have* to tilt the tradelanes, you can get away with just putting them in a line without actually rotating them.

But of course, it would be easier simply to make a program that did that. The math probably wouldn't be that complicated.

*goes to experiment*

Meanwhile, my suggestion is to make a tradelane with only a start ring and an end ring. Makes it a bit more interesting. (and deadly )

EDIT:

The math for this would work as follows:

The tradelane start and end point would be two points on a triangle

.



_____.

To get the third point, we simply trace down from the first and over from the second.

.



.____. <-- calculate angle of that corner

Now its a simple matter of calculating the angle of the corner pointed out above and voila, you have the rotational value for one axis. Simply repeat the process with every other set of axis that it needs to be done on, convert the rotational values to the FL values and ka-poofda, you have perfectly accurate rotational values.

I'm not absolutly positive that this will work, but i'm fairly certain it will.

EDIT2: Program almost done, i'm testing it

Edited by - blackhole on 12/1/2006 9:12:40 PM

That is how I am doing the tradelanes, 1 or 2 tradelanes only. I am going to make it tougher to bring them down, but still will be possible.

tradelanes can be bent as well - the game really doesn't care where the next tradelane is, as long as it's not straight-up or straight-down. it can manage near-vertical climbs, but attempting to go down the same way will just cause the tradelane to continue moving you up.

why is it no one has programmed a FL coordinate-scaler? (you would figure FLE would have such a feature by now) I want to resize the universe without getting arthritis lol.