Well for the first one, I'm pretty sure our good friend HCl will be able to do that fairly quickly. For the collection of what we all know, I do believe there was another thread started for that purpose, perhaps once enough is known it will be in a better medium.

Edited by - VikingThunder on 02-03-2003 14:53:59

oh I see, you want a newbie tool to start with.. eh.
that gets around all the cool stuff tho. go learn.

and the inis.. well.. he already made a command line util to decompress it, if you're too lazy to do the rest of the work, I suppose I could make a batch file to do all the decompressing and renaming.. but as for a GUI w/ templates and seperate fields [question format, or per-attribute, like the old c&c editor utils & stuff, I'm not looking forward to it.
heh.. come to think of it, that could be done with html & jscript/vbscript easily.. it's just text, and ie supports a downloader object, and regex, hm..
.. but getting object ids is something I'm looking foward to, and adding ids most especially, but first and foremost more security.
the zlib there in the exe dir hints fairly well as to how things were compressed.

Edited by - S7ATiC on 02-03-2003 15:07:38

Well, right now i'm concentrating on documenting other file formats used by FreeLancer (ship files, etc), i think this research should prove very useful for the community . However, i know that someone is working on a VB GUI that calls my command-line tool, so you won't have to use the command-line program directly if for some reason you don't want to.

Noticed zlib too, although i'm still not sure what it's used for in the game. It's not used for INI compression, that i can tell you... I'll check if it's used on other file formats as i research them.

Mario


Edited by - HCl on 02-03-2003 17:22:22

I think the work on a definitive ini editor should wait until we've discovered everything you can do with them and every connection that has to be there...

so that the editor then not only has the ability to add code for new ships, but you can create EVERYTHING, from a gun to a patrolpath to a whole new system...

Yeah that would be cool. I'd like to see an editor that can completely create a whole new system make up.. like take out liberty, rheinland etc.. and make yer own star systems, ships, and whatnot.. maybe make a privateer 3

hurm.....this is very interesting..well ...i really hope u guys succeed in making the editor falken mentioned...since i am a clueless and just a casual gamer...all i can say is good luck to all that are working on this...hope it can be done in less then 1 1/2 months.......

I hadn't heard anything about Freelancer until about a week ago but I've really got into it since then and I've set up a dedicated server and have been playing a lot. I'm a developer and after seeing the format of the dedicated server files I got the urge to write a gui to handle modification since it was pretty obvious they were intended to be easily modded.

At any rate, one of my projects at my company was an IDE for a scripting language we use so I have a bit of experience with developer / editing tools. I'm just looking around to see if I would be duplicating work if I started working on a lightweight IDE kind of interface for creating new systems, changing values for goods prices, etc... I've also seen that there are references to files with a .thn extension for some sort of scripting. From looking around it's not clear if those have been opened up yet, or if we know their format. but if so I'm figuring that support for them would be added to whatever I came up with.

Right now I'm thinking about starting it off in C#, I've been bit by the .NET bug, so I've been looking for excuses to use the framework whenever I can.

Anyway, to wrap up what turned into a longwinded post, I just want to make sure I wouldn't be duplicating work that someone else has already started and to make sure there would be some desire for the tool if I wrote it, though by the post volume on this forum I'm guessing there would be a need if the tool did what it needs to. I also wanted to just say hi, so 'hi'.

Edited by - PumpkinEscobar on 10-03-2003 07:50:15

Pumpkin - That would be awesome, the only thing that prevents me from working on mods 24/7 is the amount of leg work it requires.

So Instead me and a couple people are working on a Freelancer SDK kit. Would love to add your tool to it.


Keep it up

~Kru Out

This sounds quite promising, a gui mod tool. That would be so cool, as a suggestion. I don't know how easy it would be to implement, but could the values in the ini be addressed separately? e.g. "my_item_info, 30, -1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1" basically you would have the item title & the numerical data spearated into invidual columns. It would certainly make editing the level requirements mod I'm doing much easier.

Forgive me if this is what you already have planned, but a suggestion just incase.