Ok, got it sorted. Had to reinstall FLMM so works fine now ta

Am I the only one who's noticed how badly hosed the new ships with Cargo Pods are? Oops, hehe...

I spent 3 hours today completely revamping the entire coding for Powerplant Upgrades, among other things, getting rid of that problem and a few others like it. I've been testing tradelane speed boosts and am very eagerly awaiting more documentation or at least a better patch from Alcander to incorporate into the mod's standard build- I currently have Tradelanes that go 50K/sec., which = "whooooosh"... Tradelanes actually feel like they're useful travel devices now

I'm also playing around with Cruise. I've decided to put a fairly fast uber-Cruise into the mod... but... with a price (since I've been trying hard to keep things game-balanced, true to FL's game design and not break the SP campaign ). Basically, you can Cruise at very high speeds, but it takes nearly 20 seconds for it to charge up. So... no more running out've fights by hitting Cruise and dodging a little bit while dropping CMs- now if somebody tags you with a disruptor or has you on the ropes, it's better to stay and fight than to try to run. On the other hand, this also makes it difficult for people to nail you with CDs, unless they're very quick on the draw, so CDs have been improved to the point that they're pretty much garanteed to hit if the AI lets one loose- keeping the FL game-balance intact. I've built new Cruise charge-up sounds, etc., so you're not just sitting in silence, either- it's actually pretty kewl, because when Cruise kicks in and you start moving really fast, it suddenly feels like all that waiting was worth it, unlike cheap Cruise mods where you just wait the standard time

I'm also still making steady progress on making all of the Border Worlds, Independent Worlds, the Hawaii Systems, etc. all "complete", with ShipDealers at every Base. This adds a HUGE number of new places to buy ships. Now I just need ships to sell, and I can "market" the mod as "Freelancer Complete" or some other nonsense

So, at some point soonish, I'm going to announce two contests- one for the best planetary textures that people can come up with (to go with the new method for building planets I've come up with, which if you saw that screenie... really, these are cool) ... and more importantly, to see if the shipwrights out there have ships that really, TRUELY fit the original Factions... which could be used in the mod and sold at all of these new ShipDealers I have.

I'm not talking boring re-skins here, of course- I want, for example, a matched set of Red Hessian fighters that are original in design, true to the FL style, and... well... red. I saw what MACE166 has been doing with reskinned FL ships, and while they're not bad... I want stuff that's 100% original. I don't have enough time to make all of it myself, otherwise I would- but a decent ship takes me at least a couple of days of "free time", and I really need quite a few. Note: do not send me anything other than a 100% finished, hardpointed CMP of truely professional quality, if you're reading this and want to participate before I announce this on the News. And also note that if you don't know what my artistic standards are, then you probably should go to the Modeling Forum and read my critiques... and view my finished work. I'm not even slightly interested in somebody's newbie GMAX model with a tilemap, so don't even bother

Heya Argh,

If you need a tester for the latest release of the Toolkit, le tme know I'd be happy to torture test what you have.

It'll also help me to figure out ways to do some things that I'm thinking of implementing in Rebalance.

Let me know what you think.
ArchKaine

Some say ignorance is bliss, I say they're just too blissful to know better.

@Archkaine:

When I get a little closer to the finish line, I'll take you up on that. I've been messing about with a bunch of things for the next version:

1. I've finally figured out how to alter some FX at their lower levels, so that we can see some really "new" FX. I can't do Engine Flames or other particle-only FX yet, but I've figured out how to work with TXMs, and (among other things) you can expect to see prettier, smaller smoke trails from missiles, Thrusters and other things that eject smoke puffs, and other alterations- I'm considering reworking the explosion FX to be higher-rez, but I haven't made up my mind yet. Dunno how much else of this I'm going to mess with just yet, but this is all very promising

2. Custom Thrusters with custom flame FX assigned have been put in, tested and are working. This turned out to be (thankfully) pretty simple. Unfortunately, there are some fairly serious limitations on which ALEs can be used for these purposes- basically, we're talking Playtrails only. Using Flames isn't practical. I'm also planning some invisible "thrusters" that aren't unmountable that can be put into the engine areas of ships for extra visual fun. These "thrusters" won't actually add any speed to a ship- they'll just be there for visual effect

3. I've been testing the timing on the new faster Cruise speed, and it appears to be working well with the SP campaign overall.

The only problem's going to be the Hovis race- I have a feeling that people who suck at flying or have slow comps are going to have some serious issues with it. I've been considering changing the track layout so that it's a nice easy loop... dunno what I'll have to do with the Mission code yet, but I've been investigating it a bit.

4. I've figured out how to make characters who appear in Rooms render at their highest LOD all the time. I won't say that this is a gigantic leap forward in quality, but they are all slightly prettier. If I had time (or better tools) I'd also remove all of the MIPs from the DDS files that don't need them (this especially applies to Rooms throughout the game engine), which would result in more-efficient memory usage and more attractive textures. Unfortunately this isn't terribly practical, because we're talking about thousands of DDS files that all have to be removed, re-built with the proper MIPs settings, and returned to their respective files. Doing it with UTF Edit would take for-ever... ah well.

One of the things that's been coming up as I've been running through the SP campaign is that a number of THNs native to FL seem to be buggy. I'm not sure about this yet, but it seems that as I've cleaned up other things, these errors are now getting into the error-reporting queue. The reason I believe this is because I've been able to replicate the bugs in stock FL- so it's not the THN/ANM instructions so much as the combination of the two, it would appear. These issues may be responsible for some mods which have had very serious but intermittant crash errors, but I'm not sure yet.

Lastly, there is some sort've very nasty Encounter bug in the stock SDK, affecting Br01_02 (Southhampton Shipyard) and the Zone around it. I've been looking into it, and I think I have fixed it, but it's quite puzzling. That one's been bugging me (pun intended) since 1.1, and I'm not sure if I've really fixed it, or if it just chose to go away because it saw I was paying attention

JustSomeGuy asked the following question in another thread, and I chose to answer it here:

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Hi Argh...

Just curious, but why didn't you make your own "my_weapons_equip.ini" file and "my_weapons_good.ini" and "my_market_misc.ini" files (use any name you want )and reference them in the freelancer.ini file so you could leave the originals alone? Then, using a new DLL you could assign new numbers to all the new weapons you made and put them anywhere you wanted to.

JustSomeGuy

---

@JustSomeGuy:

1. Because then FLMM won't delete them when removing the mod properly. Which usually doesn't cause problems with things like CMPs or new sounds, but has caused problems with INIs with several major mods. Granted, this is probably avoidable, but I'd rather just not have the issue come up, period.

2. Because I deliberately intended to permanently alter those values insofar as users of the Toolkit are concerned, to introduce modders to the concept of actually building game-balanced mods, instead of add-ons stuck on top of FL's rather lousy game-balance. I'm not just talking out've my arse here- I've demonstrated stock FL's game-balance problems in multiple ways, and I'm sticking to my contention that what I built is superior.

If you want to change them back to the defaults, you can write an XML script that references the values and alters them. I made things 100% easier for everybody, by extensively referencing every value in a way that would make it quite easy to change the values with complete specificity. I even made a demonstration script showing how this could be done for the Civilian Laser series of weapons. What more could one ask for?

3. I would have had to modify every Loadout in the game to fit the new files, or create another set of Loadouts referenced in Freelancer.ini, etc., etc., etc. Why bother, when I can just fix the problems at their source?

In the end, this was both the most technically and philosophically elegant way to address these issues, I think. I do not like FL's stock game-balance, period- I think it's full of redundant weapons, bad ideas, and quite a few things that look like mistakes, such as weapons with marginally different (we're talking 3-4 decimal places) rates of fire, energy use, etc. So I fixed it, and made it rational. This doesn't mean that, for example, you can't find the very best weapons (in terms of damage-per-second) in the "harder" areas of the game, like you could in the stock game- you still will find them there.

But what I've done is very dramatically altered the balance between the "best" and "worst" weapons in the game- the gulf in performance vs. energy efficiency, for example, is a lot different, and lower-level weapons have much better performance, which means that they stay somewhat viable even at higher levels of play.

This does not mean that, say, a Starflier with the default armament is going to be able to take on an Eagle with level 10 weapons/shield very easily... in fact, it won't work at all, because the level 10 shield regenerates quickly enough that the Eagle will never take any damage at all (the damage output of two default lasers is a whopping 416.5 / sec and the Eagle's shield would regen at 750 / sec).

But a Starflier armed with 3 level 3 lasers would, in fact, do enough damage / sec to gradually take down the Eagle's shields, if the Starflier pilot was accurate and didn't die... which is exactly how things should have been when DA released the game, in my opinion, because it makes flying and shooting skill > money. Money, after all, can be had without anything more than a bit of time (or a fellow clan-member giving it to you- remember that reality of online play) so it should never ever trump skill- if you suck but have lots of money... you should DIE when confronted by somebody with real skill- it's my attitude about any MP game that involves twitch, and I've been playing MP since Quake was new

If you don't like that, I've made it easy to address- feel free to release a "purist add-on" for the Toolkit that addresses this... but I really don't see the point, myself...

Ok... when I wrote that about the unique files I did not know you were writing a mod for rebalancing the whole game. Obviously, you would use the original files for that sort of thing, since it changes the gaming experience completely.

Sorry for any confusion... I will commit sepiku immediately!

Yeah, this is a fairly extensive mod/codebase/whatever for modders to play with. No need for seppiku, just go buy a Titan and take on some Hammerheads against my properly-ruthless AI

My little articles on General Dev are about the technology areas and ideas I'm looking at- some of which are just "beauty areas", and some are things that haven't really been succesfully addressed by other modders yet. I use it more like a blog than anything else- I figure, "hey, if I'm thinking about something weird, I should write it down so that somebody can use it". It's surprising (and gratifying) to see some of my whacky side-projects end up in various mods.

In case you didn't already know, I started modding here with Warriors of the Sky... Beta 2 is still on hold because I'm waiting for the SUR Exporter to get out've beta, but it's going to be very cool when it's released, if you want to see just how far the FL engine can be turned into something else. So I'm not exactly a newbie at this point- you may just have missed my earlier stuff because it didn't involve ripping off other people's imaginations, and is not gigantically popular as a result... but I've been around

Wow!!! In a nostalgic mood,I installed FL on my new pc some days ago, and I downloaded Argh's Toolkit yesterday. It's really fantastic! Will be great to add a few systems to Sirius with this mod as a base.

The added shipdealers are very cool in particular, and I'm eager to try the new ships.


Btw, I 'played' (flew to Denver and back) it in combination with OpenSP 1.1, and noticed there were some entries in FLspew. They don't bother me at all, but you (Argh) seem the kind of guy who goes to the bottom of these things, so I am just curious how they'd slipped in:

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NOTICE:General: VMESH: couldnt find material 3874212388
C:\work\builds\dalibs\dalibs-build\build\Src\RendComp\VMesh\VMPartArch.cpp(697)

*** WARNING: Voice message 2351700488 is invalid for voice 3073825485

---

I first thought the "couldnt find material" error might be caused by my customized (darkened) starsphere CMPs for the Liberty Systems (because they obviously involve material, although I didn't change anything but the TGAs), but I get this error without using them too. It's repeated about 13 times spread over 3 different sections.

The "invalid" voice message is there 2 or 3 times, at different sections.

O, I also use a customized tlr_lod.3db but I don't think that would be the cause, now would it?

Anyway, thanks for improving the game! (I think your claim that it's superior to retail FL is justified)


Edited by - Moonhead on 8/16/2005 4:31:22 AM

=========================================

EDIT

I notice the Toolkit has several moddified FLSDK files, but also XML-scripts altering these files?! (Like faction_prop.ini). I always thought that you either used an FLSDK file, or moddified that file using XML-scripts - but apparently you can combine those methods! Gee, never knew that!

Edited by - Moonhead on 8/16/2005 1:02:24 PM

Moonhead:

I'm not quite sure (yet) what's causing some of the errors. The Voice errors show up in any of the SDK mods, truth be told, if you fly around enough you'll see them. I'm not sure why they're suppressed in FL, since the SDK is pretty much just the original INIs with some bug-fixes in place.

The MAT error... is probably related to one or more of the new content files, but I'm not sure. In the current version, I'm not seeing them, but I'm seeing some other issues with the Pretty Planet Project stuff which I need to resolve before I release the next version.

And last (but not least) there are several serious bugs still remaining in 1.2, relating to stability/crashes in certain areas in Bretonia. I think that I have these all fixed in 1.3- there appear to be serious problems with certain Encounter types there, that are present in the SDK and may/may not be exacerbated by the mod's greater efficiency (one of the strange side-effects of greatly streamlining the AI code is that a lot've error messages that weren't showing up because they were getting dumped out've the error-reporting queue are now showing up). I'm hoping that 1.3 will be both more feature-rich and yet more clean in terms of errors and odd behaviors- it's just a matter of going through the code and eliminating errors, slowly but surely...

I made a trip thru Bretonia last night and all went well (except for the Corsairs blowing my wings off, but no CTDs).

Btw, I'm kind of relieved those errors are, more or less, unavoidable (or, at least, are not caused by some stupid errors on my behalf). I had lots of them in my previous project, and staring bind at them is why I never got to a point of completion. (The hash code stuff is beyond me - I guess I just don't got what it takes...)

Anyway, any idea when 1.3 will be ready? I've already begun adding my personal stuff to 1.2, but because of the way you've set it all up, it won't be much of problem to transfer it to 1.3 (especially if you include some upgrade log with it )

Thanks again for revitalising the game!

1.3 will be ready when it's done

Seriously speaking, I anticipate that it will be another month + before I have enough free time to get it out the door. I have a lot've things going on IRL right now that are eating considerable amounts of my time- I really haven't had any time free to do much modding at all for the last two weeks, unfortunately- this kind've stinks for me, because I'd just gotten the new custom ALE animations and the new Rogue/Molly VHF project done, but it's necessary stuff, and I need to get it done.

Take all the time you need!

Question: why do we have to put a reference to Resources.dll in freelancer.ini? It is normally not mentioned in there... I tried to eliminate the reference, but then the Flmm.dll ids were screwed up... ("IDS?"

I would rather have guessed that you'd screw up the ids when you do put a reference to Resources.dll, especially when you put it after the other DLLs, because the first 65535 ids are in it... Does the game read the file twice now? (so that the ids are still to be reached at their original location?)

Not a big deal, just curious as hell why you did this...

---------------------------------------------------------------

Edit: Another question (and one of more practical importance): you explain a lot about what the xml files do (which is really great!), but what did you manually change in the included ini-files? Why are e.g. Li01.ini and SolarArch.ini in the Toolkit? As far as the Windows Search option is correct (it sometimes misses instances of what you are searching for), these files (Li01.ini and SolarArch.ini) aren't referred to in the XML files...



Edited by - Moonhead on 8/19/2005 3:03:01 PM

1. Taking that reference out've Freelancer.ini shouldn't cause IDS? errors. I've tested that over here, and commenting out the line before activating the mod didn't cause problems. What you probably did was take out that line and the blank line below it , which is necessary for FLMM to do its thing- it uses blank lines to write new lines to (and then adds another carriage return at the end)

2. As for what "everything else does", besides the XML... well... here's a short list:

A. Significant changes to the way that sounds are handled. I messed a lot with the sound INIs to get things to sound more dramatic and to have more sounds playing at once.

B. Every stock FL ship CMP is in there because they had to have hardpoints added, and (not to ding Chips or anything, cuz Evo is one of the inspirations of this project) I wasn't satisfied with the way it was done for Evolutions. In 1.3, every Base CMP will probably be included.

C. Significant changes to a great swath of the Equipment INI files, for various reasons. Everything from re-ramped Thrusters (with XML code to control them) to rebuilt Shields (which are getting rebuilt again for 1.3) to... you get the picture.

D. Totally rebuilt AI. In the Missions folder, you're looking at some of the most radical work in an FL mod to date, in my opinion- I'm a lot prouder of that stuff than the work on things like the THNs. Explaining it all would take awhile, so I'll say mainly that what you're looking at in Missions is two things: a major change in the way that AI is coded, and a set of lengthy but minor changes to Mbases.ini.

E. Most of the Systems are in there because I went very methodically through 1.2 getting rid of Encounters that seem to be buggy. Basically, anything involving Prisoners in stock FL doesn't work and sometimes causes hangs.

F. Solararch is there because of the big changes to docking radii, etc., which are so big and obvious that they don't bear mentioning imho.

Umm... I know I'm forgetting about 50 other things, but basically if you have a question about a specific alteration, please write it here. Some of the more complex stuff (like the AI modifications) I tried really hard to make easier for people to understand, by including commented lines, etc. But in lots of sections, I've just put stuff in as I've been going along... and a lot've the smaller beauty enhancements, like sound work, have been done rather sloppily, if I'm being perfectly honest- it all works, but it's not explained anywhere, and probably should be at some point. I've never really talked much about how sound works for FL, and so far as I know, I'm the only modder who's really done a lot with the parameters- most people just put their new sounds in and are done with it

Thanks for the reply!

1. No I did comment it out, but I did indeed not leave a blank line right below Resources.ini, as my two custom DDLs came after that, and below the entire section, there was still a blank line. At least that's what I thought there was I changed the order, and it all works okay now (without having to change all the ids numbers refering to my custom DLLs).

2. Wow man, you did indeed create a more than a Toolkit... It might be really a breakthrough comparable to the FLDSK (not that it's more of the same thing; I mean the impact ).

B. I noticed you added hard points to the ships' CMPs. I'm not at all good with this CMP stuff. Have made a couple of custom planets that look quite nice, but that's easy. I never really delved into that VMesh code... (Btw, do you have any idea how doable It would be to create clones of the base CMPs without all the docking stuff in it? Just deleting the docking entries from SolarArch and setting the type to SATELLITE doesn't keep the "dockable but no base assigned to it"-errors from FLspew.)

Good to know you did indeed made a lot of changes to the ini files; that means I have to be very careful to stick the fragments of my old mod into the Toolkit... It's probably better to recreate them, based on the new standards...

E. I've been using the FLDSK 1.5 files; these have that prisoners Encounters deleted too. Nevertheless, its also better to use the Toolkit's file and recreate my old stuff again according to the Toolkit's standards.

Keep up the good work!