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Non-Connected System... Whew... it''s fixed!

Do you want to start editing Freelancer, but have no clue where to begin? This is the place for you to find things and talk about getting started on Freelancer Modding

Post Sat Oct 09, 2004 11:38 pm

Non-Connected System... Whew... it''s fixed!

Well, I'm off to a start with making my mod, and have already run into a major pain.

I want to make a mod where there is exactly ONE system. And new players start there.

So, I want a system with no jumpgates, no holes. Just one system. I'm taking baby steps on my TC project... if I can get this to work, then I'll work on the ships and custom weapon models, which looks surprisingly easy thus far, if you know how to model and skin with UV maps... of course, after this humbling experience, maybe not :-P

I've tried using FL Explorer to do this, by taking the NY system and deleting all of the jumpgates and holes. The result? Insta-crash when trying to load up the FL Server or client applications and playing a game. No offense to the FL Explorer guys- this is a neat modding tool. But this just plain doesn't work when I try it.

I'm building this mod for MP only, so I don't even care about making it work for SP at all. How can I make a single system, and define it as the one which is where the player starts? FL Explorer seems to know how to ADD new systems pretty well... so if somebody can tell me what I have to change to change the start location for new players... I'll just hack around this problem, and people can wonder why the system is sitting in a corner on the map of the FL "universe" until I figure out how to get rid of all of the other systems for good and all. Please let me know how to set the starting system...

And while I'm at it... I don't suppose anybody's made a "empty" mod yet, where all of the weapons, IDs and everything else have been cleared out, leaving just an example of each thing in the relevant INI/DLLs? Ideally, this would be a "mod" only in the loosest sense of the word... you'd have to keep all of the things that FL can't live without, but get rid of everything else... so, for example, there'd only be one kind of ship, which could only have one kind of gun, missile, engine and so forth, one planet with one docking ring... one asteroid field... one patrol path... what else needs to be in there?

If not, maybe I can figure out how to make one, so that people wanting to do Total Conversions don't have to struggle with wading through the hundreds of weapon, equipment, and other entries... yes, I know that I have a looong way to go before I'll know how to do this... but it'd make people's jobs a lot easier if they could just start with a blank slate, and just add the things they wanted, instead of having to wade through DA's stuff... just my $.02 there... but having messed with a lot of things thus far (ship physics, .MAT files, weapons, patrols and other crap)... it doesn't look like it'd be terribly hard to do, once one had figured out how to make it all internally consistent.

Edited by - Argh on 10/11/2004 7:51:39 PM

Post Sun Oct 10, 2004 12:15 am

OK... so now I've looked at the newcharacter.ini file, and changed the name of the initial starting system. I've built a system in FL Explorer, sitting all by itself... with one planet, one docking ring, and a sun.

When I tried to load up FL Server, though, it recorded the following errors in the console log:

E:\FL\Scratch\Source\Common\GoodList.cpp(450) : *** ERROR: Cannot open goods file ..\data\equipment\engine_good.ini
E:\FL\Scratch\Source\Common\Loadout.cpp(179) : *** ERROR: unable to open Loadout file ..\data\ships\loadouts.ini
E:\FL\Scratch\Source\Common\DataConfig.cpp(142) : *** WARNING: LOADOUTS file '..\data\ships\loadouts.ini' contains no new definitions.
E:\FL\Scratch\Source\Common\BaseData.cpp(226) : *** ERROR: Invalid ini block in file ..\data\Universe\Systems\BR07\Bases\BR07_01_Base.ini

Now... I haven't messed with engine_good whatsoever... nor loadouts.ini... and wtf is this about an INI block problem? BR07_01_Base.ini is, obviously, the new base in my system... fresh out of FL Explorer, so assuming that it didn't do anything wrong (which I don't know)... why am I getting this error message right out of the gate? I thought I had this problem solved... grumble...

Post Sun Oct 10, 2004 12:09 pm

Hi Argh,
The engine_good.ini error I think you can ignore because unmodified freelancer gives this error . Its an ini file with nothing in it.

The Base error is caused by a bug in flexplorer it's self. In universe .ini your base definition section needs to be before the system definition. Flexplorer puts in after, which is wrong even though it might seem more logical. Just cut and paste to put your base before the system.

Dunno what u did to affect loadout.ini but this file relates to equipment weapons etc for npc ships so guess somehing you did affects ships.

With regards starting with a single system there's a thread or tutorial somewhere around here about starting from empty universe but i cant remember exactly where.

I do know that messing with Newyork too much unless you know what your doing is not a good idea. NewYork is complex and close to it's limits on many things.

For starting ship, money etc look at mpnewcharacter.fl file in the exe folder with notepad. Then look take a look at a mod that changes start-up ship to see how it's done.

Post Sun Oct 10, 2004 3:05 pm

I got rid of the loadout.ini problem by doing a clean reinstall of FL again... and this time, I backed up the entire install, along with the FL SDK files... I have *no* idea how this file went missing or was corrupted, but it wasn't there when I searched for it :-P

I'll move that entry in the ini file... that's probably what's still causing the crash! TY, I would've probably caught that eventually, by comparing the files from working mods with my decidedly un-working mod... but I hadn't noticed that yet :-)

I'll take a look at the empty universe mod tutorial, if I can find it... I'm very interested in building a TC where there's only one system, so I'll take a long look at how they did that.

I already figured out the newcharacter stuff, thank goodness... I think that's all fixed up now. Now if what you've suggested works... I'll be at least able to find new ways to break it, hehe

Post Mon Oct 11, 2004 6:13 pm

It's still not working... tried moving the INI entries as suggested, and I'm not getting any obvious errors from the FL Server's log. Would somebody be willing to take a look at this mod if I uploaded it? It's not very complicated (there are less than a dozen files)... and I'm sure *somebody* could tell me what I'm doing wrong... I'm sure it's something really basic.

Post Mon Oct 11, 2004 6:48 pm

I fixed it! Yay!

Here's what was wrong.

As I suspected... it was something dreadfully simple.

When you build a new mod with new start location... and start the FL Server for the first time... you must DELETE ALL EXISTING ACCOUNTS from the Server before players can log in.

It was just that simple... wow, do I feel stupid. My new system works perfectly, thus far at least... now I just have to figure out the hundreds of other things I need to do, to make this mod work! Thanks for all your help, folks

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