I've been waiting for this game for many years (I think I first heard about right after Privateer 2 came out and was less than a hit with old-school Privateer fans (me included)). Anyway, I've been lurking about here for a few weeks and think this place is great.

I asked this in the MP forum but wanted to post it in here also. Does FL have anything that allows you to sneak contraband past a scan? I Remember that you could get a small "secret compartment" in Privateer that would allow you to get a few units of not-so-legal goods past the authorities. While this would never allow you to get rich quick, it was a good way to top off a nice legal cargo run.

Any of the beta players run into anything like this....if not, maybe a possible mod? If this has already been stated elsewhere, sorry for wasting space.

Planet Earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do.

Good question Brother Grim. That would be nice to have a feature like that in FL. It added so much more realism to the game. It was a lot of little things in Privateer that made it such a blast to play. It is a fact of life...most of us old Privateer fans will be comparing Freelancer to how good Privateer was. I hope it exceeds our expectations.

So what is the best way to smuggle goods in? I know in P1 you could eject the cargo and then pick it back up, this seems like an exploint more than a tactic unless the cops pick up the cargo.

Can you just fly past them at high speeds and try to reach a base to sell the goods?

That's what I did, afterburn all the way baby! Blow by those militia/confed patrols and hit ground/station running. Nice way to make quick money on illegal goods.



"We're almost there." - Jorg

Aaaaaahhhhh, the sweet memories of fabled Priv days.

The endless nights locked in some scummy college dorm room, with a few friends and a case of beer -kindly purchased from some generous upperclassman with a very reasonable 150% markup . All huddled around a 15" monitor, with the computer hooked into the stereo system, and the sub-woofer under the seat of the chair.

The frantic first runs, just getting past the pirates.

The joy of our first jump out of Troy.

The dismay as the retros rained righteous fire down on us for our heathen pieties.

The thump of the sub-woofer on our a$$ as their meson blasters tore through our shields like tissue paper.

The agony as we would have to give up the precious pilot's seat to the next person as consequence for our miserable failure.

The anticipation as we sat, watched, nursed our sorrows in a fresh brew and waited for our turn to come again.

...........and yet, too quickly, the pink glow of dawn would invade our precious space, and off to class once more with no sleep.

"sniff" (wipes tear from eye). Oh happy days, thank you Privateer for those many nights, and the many nights before finals when i would have to make up all the work I missed.

I have actually already planned getting together with some of my old college friends whe Freelancer comes out for a long sleepless week of reliving those days.

"If this is what you want to do, you'll do it, no matter how long it takes..........and usually the longer it takes the more fun you've had!"

Laughs!! Excellent post Kivuli!
You are without a question a true Privateer fan who has llustrated the attraction the game had for so many. Freelancer will get it's best advertisement and promotion from the old Privateer fans. Please them and Freelancer will over come a huge hurdle.

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I Remember that you could get a small "secret compartment" in Privateer that would allow you to get a few units of not-so-legal goods past the authorities. While this would never allow you to get rich quick, it was a good way to top off a nice legal cargo run.

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You'll be please to note I did in fact recommend this repeatedly to the DA Dev's. I think they sort of wondered why for a while until they realized I was the owner of the Priv FAQ.

*bows*

Thank you Tiger I am honored

"If this is what you want to do, you'll do it, no matter how long it takes..........and usually the longer it takes the more fun you've had!"

Speaking of Privateer, i found a copy last year. I tried playing it on my old system, but, i couldn't get it to run. I think my old system was too fast for it. I'm not sure. I'm wondering if any of you have played it on a P2 system. My girlfriend has an old 486. I'm thinking of taking it over there.

Stinger, is a secret, non-scanable, compartment a possibility for FL? That sure would make smuggling a little easier.

None in beta, but wouldn't be surprised at all to see soemthing like that in final build. DA always seems to have surprises up their sleeves. The secret compartment was part of the Privateer storyline. Don't believe that to be part of the FL story, but again, I only played about 3 hours of SP campaign. Most of my work was done in MP.

Merlin
DRUID'S MYSTIQUE
"...I'm only in it for the money..."

Edited by - Stinger on 12-02-2003 01:34:23

Dave...Privateer should run great on her 486 as long as she has atleast 4 meg of ram and you setup the config.sys file with the "device=c:dos\emm386.exe 2048" added in. You could first try it without modifying the config.sys file. Privateer needs atleast 2 meg of extended or expanded memory to run well. And the computer needs to be setup to allocate enough extended or expanded memory. Some were and some were not.

Speaking of running privateer, it won't run at all on XP, so far as I know. I've tried several methods. Time to bust out my ol' Pentium 90 Mhz until Freelancer comes out.

Privateer, ahh, sorely missed indeed. Nothing else in the history of everything else comes close.

Freelancer won't have joystick support; it won't be Privateer, just another wanna-be like Privateer 2.

Speaking of P2 ... back when the first PC-AT was built game designers learned to tie the game speed to the clock so that faster computers would not make games unplayable. The designers of Privateer 2 inexplicably un-learned this lesson, so that a modern multi-gighertz system that will run Privateer as smooth as silk, with perfect framerates even in the middle of the shimmering blue sphere of a jump-point, will run Privateer 2 so fast it's unplayable.

But then who would want to play P2 anyway? I think I flew 3 missions before I realized it was going to remain as profoundly horrible as it began, and the last 2 missions were just me being generous. There are games on cartoonnetwork.com which are less cheesy.

The moral here is DON'T PRE-ORDER: as much as we all loved Privateer, we could as easily get burned by Freelancer as we did by Privateer 2. Their attitude with respect to flight controls sets an ominous precedent: "play it our way or no way at all."

Remember the Wing Commander mission briefings? I don't; they all sort of ran together: "Kilrathi activity ... blah blah ... important mission ... blah blah ... so therefore we have decided that you and your wingman should fly to the Nav Points then return here to the carrier. Good luck!"

Privateer was an evolutionary step up from that. There were a bunch of "connect the nav point" missions, but most of the "missions" you flew were of your own choosing, and there was something more: you were on your own. The pacing was also perfect: you "discovered" Sandoval in New Detroit right about the time you started thinking, "Cargo, missions, cash, Centurion; okay, this game's done." Then you find out what all those "Contraband Searches" are for ... Tayla turns you into a drug smuggler!

Privateer was a game you could play the way you wanted to play it. Did anyone manage to get the Tarsus all the way to the Steltek Derelict? I could never finish the mission just before it ("Delta" I think?), which is actually the hardest mission in the game. I always ran out of missiles before I could make it back to Rygannon. The second-hardest mission for the trusty old Tarsus was, oddly enough, Salmon Kroiz in Rikel -- torpedoes really give a Tarsus a beating. The Kilrathi ambush in Palan is probably impossible in a Tarsus, but I didn't stick around for that one. Even on full A/B the Tarsus is slow, but it's just fast enough to get away from that fight.

What great memories! My friends used to have me run their Tarsus missions for them -- I could've just given them one of my saved games, but it wouldn't have been the same. It was kind of fun to be "famous" as the greatest pilot of the lousiest crate in the game. If anyone here has managed to get the Steltek Gun onto the Tarsus, I relinquish the crown!

Err, back to "Freelancer vs. Privateer" -- Privateer flies, Freelancer doesn't. What a disappointment. Privateer allowed joystick control, why can't Freelancer?

Privateer and that other one, Strike Commander, will run fine on most modern Computers. I have an AMD XP 2000+ and it works great; but you need either a OS emulator for XP so you install DOS (Very expensive) or a partition to install Win98 on. I also had a problem with my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 because it does not have the same DOS emulator of older Sound Blaster cards, but my onboard audio works fine. For games like Ultima VII I need to get those processor clock rate reducers, there is a free one floating around out there that works great, but I never needed it for Privateer and Strike Commander (both use basically the same engine.) I did need an XMS (or someother mem) boot disk though, but the one in the Privateer Manual worked fine after some tweaking.