Before I go on, a tip of the hat to Hellfire. Very nice program! Thanks very much for your time and effort.

Now, onto my comments:

About sp00n's comment that FL Datastorm is currently missing which wrecks pops what equipment:

I've noticed that too, but I don't know how one will go about it. The reason I say this is because I've mucked about loadouts.ini, and noticed that the loadouts assigned to the wrecks in this file does not necessarily correspond to the actual stuff you get from shooting the wreck!

For example, some bounty hunter wrecks carry the Paralyzer Missile launcher, according to loadouts.ini....but I'm sure pretty much everyone knows by now that you can't get the launcher without hacking the ini's.

What I have not been able to determine is how the game decides which part of the loadout of the individual wrecks should be preserved as loot. I guess once someone determines this, then it wouldn't be too hard to code this feature into Datastorm as well.

In the meanwhile, though, I've personally gone through each and every one of the wrecks to determine exactly what they give. You can find my post here.

-- The Haen.

perhaps it just depends if the stuff on the wrecks is actually "lootable" which is determined in the inis (cant remember which though).

the wrecks contain several weapons/missiles/stuff and the ones that are lootable are being released when shot, the rest -well- just wont.

BTW: awesome list!

Edited by - sp00n on 13-04-2003 17:24:47

IT WORKS! IT FINALLY WORKS!

Err...yeah. Just had to get that out of my system, and it's currently 3:03am on a Monday, so shouting is not a good idea.

Found the fix on the InstallShield site...never even knew they had one, actually. Something to do with an incompatible version - big surprise - of oleaut32.dll. Ahh well, guess it's just something to file away.

sp00n wrote:

---

perhaps it just depends if the stuff on the wrecks is actually "lootable" which is determined in the inis (cant remember which though).

---

I thought it was that too (btw...the files that contain that info are weapon_equip.ini, st_equip.ini and misc_equip.ini off the top of my head). However, a simple investigation simply shows that this isn't true. The following discussion is probably best suited to the editting forum, but since this is a support thread...

Take the sole wreck found in Cortez, the Edward Kane. When you shoot it up
in game, you get 6 starbeam turrets, and 10 units of Gold.

In iw04.ini, the nickname for Edward Kane is Iw04_surprise_ge_armored_1, and it is given the loadout of SECRET_armored_iw04. So, we have to look up the loadout files.

Since it's a transport, it's considered internally by the game as a utility ship. Therefore, open up loadouts_utility.ini to find SECRET_armored_iw04. A quick glance at the loadout shows the following:

[Loadout
nickname = SECRET_armored_iw04
archetype = ge_armored
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret01
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret02
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret03
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret04
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret05
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret06
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret07
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret08
equip = co_turret01_mark01, HpTurret09
cargo = commodity_gold, 10

You'll note that there are 9 co_turret01_mark01, which corresponds to 9 Starbeam turrets, plus 10 commodity_gold. However, I have personally shot up the Edward Kane 3 times, and each time, I only get the 10 gold and 6 Starbeam Turrets! I don't have the file with me to check, but I am fairly certain that the lootable flag for the Starbeam Turret is set to true, so that seems to suggest that all 9 Turrets should be lootable.

Even more, I remember specificly checking for the lootable flag for the Paralyzer missile launcher, and the lootable flag for the launcher is definitely set to true.

That's why I think there must be some other factor at work to determine exactly what you get from the wrecks lying around the system. I haven't had time to go through all the ini files, but from several threads I have seen on TLR forums, I'm starting to think that at least the "loot limiting factor" (for lack of better term) is hard-coded into the EXE.

About the only thing that the loadout.ini files are good for is a general pointer as to what you might get....that is, the equipment/weapon/commodity you actually get from the wreck is a subset of the equipment/weapon/commodity listed under the loadout section.

-- The Haen.

P.S. Thanks for the compliment. Hope you found the list useful.

Run-time error '3633':
Can't load DLL: MSJTER35.dll

anyone know how to fix it?

OS: Win Xp Pro

Edited by - boz on 15-04-2003 06:05:47

Strange bug here:

After installing this on a win98/2, I cannot do "Open in new window..." inside internet explorer (5.5) anymore (same for popups).

The border of the new window shows up, but it seems that ie "waits" for something in order to show the contents. Stopping the load (esc-btn) and reload (F5) does the trick. But I'm not planning to do this every time for the rest of my pc's life

I'm a programmer myself, and I've had this bug once before in a program. It had something to do with event-syncing and the message loop.

... and believe me, before the fldatastorm installation everything worked just fine!

I have XP Pro also. I resolved the DLL issue by downloading the VB5-System Files located on the download page located at http://www.101st.info/DS. I installed the VB5-System Files into a temporary directory, and then ran it. It installs the files into the \System directory. Once you install the VB5-System files the program should work correctly. At least it did for me.

- Garg.

XP has a problem with a lot of games...Micro$uck dosn't program enough drivers to support all games and devices to opperate the games. I will give thim credit though Freelancer & XP are pretty good...most of the time.

xp doesnt have any problems with new games, only with certain older (dos) games (few old windows aswell).

hm, the xy coordinates seem to be wrong after installing the new 1.80 version...

"Strange bug here:

After installing this on a win98/2, I cannot do "Open in new window..." inside internet explorer (5.5) anymore (same for popups).

The border of the new window shows up, but it seems that ie "waits" for something in order to show the contents. Stopping the load (esc-btn) and reload (F5) does the trick. But I'm not planning to do this every time for the rest of my pc's life

I'm a programmer myself, and I've had this bug once before in a program. It had something to do with event-syncing and the message loop.

... and believe me, before the fldatastorm installation everything worked just fine!"

Jacky X,
I had the same problem, plus it screwed up my Norton LiveUpdate too. I traced it down to an incompatibel verison of the file oleaut32.dll. I replaced it with the correct version and the problem went away.

Check the version of the file installed in your windows\systes folder. If it says 3.50.14 or 3.50.16, it's the wrong version.

I've version 3.50.5016.0

Do I have to upgrade to a newer version, or downgrade to a previous one?

oleaut, isn't that for ole32 automatisation? Could be a bit tricky to change that dll, cause datastorm is not the only program that uses it...

Yup, that's the same version I had. I managed to track it down as LiveUpdate for Norton wasn't working and gave me an error message. Thankfully there was an error code, so a visit to the Norton website gave me the info I needed.

AFAIK, in the fix suggested by Norton, an older version of the file is installed. But this is specific for Win98 SE. I did the fix now everything works fine, including DS.

I suspect that DS installed the wrong version of the file, which is perhaps for WInXP or something, which could explain why the probelm is not reported widely.

You'll have to restart in DOS mode to get the swap done. You could always back up the file in case things go wrong.

Good luck!

BTW I should add that both my home and office PCs had the same problems, and the only thing in common with the two is the installation of DS.

DS doesn't seem to be working properly for me at all - All I get on the maps is a series of 'X's & '?'s.

I installed it on a different PC than the one I have FL installed on, and it asked me for an FL install path, which of course I didn't have on that PC. I now installed FL on the PC I have DS on, but DS doesn't ask me for the FL install path any more, so I guess that's why I only get 'X's & '?'s. Maybe if I could deinstall it & then reinstall it it might work, but how the hell do I deinstall it ? It doesn't show up in My Computer - Software to be deinstalled, & it doesn't install itself with any auto-uninstall methods.

So how do I go about uninstalling DS ?