This is also a good idea, as my ideas for my mod is to strip it from everything, except weapons ect ect.

So i can add my own systems, trade lanes, ships ect ect.

I would also appreciate any info ppl are willing to post for us, as a newbie on mod making, im trying to find everything out before i actualy make the damn thing. lol

Const.

What I'm hoping to achieve is basically having a striped freelancer as a codebase, and then having templates for all the original ships, equipment etc so that people can pick and choose which ships etc they would like from vanila freelancer, and simply drop them in.

The way I'm getting this remplating system to work is, things that change a lot are in a seperate file.

So instead of adding a ship with one script file, you have several that make up the one ship.

For example with a ship, you'd have your ship and good entries, you'd have a seperate loadouts file so that technically you could create multiple loadout files, and just drop the one you want to use in the folder, in this way you can add (I'm hoping) several loadouts for particular ships, such as a npc ship, or a mission ship, and just pick and choose your loadout.

The segmentation would just be a way to quickly drop loadouts in there for not just the ship, but any other ships that share the same hardpoints.

Those are the kind of principles I'm working on...

I think I understand what you're doing...

Essentially, you would break down everything in the game into separate templates that a person would look at, copy, alter, and drop into their game. For example, have a system be broken down into: A template for Stations, a template for Jumpholes/gates, a template for Light, a template for Suns, tradelanes, etc. And then a person would be able to say, drop in a tradelane by simply copying the template and adding his/her custom data.

If I've got this right, I would say that this is a great idea, and I would be willing to contribute my help to your efforts.

Cheers,

Xen()morph

Well, I suppose you could say it like that, yes.

For a ship, all you'd need is the template, modify the loadout and package, edit the template to reflect the file paths for the files (model/texture, icon etc) and that should be that, except for ship stat editing.

The ship would be in the game on sale wherever you set it.

Quicker and less painful, plus things will be even more stable and hopefully less bugs as the standardisation comes into effect.

System building is a little more complex than that, so sure, it's not going to be terribly easy, but will be better as you'd have code samples to just slot in, amd modify to your needs.

Sounds like a nice idea. But what exactly do you want to produce, in terms of result? It seems like you'd like to create an XML (text) editor with specialized Freelancer macros, is that correct?

There is a lot you can do with XML. I am currently working on a mod, just for the fun of doing it, that does as much as possible with XML, even adding factions (although there are limitations to that because of the four names that have to be +131834, +131934, +132034 and +132134 from a faction's ids_names). I've already rewritten most of the equip, goods, ships and loadout files into XML, although some files (mainly the ships) are already altered (ships stats follow Argh's Toolkit 1.2 rather than stock FL, but I'll probably recalculate them myself -- somewhere during the next decade, as I am not a fast worker)

Now with FLMM 1.4's improved functionality (I hope the complaints some people had do not discourage IGx89 from an official 'non-beta' release) it's also rather easy to add star systems and bases (also to mBases).

As for the supposedly not-deletable Li01 - if the game really needs the file, you could always leave it in, add a visit = 128 to it and ignore it, if it's not desired in a mod.

Anyway, if you could summarize what you want to achieve (not just in general outlines but sort of detailed) then people who might be interested could pick a task and you could coordinate the whole process...

I think the demand isn't large enough for a full scale reverse engineering project, that would allow people to start from scratch and just slot in what components of the original game (plus custom ones) they like.

It would probably be too much work, besides I agree with my =EOA= counterparts, Louvis would have probably done this way back when he built up the SDK.

So I'm toning the project down a tad ...

Here is the vision I had: -

Someone browses on a website and visits the weapons section ... they look down a list (viewed in freelancer stats) and when they click download they get a zip/rar/7-zip archive containing a simple script file that is standalone. Meaning they can drag and drop it in they're mod, change the relating data so that it can be sold wherever, and hey presto, instant weapon.

The SDK kit of this would be the complete set of templates for pretty much anything, all the objects (ships, weapons, shields, thrusters, engines), and system objects (stations, nebulae, suns, etc).

So basically, you can cut and paste files and or code into your mods, with less editing needed to make it work.

These templates would mean that everything would work out of the box, and so theres less opportunity for mistake as you'd know it was option A, B, C that you edited, and so it would hopefully limit errors, provide a standard coding, and make things easier to change and or add-on.

At the moment I am making extensive use of Macromedia Dreamweaver to do a lot of my modding.

For the main reasons that I can add my Freelancer data folder as a site ... so I can see the pane on the right with a tree structure of all the ini files, I can use the snippets area to store templates and simply drag them into the ini file while I'm editing it.

So yeah, I'm hoping to take Arghs toolkit further and provide a modular standardised set of templates and sub-template components, that should make the whole modding process that little bit easier.

Getting into it a bit more technical though ...

If you look at Arghs H-Fuel Tanker, thats an example of what I'm driving towards, except that I would like to seperate what is modified a lot from what isn't.

I'm thinking like this, the actual ship enties aren't much, you basically change a few things like armour, file paths, etc. But, I would like to segment out into a seperate file things like loadouts, and packages. This means that technically anyone can have 5 or 6 different loadouts, and drag and drop in whichever one they want, for player or npc purposes, for testing purposes, balance testing, whatever you like.

I hope you see where I'm going, it needs to be as modular and extensible as possible, with minimum fuss and editing needed. This will allow modders to focus more on being creative than spending hours doing ini coding.

Especially for ship builders, just dragging and dropping your files in, and dropping in a standard template, with minor modifications to do, would be quite valuable don't you think?

Edited by - oPwnagEo on 6/26/2006 7:23:16 AM

Can you believe that?! I hit the ESC button again after doing a lot of typing My text was instantly deleted and ctrl+z won't get it back... I found out that it's a browser thing, not related to this forum, so I can safely wish H5N1 upon the inventor of this functionality, and still appreciate LancersReactor at the same time


Anyway, your original idea would indeed be a lot of work... though it would probably be much appreciated.

What you want to do now sounds cool, but in all honesty I must say that I wonder if it will attract the right kind of people... Most of the large, succesful mods are made by people who are probably control freaks (in the most positive sense of those words - no insults intended!!!). Those persons could still perfectly use your templates - but I wonder if they will... Maybe, when you're a it further on the road with your project, you should just ask some large mod creators (Mace_166, Chips, to new a few) for feedback, if at that point you haven't heard from them yet. They could tell, as no other, how useful your templates are getting.

What I most appreciate about Arghs's Toolkit is indeed its modular, systematic approach. I am having more difficulties with Argh's reasoning about ship stats, partly because I don't fully understand, partly because it's kinda counterintuitive at some points... (in a nutshell: according to his 1.2 formula, the steering_torque of a ship gets smaller as the ship gets heavier, but for very heavy ships you need to add a few zeros... In 1.3 he makes a distinction between civilian and miliatry ships before he calculates the stats, where I feel that should be done the other way around... I think there should be one formula for each of the ship parameters, that applies for each and any ship, including cap ships.)

Anyway, the real game stats for ships and weapons are also not always too logical, so there might both be a weak spot and some new area you could cover with your project - a standardization of weapon, equioment and ship statistics.

Having said this, I must say it's an interesting project and I'm looking foward to see it getting form! I wish you succes on it!

Well, I'm not basing everything on his works, just his principles, using the templating ideas and coding methods.

I'm targetting the guy that is just looking at modding and wants to know how to get a weapon into the game, he can just look at the template and change what he wants to make a new weapon...

It would also serve the more advanced modders as they can cherry pick and edit as they see fit using macros or whatever they wish.

The point of this is to create standalone entities that are written to work out of the box, with all its dependencies included (thrusters or engines a ship uses if they are custom).

So like I said you'd be able to just drag and drop a script in there, and hopefully once you make minor alterations would work, and if it doesn't, you know its one of those few things you edited that has caused the problem.

It's not really about making things easier, its about making things more efficient and stable and available than things currently are.

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The point of this is to create standalone entities that are written to work out of the box, with all its dependencies included (thrusters or engines a ship uses if they are custom).

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That's a nice and clear mission statement. What's the current status of the project?

In progress, it's being planned ... I will begin work on it after this weekend as I'd rather plan what I'm doing before I get started, so I don't lose sight of the goal and information and data is organised.