No roll control in Freelancer. D.A. was smoking a bit too much herb on flight control day.

I know that there is no roll control, but I know that the game engine is capabale of making the ship roll as it auto rolls when you switch control methds, what I want to know is, has anyone created a patch that provides roll control?

No

great.
why the hell not, surely with so many people complaining about the lack of roll and the code so emminently hackable somone would have realised that getting the roll controls sorted is a hell of a lot more important than modeling a bloody tie fighter or are the modders run before they can walk types?

noticed other craft rolling yesterday.
can't believe that its beyond the skill of mod peeps.

It isn't. It's in the game but you need to decode a certain .ini and add some lines to re-enable it. Be forewarned however that it really does not work well, you will only be able to roll while in cockpit view with mouse flight off. Do a search on the forums for "barrell roll" or something similar.

Yea well i made a thread on this about 3 weeks ago, still working on getting it to work right. But just as the last guy stated, i have gotten it to work that far. I cannot find out where the controls change, or rather find the controls file you switch to when you enable mouse flight. Its gotta be there, ill keep working on it. Any individuals that are good with the code and such on this game needs to help us find a way to do it. At my rate it will probably take several months to find a answer.

Lupe6Lupe: Because hacking the EXE to add roll control would make that EXE uncompatible with all versions of Freelancer not running the EXE, AND unless you have permission from the Licenser to distribute that EXE you would be committing a class 2 federal offence in distribution.

There is only one company that has ever allowed Alternate EXE files to be used in their games, and then only after the team has declared the project finished and they have publicly released the scource code.

[edit I believe there is no manual roll because the Freelancer universe is not a true 3D universe. The environments are true 3D but in no case do you have to travel on a verticle plane to get from one goal to another. Every base, jumpgate, or other goal is either very close to or dead on 0 degrees on the verticle plane. The possible exception is the "Planet of the Apes" system, which at least has the illusion of being set up at a 30 degree angle from the rest of the universe.[edit

Edited by - Nog on 18-04-2003 18:13:00

Edited by - Nog on 18-04-2003 18:30:03

looking over that last post confuses me. A, the programs Executable doesnt have to be touched to get the keys to be mapped properly. And B what does being based on a 2d plain have to do with rotating the ship? Im not trying to be sarcastic, im just trying to see what you are trying to say. It is a possibility to roll, and it is a necessity when it comes to combat, why you ask? The answer nearly invalidates your last post by saying, Combat is not based on the 2D plain that you speak of. Battles can go on vertically when you are fighting a enemy unit. But in any case this is a discussion on getting the option to work, and it is possible. Now if we can get people in here to stop analysing why it wont work, and start getting people to start analysing the possibilities on making it to work, we may accomplish something.

Drako: The game engine not only runs the graphics, but also dictates bounding boxes, the base level game physics and determins how a ship will act given a certain situation. EG: player input, is there a collision happening?, is there some other factor working for or against the movement of the ship? ETC...
The scripts are nothing more than the static values used by the engine to determine what is happening in the game. The rest of the values are generated by the engine itself based on the above factors I mentioned.
The engine must know how to do something before it can do it.
Yeah, you can add the inputs to the scripts, but the Freelancer EXE does not know how to execute a manual roll, and as long as it does not how to execute a roll, you can hit those keys how ever much you want and you ain't rolling if your life depends on it. In fact, the unknown input will most likely generate errors and crash the game.

Only DA can really deny or confirm what I just said, because only they know the full abilities of the game engine. But it's a very safe bet that I am right in saying that rolling cannot be implemented without a new EXE. If you want historical proof. I suggest you look at Doom. Someone had to code a new engine for the game just to allow the Doomguy to do a simple jump. Another engine was coded for it just to allow you to look up and down properly. Get the picture?

Afterthought: Games that are designed to be modded do have a way to code new movements and other base factors without changing the EXE file. However,
I have not seen any sign the Freelancer was intended to be modded at all.
There is no supported command line switch that allows an alternate game directory. No specific mention of handling mods in the EULA or readme files. People are having to hack the code and ceate mod installers for the players to use.
This tells me that neither DA or Microsoft are encouraging modifications of Freelancer.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a manual roll in Freelancer. I just don't one comeing without a few thousand emails to DA about it. On the plus side, that's one EXE change that probably would not affect player savegames.



Edited by - Nog on 18-04-2003 23:14:15

"but the Freelancer EXE does not know how to execute a manual roll"

Out of curiousity, what makes you think it doesn't know how to do this? Since it's already a documented fact that you can assign keys to manually roll your ship when not in mouseflight, it would seem the engine has this capability. The only real question is what is preventing this from working when mouseflight is turned on?

This is just one more way our friends at Microsoft hide the shortcommings of
a SUB Standard flight engin. I really loved the PIO (Pilot Induced Ocilation)prob
the program team put in for our enjoyment. It would be nice if Microsoft stoped
buying up all the good game companies and puting out such a bug filled product.
Perhaps Chris Roberts will start another comp and release Priveteer 3. We can wish

lol, well in anycase if anyone has any leads into where the mouse flight controls are, or the switch that turns other options off, let me know. In the mean-time i will continue to work on this, and try to find the answer myself. Thx all that are trying to find the answer.

Bump. This topic needs re-opening, and I have already started a new thread that basically says this same thing. I didn't search for it before, and I'm an idiot. Regardless, this is something that I feel the game desperately needs. It's like not having a strafe command in an fps (oh the horrible irony of having the ability to strafe but not roll in a space sim). Something just feels WRONG without it. I heard people were making progress with the commands and stuff the a.i. uses to move their ships in some .dll files. The most encouraging piece of information I've heard is that someone found out how to strafe vertically. I've seen both vertical strafing and rolling happen automatically, so if vertical strafing can be bound to a key and made possible, why can't manual rolling? I really want to delve into this but I've been so busy with other endeavors. I guess it's time I got my feet wet in this area of modding.