hi arch, good to see you about m8,if you need any test help at any time, drop me a line or post on my sight.

p.s why oh why did you join the navy (unless its to get the girls...........lol)

all of my questions are answers to my sins.and all of my endings are waiting to begin

@ Archkaine,nice to hear that you don't want Rebalance to die,but as far as I know I'm the only person working on Rebalance. Your in the navy with very little freetime to mod, Ro9ue's buried in his new mod, I don't know what the rest of the mod team are doing but nobody's said anything about Rebalance still being worked on.

I'm a fan of the Rebalance mod and a (VERY) novice modder, the reason that I started working on the mod,was to see if I could get my copy of 3.5 beta 3 working.



@ Black sabbath,how much editting did you & Zod have to do to get Rebalance 3.5 stable for your servers.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

i didnt do any editing, as i cant mod, but as we found suspect systems and ships, we posted them off limits, i know zod done a lot of editing, but i dont thinnk it made much difference on his server as he and his crew was also changeing stuff at the same time for the nightmare version.
But we tried to keep all players aware of any buggy or suspect systems till me or 1 of my admin team on the server done more testing, we also made sure everyone had the same set-up as the server, the main game, the offical 1.1 patch and the skd 1.3 files installed, we had good days and bad days, if you wana send me a e-mail listing the bugs you found and fixed, i can e-mail back with any bugs you havent found yet, also if you go to my website( check my profile) you can p.m rouge and arch, and engine of darkness for additional info, and to let them know wat you found and fixed, best of luck on the work, take your time on it and always ask the team for advice, im sure they be happy to help

all of my questions are answers to my sins.and all of my endings are waiting to begin

Heya guys,

Glad to hear from ya Sabb

I'll drop in to your site later, if I can remember the address (kidding)

Anyhoo, the best place to keep up on Rebalance is here or on Sab's site, guys, so get the address, and bookmark it. I think it's http://bsserver.easyhost4all.info/ but I'm not totally certain if I'm remembering it all properly, it's been a while since I've been there. In any case, I know that that's at least the root part of the address, so you can't go wrong trying it. If anything it'll just redirect you to the proper location, and you can bookmark that

On with the show, so to speak...

Bej, I for one appreciate your dedication to Rebalance, if you want to act as Ro9ue and myself's right hand man in coding the mod. Or even if you just want to do as you have been doing, keeping the Mod alive. Please let us know, just be sure to drop us a note if you're going to be thinking of making any major changes. Reason being is that we want to try to keep Rebal as true to form as possible, while fixing all the bugs. We've already discussed the idea of stepping Rebalance back a version or two to get a comparatively clean code base to work with. I'm thinking that that's not the worst idea, but that would still introduce errors that we will either know about, or worse... ones that we won't know about, and that will make themselves known later when the Mod is about to be released as the final version (as happened with Beta 3, some NASTY bugs showed up and hosed the whole idea).

We want to avoid having any more bugs show up as the codebase is being rewritten, but there's always something that happens to give us something to think about (I wish we had MD on our team, I can tell you that) :$

Anyway, let us know
Talk to you all later
ArchKaine

Some say ignorance is bliss, I say they're just too blissful to know better.

heres the addy for my website, i will redo the rb board when i get back from hoilday http://www.bsserver.easyhost4all.info/nuke/index.php

all of my questions are answers to my sins.and all of my endings are waiting to begin

Guy's this is your mod not mine,therefore there won't be any major changes.What I'm doing is rebuilding the systems using the SDK 1.5 for a base, and the beta 3 files as a reference.The only big thing I've done so far is remove the Capship encounters,I've found that most of thier entries don't work,that and the fact I get a lot of slowdown from the ones that do (New York especially, 20+ capships means a hell of a lot of polys).

At the moment I'm straightening tradelanes (and angling the ones that move above or below on the y axis) and thier traffic zones,fixing docking control uniforms and voices and adding info cards to all the non vanilla bases.I'm also removing the ghost shipdealers and replacing them with rooms and npcs that match with the bases,and the female traders have had thier meshes fixed (Big thanks to Argh for that one).

Archkaine & Ro9ue, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the vanilla systems, and apart from the odd typo the only problems I've found so far are the capships.I'll let you now how I get on once I start on the added systems.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Bejaymac,

Nice work so far

It sounds like you're making really good progress on the mod so far. But there's one thing that you've gotten wrong...

This Mod isn't just mine or Ro9ue's. This Mod belongs to us all. Ro9ue and I are simply the keepers of the flame, so to speak. Rebalance is written for and by us all, believe it or not. A lot of what gets suggested has been put in over time, it wouldn't be Rebalance without everyone's input.

In short, guys like myself, Ro9ue, and yourself, Bej, implement the wishes of those who want this Mod to be the best. the guys and girls playing the Mod are the ones that matter, and as such, this Mod belongs to everyone

So, keep that in mind, and you can't go wrong

Have fun all,

ArchKaine

Some say ignorance is bliss, I say they're just too blissful to know better.

BEJAYMAC .....keep it simple and don't let this lot drive u mad looking for ships,systems,guns and wreaks just do the best u can and good luck...ok?

death is the last great adventure.

question???? what did happen to md anyway ......??

death is the last great adventure.

Hi. I'm working on a suite of automated freelancer mod alteration tools as a summer newbie programmer project. (I am working exclusively in Python so far.) The richness of rebalance has made it my mod of choice, and as such, I've been gearing my tools specifically to use on this mod.

Code I have working so far includes:

--A complicated and finely-tuned algorithm that scores ship hulls and gives them a fair price. Can automatically score all ships the new prices (and make a new goods.ini). I believe this is exactly what is needed to bring greater balance to a mod like rebalance where dozens of ships are coming in from many different modders with very different opinions on how to price a ship. No more underpriced/overpriced ships means you'll try more new ships than ever.

--A ship shuffling routine that automatically redistributes ships in a semi-random fashion according to the average mission difficulty of the bases or systems selling the ships. (It will create a new market_ships.ini before the day is out.) Adds new freshness to the universe while keeping tougher ships in tougher systems.

On my to do list:
--A weapon pricing algorithm similar to the ship pricer mentioned above.
--A generator/shuffler to create/redistribute the ships/loadouts among the various factions in an intelligent fashion, the way a human modder might if he had a week to spend on it.
--An intelligent random system generator. My ambition might be getting the best of me here, but I as yet see no reason why it can't be done with just the ini files I have now. How sweet would it be to make a hundred new systems any time you want? Sure, they wouldn't have as much character as human-created ones without some followup customization and artwork, but they would still be fun to explore, and with human modder-followups, be pretty-darned nifty. Think Diablo's dynamic level generators. We'll see how long the summer lasts
--A basic frontend, possibly gui, for whatever I have done before the summer is out.

Anyhow, I post to this forum to ask anyone who knows about what, if any tools, were used to create the existing alterations to the inis that are a big part of rebalance. How were the different difficulty level ini's created, for example? Such information would be useful to me. I could reinvent fewer wheels (I might reinvent them anyway for educational reasons -- I'm a newbie programmer, remember) and perhaps improve my methodology. All I know about freelancer modding (and modding in general), I've learned in the past few weeks. So don't be afraid to point out the obvious. I may be unaware.

@ Spearhead, at the moment ships, equipment and everything else aren't important, fully working and stable system files are. Once I've got the systems fixed then I'll think about slowly adding the rest.


@ ExistentialRisk , while you ideas would be useful for SP ,in MP they'd be greatly received.Here are one or two pointers for you:-

1)ship prices aren't just set in the goods.ini,it all depends on what's in the ship package.in vanilla freelancer you get the hull,the shield and sometimes a thruster,in mods you often get the hull,shields,thruster,CM & mines as well as all the weapons,this can take a ship from $40,000 to over $1 million.In rebalance there are some that are getting on for $100 million.

2)The ships are currantly sold by system difficulty as it is,low power ships in low level systems and high powered ships in high level systems,in mods people put thier ships where they feel like and most of the new ships are very high powered(for some reason they don't like weak ships).

3) Tool for systems are System Editer,FLExplorer and by hand,for names and infocards its fled_IDs or reshacker,these both enter xml script into dll files.For models it's usually milkshape with the cmp plugin,textures it's any paint program that can use tga & dds files. The difficult ini's were probably done by hand,copy an ini then rename it then edit the entries by hand.Editting the files by hand is still the best way to bug hunt.

Be aware that freelancer is very touchy,syntax errors created by flawed programmes will cause the game to crash to desktop,this is the reason I'm rebuilding rebalance 3.5 by hand, it's full of errors.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Ship prices: Yes, my algorithm only takes hull prices into account, but it is still the biggest price factor on most ships, as their default loadouts are -usually- pretty spare. Plus, the shipmodders are generally not pricing the equipment they add to their ships unless they custom built that, too. So when a new ship comes in overpowered and underpriced, it's usually because the hull has been priced much too cheaply. So that's where my algorithm goes, and that's where it changes the price. (It considers all the mounts, maneuverability numbers, hard points, their levels, and pretty much everything else you could think of...) And I've liked the results.

This says nothing, of course, about potential imbalances in equipment prices, which I also intend to take a look at. But with the exception of engines, these are mostly spread evenly across the ships, since they are mostly interchangeable, and therefore do not create ship-specific price imbalances.

Ship locations are indeed sorted by level in the standard rebalance. The challenge was making something that can automatically shuffle the ships around some more while maintaining that characteristic. My program does this.

Editing a large, picky file by hand is error prone, which is half the reason I would rather make a script of some kind instead. Sure, you have to muck around by hand to figure out what everything does, but when it comes time to make a couple hundred (or thousand) changes, you're going to be inconsistent at best (when making judgment calls like prices) and bugtastic at worse.

This is why I think that the alternate inis for the difficulty levels in rebalance were probably made by a script/program of some kind. There are thousands of changes between them all, and as far as I know, they are not bug ridden.

To find out how freelancer does things and if your programs will help in the modding world, try asking in the "general Editting Forum".The Rebalance forum is looked at by people into the mod and the odd moderator,so rather than have the opinions of a novice modder (Me ),give the top modders a chance to help steer you in the right direction.If those guys don't know how to do it then it can't be done (yet).

The only script we use is xml,its used by FLMM to add entries into the ini files with out having to hand editting them,but you still have to write the script file by hand.Up until the 2 system editors were created ( about 18 months ago)virtually every thing was done by hand and alot of it still is.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Hmm,

You know, those proggies sound interesting. If only you were coding them in C#

Reason I say that is that I'm teaching myself to program in C# and have been working on a general editor that does some decoding and re-encoding of certain FL specific file formats. If you're willing, would you send me what you have? (email is archkaine.at.gmail.com, replace ".at." with the @ symbol of course).

I've played a little bit with Python, and might even understand some of what you're doing. Let me know

Btw, I'm one of the semi-retired head modders (I still wonder how I ended up with that one) for Rebalance Another good person to talk to is Ro9ue, and of course, the undauntable Bejaymac

Have fun you guys, and I'll try to keep in touch

ArchKaine

Some say ignorance is bliss, I say they're just too blissful to know better.