I can't answer for the entire Freelancer community this, but I can give answers at least from a perspective of Freeworlds:

1\ Judging by the Freeworlds Community alone, our player base is probably close to stagnating. We lose some, we gain some. There is continually new people getting involved as older vets step out. What is always nice though is that quite often, older names and vets spring up from time to time and return. That said, I also know Freeworlds is starting to bloosom in non-English communities as well, and there is a growing community with specific French and German speaking Servers for Freeworlds, even if the English speaking (which is still a combination of many different countries, not specifically countries where English is the primary language like the UK and the States) is at a more stagnant level with the numbers of players.

For Freelancer as a whole, I have heard from some on these forums a grumble that their communities are shrinking and that they are finding it harder and harder to maintain numbers. Maybe Freeworlds is an exception to the rule, though I suspect other big mods like TNG and Evo also have simalar sorts of draw and larger resources to pull from. However, we still see posts on Lancers Reactor from people saying, 'Hi, I'm new...' and then go onto ask all manner of questions from how to mod, to how to use mods, or how to access internet servers because they have never done it before, which suggests there is still fresh interrest in Freelancer and it's modding community even now, several years after it's release.

2\ I know of three mods currently under development, though obviousily there is far more out there. These two being the new Freeworlds 1.66 (Star Wars based TC - evolution of the Freeworlds series, completition expected within the next month or two), FL: Combat Evolved (Halo based TC - alpha has just been released) and Tides of War (another, new Star Wars TC approaching, or is, in it's Beta Stages).

3\ I imagine you mean in reference to newer, more up and coming mods in relation to their struggle to get noticed in the presence of the vets. I will admit, it must be difficult for any new mod to get any exposure in face of the larger vets. The trouble is, players want mods which give them more than others, and the veteran Mods have been slowly expanding with each new version, so naturally, most of the big mods, like Evo, TNG, Freeworlds, Tie-Universe etc.... are going to offer more than say some new mod that has just been released, has maybe two new star systems and half a dozen ships. If I were a Server Admin, I would want to run a mod that is popular, and in honesty, those that have had the experience of time to get balances correct, bugs worked out, and quality content added are the mods people are going to gravitate towards.

In light of this though, as difficult as it maybe, it doesn't mean that it is impossible for new mods to get recognised. Both the Tides of War Mod and FL: Combat Evolved mods I mentioned above are gaining a good fan base already and plenty of interrest, yet in terms of the mod age, these two are still relative new comers to the whole mod scene in comparrison to the vets. It is all about having a good and original idea that others will like and having a team of people who are willing to see it through and getting it produced. Even though Tides of War for example, is another Star Wars mod, for example, they have chosen to take a different tact to that of other Star Wars mods like Freeworlds and Tie-Universe, in that they are basing the entire mod around one particular period in Star Wars history (the Rebellion Era). This has drawn some people to it who are interrested in roleplaying pilots in that era of star wars history where as Freeworlds and Tie-Universe are more liberal with their timeline basis. Indeed, this idea has grown so popular, that recently Tides of War started a side project in development beside the main mod called Tide of War: Clone Wars, which converts the mod to the Clone Wars era, to allow people to roleplay as well in that era instead if they so choose. It is possible for newer mods to get noticed still, but it needs determination and good ideas to keep it going, in much the same way the vets emerged from the sea of small mods that were produced in the first year of Mod Development for Freelancer.

I hope some of that is helpful.

Freeworlds Mod Developer
Author of Modular Station

'There is no Good nor Evil in the universe, just perceptions and circumstances.'

1. my opinion is that it is slowly growing but the development of mods outpaces that growth, probably sustaining it.the result is apparently fewer players, although there are more people playing

2.at least 8 - my opinion is that several of these mods,specifically those based on Arghs XML toolkit should probably be integrated into one larger mod - there are too many of us working alone, and our combined efforts would be much greater

3.some of the older mods have grown stagnant or just gone vapor - they have added so much with manual editing that further progress is hindered by old developments, their development teams have lost interest, and they're no longer cutting edge, having fallen behind on major exploits like orbiting objects,dynamic asteroid fields, EXE patches, unlocking unused features etc. these mods are bound to lose lots of players as new and hopefully better mods come out

Edited by - Cold_Void on 10/7/2005 6:41:06 AM

Cold_Void-"there are too many of us working alone, and our combined efforts would be much greater"

I agree with this statement.

If TNG, Crossfire, Panther studios, Argh, Silvik, XTS, Bejaymac, and so many other talented Mod makers could just work together on a mod that would I think take some time, but the result I believe would be a mod that would continue to improve indefinitely. By taking advantage of scripting the New Mod would not be a large time consuming D/L.

Maybe The Lancers Reactor could start a Thread asking the many mod makers to join together to produce the greatest mod ever. Let them work together and take it which ever direction it would go. The Mod would need to be SP/MP playable also.
Maybe I am dreaming here, but I think that would be awesome.

It is a pipedream though. The trouble with 'mega' mods is that you can only take things so far. Different mods have different physics, different ideas, different balancing, etc.... combining it all into one mod would be an undertaking that would require more than people might realise. Whose way of ship balancing would you use? Whose commodity formula would you use?

The other thing to remember is that mod makes are a proud bunch of people and prefer working with their teams. Mod team leaders would find it hard to work under someone elses direction, even though they are more than capable of exchanging and running ideas past one another. And don't forget the saying.... too many cooks spoil the broth. If you have too many of the developers working on one project, arguements would ensue into the direction to take it and the mod would most likely end up as such a mish mash of stuff, that instead of being a clear and consistant mod, you would end up with a horrible juxoposition than just didn't click together correctly.

obviously you would want modders who were working in complementary areas that didn't overlap much, and balance _needs_ to be formulated in a forthright and universally understood way.

but we're not talking about teams merging, we're talking about lone wolves like myself whose mods won't get enough exposure to justify one person doing the work of seven...i would consider the unnamed expansion i'm working on very comprehensive in its ambition,yet it adds no new encounters, commodities, factions, systems, bases, jumpholes - frankly i'm not as concerned about these things as correcting balance all around(thanks to the toolkit which has been a real boon to tweaking weapons)as well as completely reorganizing FL's messy INIs -especially the FX and equipment, upgrading planets w/ spin & orbiting satellites, converting every debris field to dynamic and some asteroid fields, introducing the zone property drag_modifier to nebulas,adding new class-specific power systems,multiple shields,and reintegrating thrusters into ships as embedded afterburners,and lots of other misc improvements i feel i can't live without but wouldn't my mod do much better with new encounters,factions,etc? alas there's only so many hours in the day, and only so much aspirin for strained minds and cramped wrists =D

This reply is rather late, however I think many people miss the point on MP.

The player base is shrinking.

Too many mod makers are making "what they think" is the best mod, with little regard to what the players want/need. All this sexy stuff people talk about is fine, however, if it is not going to keep the interest of the players for more than a few days it 's pretty pointless.

There are some good mods out there and there are some average mods, however, there are very few mods which have any depth to them. I talk about the attention to detail here, in the economy, the history, faction relationships and plenty of documented details for the players to read in game etc etc. all this seems to be forgotten about very often. This is at the expense of some new sexy gear or ship etc.

You cant keep a player at a server if you just throw some nice stuff and say "look, this is really cool", this novelty wears off after a week or so.

The sooner some of the modders out there understand this the better for the players.

The other thing is the variety and how often you change the mod to keep people interested. We changed our mod 3 times in 12 months, adding systems factions etc to keep the interest and grow the community. We now have over 7,700 ACTIVE characters on our server (Not just characters - but active ones). We are now undeniably one of the largest MP Servers. The thing is to listen to what the players want and balance it up.

TNG is probably one of the most popular "multi server" mods, however, again I think its old news to some players and they move to other servers to get a taste of what else is out there. This will always be the case with players. Dont get me wrong, TNG is a fantastic mod, but players will move on.


Strail
Server Admin - The Void
The Void Server Homepage


Edited by - Strail on 10/22/2005 5:13:50 PM

well if i wanted to read i'd go to fanfics but i definitely see from your perspective - sexiness alone won't make a great mod - which is exactly the point i was addressing,although i said it differently.i have played on the void, and all i can say about that is...players will move on

Another thing to keep in mind is that players hate mods that are unbalanced. When you have 30 factions, 200 ships, 90 systems.. and everyone is flying one ship with one set of equipment.. there is something wrong there. When a mod loses it's balance it becomes boring and falls prey to a lot of troublemakers.

Also with consideration towards the shrinking interest in the game we have to realize that Freelancer is not designed for Multiplayer. By that I post this question, how often do you see the majority of players concentrated in a few major systems? The reason is because players that actually try to play the game end up scattered all over the 'universe' and rarely run into each other. This does not give a very good experience, especially not when this game is not aging so well. Some have tried to compensate by making a much smaller 'universe' but that usually falls prey to boredom rather quickly.

What is really needed are human organized activities. An interactive story (something like being an actor in a movie) where each person has a part to play. At that point mod construction is relegated to supplying the building blocks for this to take place.

The RPG element is illusive but will be the deciding factor on how long this game lasts.

Players hate unbalenced mods with tons of ships? Sweet. FL:CE will have a mere 30 or so pilotable ships. only about 25 weapons, and everything is perfectly balanced.

Once we are in the later stages, of course. The mod is still very, very early.

1) I think the player base is "stagnant" for now, and will be for some time. Players like Freelancer, and often will come back to it after many months - the game has that allure which will keep people playing it for years. The actual storyline was good imo, with excellent voice acting. New players in probabily equals a few a week... at best. Glock also has a theory that alot are playing whom haven't bought the game - and from some requests for NO CD cracks etc, I am inclined to believe him.

2) I know very little of the present modding scene, simply because I have enough on my plate as it is. I do know of some, simply because people email me about it, or ask for help... but it is rare that I can aid anyone these days. I know of some major mods, and that is about it.

3) I think people like some mods, and therefore play them. You'll find many hardcore die hard TNG fans whom only play TNG, just like we have some Evo fans who only play Evo. NR seems to have taken a large chunk of our player/server base - but that is because they added extra features we did not. New mods have the difficulty of:
A) Attracting a crowd of players, and also servers to run them.
Coming up with new ideas or better ideas than existing mods.

NR worked because they had a successful mod to build on, which they did. They also fixed stability issues (something we are still working upon ourselves, we sometimes manage a few days without a server crash now :O)

Evo had many features at first that other mods didn't, hence how we got the players. I learnt to mod "on the fly" as it was, there wasn't any real tutorials of any value whatsoever. Alot of what I have done was simply found through hours of experimentation and finding ways to accomplish what I/others wanted.

No, my code wasn't the best ever, was often buggy - and had errors. I had a hard time trying to figure stuff out, tell everyone else how to do it, and keep the momentum of creating a huge mod on my own. I was bound to make mistakes, some of the stuff had never been done before, or were "unknowns". At the time I also was unaware of the Spew - which can highlight said issues.
No-one's coding is perfect, and I am still fixing up parts of it today... and refixing my fixes! Some may say "start over" - but to be honest, I've forgotten so many things that we implemented that I would leave half the mod out easily, and it would be such a huge job that I would probabily never finish it either.
Here the new mods have an advantage, alot of stuff is now well documented - or at least documented into how to do things. They also can "borrow" things without doing any work. An excellent example are my "Pilot" icons. Each one was a screenshot taken in a bar, which was then cleaned in photoshop, background removed, resized, saved, format changed, imported and made into an icon. Each one took one hour to do, and I forget how many I made; Same for ships icons. Now people ask to use them, they have them for 2 mins copying. In reality it took about 30+ hours to make them all... so I guess I am saying mods are easier to make now than ever before... the help is there, so making existing features into mods is an easy and simple affair compared to the hard grind it used to take us Unfortunately this is probabily also why they have nothing new, because they may not have the dedication to work things out like Argh here... it takes time, effort and fustration - something alot of people are unwilling to put into modding.

Simply put, I don't have the time either anymore - and although I would love to ask some people to help in particular for what they could do/acheive... I wouldn't because I dislike trying to push people to get things done. I've had volunteers in the past whom were supposed to do things, but nothing materialised. As it is, I'm still waiting on my own modellers for ships.

Everyone has real lives, and we can't all keep a pace that we used to. This is why many larger mods have apparently stopped, modding for 2+ years isn't exactly fun... Right now we're working on the "definative Evo", TNG just adds a few extra things - and MD has given up. TNG still works on adding new things I think, but for us it's no longer about new content (maybe planets if someone else makes them though ), it's about quality... but this takes alot longer than shoving in a capships encounter and releasing for everyone. Hence why large mods appear "silent" for so long (coupled with Real Lives).

As for new developments - I love the excellent looking planets I have seen - but I do not have the graphics skill to do that myself, so I must trust to others. Sadly, alot of people whom came on board to help did nothing, so these days (although I see some I would jump at to ask) it is really just the "core" team... we've tried too many, and given up asking! The ones I do now trust are usually on other teams already
This means work is slow as we all have responsiblities and lives to take care of. I would similarly assume this is why some other large mods don't bother either.

Back to new mods - a major problem for new mods is that I now note alot of them heave features we first implemented, or Rebalance/TNG etc. The problem is probabily exactly that, what is the difference? I read one mods description the other day where i thought "sounds like Evo 'lite' to me", not because of the fact that I think they nicked our ideas... I don't mind, but why is anyone going to play a mod which is identical features wise to other bigger/more complete mods? It has similar/same features... but less substance. Many mods may find it hard to get a foot hold simply due to this - 30 months after release, and they are releasing mods that feature most of their content from mods that have been out for 24+ months. Their idea for releasing mods is probabily not to try and make the next big thing, but simply a wish to create something. However, we are making the assumption that this is why they are releasing them.

As it is, we continue working slowly on Evolutions, I would love nice planets, I would love other thing's I've seen, but I don't necessarily have the time, knowledge or know-how to implement some. Others, I wouldn't do (dynamic asteroid fields - sorry, original concept is that capships cannot venture into asteroid fields, and that they are "dangerous" to fly through. Current dynamic ones are neither! This is not an improvement, but merely an accomodation that relinquishes some gameplay aspects). Some other features maybe the same - they may look cool or sound good, but infact just simply aren't going to fit in with what some people want... it's not that the mod makers aren't "forward thinking" - but new ideas may not actually fit.

Essentially Louva is right. Although I would love to make the graphics look awesomely cool for things (not effects just stuck onto weapons to make the universe glow brightly, that is not realistic or exciting - its just more flash without substance) - the most important things people listed in our "grieviances thread" were both balance and professionalism.

We always work on balance, and we are working on completing infocards and stuff as well. Of course, when a mod is as big as Evo (I think we have the most ini files of any mod except the SDK!), little tweaks don't take five minutes - I can have several hundred entries that I need to alter and then test. Tweaks can actually take hours or days to do.

Edited by - Chips on 10/25/2005 12:35:35 AM

Having just found the site, although I've been playing FL homebased for a while, I would think that there will always be those who just find it- the universal war
server is good in that a player new to this will have an advantage when beginning thier on-line play, and the server side mods are cool for those of us who are- whisper it- computer illiterate.

Also, being that it's a very dynamic community I would think that all the iterations and variations on the theme would be hard to exhaust - whether you prefer to mod, or just to be able to get online and have a good time.Not only is there A server, there are a great many of them apparently. And that is something that not a lot of games can say, especially about their longevity and broad base appeal .

We're good. thanks for asking.