Starter ship and maybe cloak

    hi people,
    I'm relatively new so excuse me if I ask something which is "not done" ;)


    I want to change my starter ship to the Valkerie, could anyone explain how I do that?
    or maybe give a link to a good tutorial :)


    and it's always been a bit of an issue in the freelancer modding world (not sure if it still is), but how's cloaking?
    because i've found out something while i was playing freelancer a few days ago.
    in the bretonia escape mission, when you come out of the first trade lane in Tau-31.
    you can already click the then cloaked battleship. is this the problem why cloaking "doesn't" work in singleplayer, because AI just detects you?


    thanks


    Eagle John

    Cloaking doesn't work in single player simply because the framework is not there to support it. It only works in multiplayer (working cloak mod) because FL Hook adds that framework. You can actually add the cloak to your ship (decode the savegame and add "equip = cloak_fighter, HpCloak01"), but this results in permanent invisibility (until you remove the line from the savegame). Hacking around, I was able to intercept the engine kill to turn off the cloak, but it wouldn't turn on again (although that was probably due to using the engine key). However, when I landed and launched again, I was once again invisible. The cloak also pretty much makes you invulnerable and doesn't show up in the equipment list, so I gave up on trying to get it working - just not worth it.


    Probably the easiest way to change your ship (in single player) is to save the current game, decode it, change the ship, and reload:


      look in My Documents\My Games\Freelancer\Accts\SinglePlayer for the most recent file;



      change the ship: "ship_archetype = rh_elite";


      copy the file back to its original name;


      load it and you should now have a Valkyrie.

    Cloaking don't really work in Singleplayer because the AI knows you're there anyway and since you're playing with yourself :o there's no reason to cloak anyway, who's going to see it...


    It can be done, cloaking that is, I know because I have several cloaking mods that were submitted but never put on the site for download because, while not being of sound mind, I posted a cloaking mod once and it caused so much trouble for server operators that I felt really bad about it for quite some time, so I didn't post any more cloaking mods.


    I don't normally do this because I don't want to spoil your game or anyone's for that matter, so you can use this at your own risk.


    The IONCROSS Freelancer Character Editor will allow you to edit saved game files to give yourself any ship and a lot more so it can spoil the game. After all, doing everything in game the way it was intended is the way to go because the game will last a lot longer than if you were to give yourself tons of money, equipment and other goodies. You'll get bored real soon, believe me, if you don't go through at least the story part and explore all the systems, but by then you should have acquired a better ship, equipment and tons of credits and besides it's more fun doing it all by yourself and not as I call it cheating and giving yourself lots of goodies.

    But in your case just wanting a better ship to use going through the storyline is not really going to spoil anything, just make it a little easier to survive which isn't the easiest thing to do in a Starflyer or whatever the name is of that junk Juni gives you at the beginning of the game.
    So start a new game and save it so you have a saved game to edit. The IONCROSS Freelancer Character Editor will automatically bring up a list of any saved games files so give your save a name you'll be able to pick out of the bunch if you have several saved games already. Autosaves have a cryptic like name so it's not easy to know which one to edit.


    I didn't see the character editor in the download section so here it is in a attachment if you what it.
    Also the character editor requires the Visual Basic runtime files installed if you don't already have them installed.
    You can download the Visual Basic 6.0 SP5: Run-Time Redistribution Pack (vbrun60sp5.exe) here: http://www.microsoft.com/downl…f2d29a79d5&displaylang=en
    vbrun60sp5.exe is a self-extracting executable file that installs versions of the Microsoft Visual Basic run-time files required by all applications created with Visual Basic. The character editor was created with Visual Basic.

    [attachment=0]<!-- ia0 -->ifce5setup.zip<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment]

    Ah, I didn't realise there was a single player version (the one with the server only seemed to edit multiplayer characters). Still, I gave Eagle John bad advice before, so I'll correct that. Making the change I suggested would indeed give you the Valkyrie, but you'd still have the Starflier power plant, so firing wouldn't last long. Here's the Valkyrie loadout used by Chips Open SP. As before, decode your savegame, but now delete the ship_archetype line and all the cargo and equip lines, replacing them with:


    If you want to further edit it with the character editor, first load it into FL and save it again, since the editor doesn't like the names.