Posts by AestheticDemon

  • Slow Sound when Mods are activated.

    I dont have a copy of OpenSP on this machine, start up flmm, and select the mod, then ue the tools menu option to open the mod folder, and have a look, does it just do open SP, or is it one with enhancements like spinning planets?


    On some machines, with some graphics setups, spinning planets can make it a bit laggy.


    See what the mod actually does...

  • Strange hardpointing problem

    Simple solution to the 'file access' fubar in microbloat windoesnt vaster and later...



    DO NOT INSTALL MODDABLE GAMES TO "C:\Program Files\Whatever"


    Instead install them to "C:\Users\[your login name]\Games\Whatever"


    Install modding tools in suitable subfolders likewise. Then when you save a modded file it just gets saved like a functional operating system should.

  • More Than Disabled Cruise


    You don't have to make the game think it's a missile or torp to have an explosion , or add a 'motor' to it.



    It's just a standard turret, fires like the blazes when you hold the rmb down, and YES they do damage, this gun def is ripped right off the quad flaks on one of the cruisers i've been working on, the assault cruiser has 18 of these, 4 barreled turrets, very very killy, the npc pilots take down whole fighter wings in seconds, firehose time...




    Ok. solution is a custom power plant OR mod all the existing engines to change their power usage.




    As for the engines...



    The hpEngine?? and hpengineglow?? are just for the visual effects on the back of the ship, the ACTUAL engine itsself, is mounted on a virtual hardpoint



    If no hardpoint is specified for an item of equipment it's deemed to be 'internal' and untargetable, but you can mount them on real hardpoints, use an existing one or make a new one. Of course then you have to specify a mesh, one with a sur file to use for the equipment so it can actually be seen and shot at, and hit.

  • Adding vertical strafing ability by Rasauul

    Put that in an xml file for your mod, and it should work, make a file caleld 'vertstrafekey.xml', paste the code in, save it, drop it into whatever mod you want to add the feature to, activate the mod with FLMM, and you're good to go.


    Dont forget to go into the options/controls section once Freelancer is running and set the keys you want to use.

  • Rail Guns, Gauss Cannons/Rifles, Mass Drivers

    Ok...



    Long ago and far away, a clever man discovered that if you take a coil of copper wire, shove a magnet in the middle, and spin the magnet, it makes electricity...


    Electric Dynamo


    Later it was discovered that if you take a coil of copper wire, shove a magnet in the middle, and turn on the electricity, the magnet spins...


    Electric Engine


    Later another man discovered that if you open out the outside of the engine flat, you can make the magnet move along the 'electromagnetic track'...


    Magnetic Linear Induction


    It was suggested that this last version could be used to make frictionless (at least with the 'rail' because it floats just above it on a magnetic field) and virtually noiseless light railway systems for inner cities...


    Mag-Lev


    It was then suggested that this thing could be used to launch chunks of metal mined from the asteroid belt or the surface of the moon, back to earth, using solar or fusion power, as a 'cheap' way of replacing chemical fueled cargo rockets...


    Mass Driver


    Then true to form, the human race said "hey we can turn this into a weapon", and set about trying...


    Rail Gun / Gause Gun / Mass Driver


    There is no friction between the projectile, and the barrel in a maglev weapon, as the projectile sits in the middle of a magnetic field and does not touch the sides. This suggests high velocity. If you dont believe in this, smash your hard drive open. Modern hard drives use 'frictionless bearings' made with 'rare earth magnets', higher rpm for less power.


    Freelancer already features a 'mass driver' like system, the common TradeLane. you enter the first 'hoop' and get shunted at high speed to the next 'hoop' and the next till you emerge at the other end, with the final 'hoop' reversing the process to turn your momentum back into energy, this is called 'magnetic braking', and a version f it is used on some modern subway cars, the engines are also dynamos, electricity is put in to accelerate the train out of one station, then as it aproaches the next station, the process is reversed, so the movment of the car turns the wheels, which spins the engine core slowing the car down and getting back quite a lot of the electrical energy put in during acceleration.


    Oh, and 'Gauss' is a scientific unit of measurement named after a dead physicist, specialising in electromagnetism...


    'Rail' comes from the original suggested application and first practical experiments moving a 'car' along a rail...


    None of these weapons uses 'bore reduction' or chemical propellants of any kind.


    :rolleyes:


    'Mass Driver' comes from scifi authors back in the 40's, 50's and 60's, taking about using this tech for moving large chunks of mass through space cheaply.

  • Coding custom weapons

    Brief notes on hardpoints...


    HpMount - no number after this, this is the docking/mooring point for the ship. When docking this point is moved so its position and orientation matches the hpdockingpoint of the station/planet/etc


    Like any hp, it can be rotated in hardcmp, this doesn't affect the way the ship flys normally, but does alter the way it lands/docks/sits on the pad, so for example you could put the mount on a model of Boba Fett's Slave1 so it lands on its back as per Attack of the Clones


    HpPilot - no number again.


    HpEngine?? - Numbered 01 to whatever, engine exausts
    HpEngineGlow?? - This is for extra glow effects added when in cruise etc, can be one per hpengine but its optional and they can be shared, say one glow per paired exausts for example. Game cant cope with more than 8 of these per ship. Usually placed outside the ship mesh, 3 to 9 units behind the exaust nozzle.


    HpBayDoorA HpBayDoorB - These are to do with animated cargobays, but also on customships without bay doors, they govern where dropped cargo originates and direction it's dropped in, from A to B.

  • Welcome to all new and old TLR members

    Heh, I'd say 50%, the Ageira Military uniforms are more or less done, space is full of new ships, like the CargoCrow lt transport, Blood dragon aces afe flying patrols in Sutekh Torpedo bombers, with pilots who know how to fight the ship properly, Detroit Munitions has had a hefty upgrade, and is 100% xeno free thanks to the Cruisers on patrol, it's all fully scripted for flmm 1.4, no dll's to worry about when mixing mods, all the code is commented for other modders to browse through, just messing with 'proof of concept' stuff, and bells n whistles, idea is a mod that can be played in sp and open sp, but which can also be incorporated in whole or in part into other larger mp mods.


    Hope to have a partial alpha release by newyear, mostly rescripted ships with encounters, with the more poc stuff later, it's just been on the back burner a while, as i was messing with 3d cgi, and jedi academy character skins n sabers, and teaching myself EaW-FoC modding

  • Welcome to all new and old TLR members

    Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

    which mod was that?
    I remember your name but fail to remember with what i can connect it.



    Hehe, hardly suprising, I'm the silly mare who rescripted etc a couple or 3 ship meshes. The corporate war fleet mod has never been released (it's not finished, still got to tweak the random merchant encounters, random capship patrols, sort out the new mats for the liberty police corvettes, finish the stuff for the dockable shipyards for buying capships in, bar scripting, all kindsa stuff, including messing about with the untryed docking types like 'pad' and small_moor).



    The 'mod' I'm best known for if at all was the ADPtah, right up at the top of the shipmod list here.

  • Fixed Weapons

    Wrong....



    turn rate controls how fast a turret or gun rotates, the li cruiser gun doesn't rotate , turn rate isnt used
    putting a normal gun or turret mesh on a fixed hardpoint , and they still spin


    point is there is also a revolute hp on the cmp for the weapon mesh, the li cruiser gun, rh gunboaat cannon etc have non standard hpmount settings, if making your own weapon mesh copy the hpmount settings from these


    forcing gun origins means that 1 the weapon can be fired even when YOU are looking in the opposite direction, and 2 that the weapon doesn't use the 'muzzel cone angle' specified in the global inis (usually 40 degrees) so a normal gun on a +0/-0 degree revolute hp will still fire 20 degrees to either side and 20 degrees below horizontal, plus whatever amout of elevation it permits.


    You need either to
    1 use one of the invisible weapons like the li cruiser gun mesh (simple)
    2 make a custom weapon mesh with limited hp's, (very tricky)
    3 clone an existing weapon mesh, with the flmodelcloner AND some custom editing with the utf editing tool AND hardcmp(tricky)
    or
    4 check out some of the unused weapon meshes, like one of the bretonian weapons or one of the missile launchers, which have a weapon mesh suitable for a standard ship hardpoint but also have limited mount hp's (fairly simple)

  • Railgun

    if you make the ammo 'exploding' like a missle/torp, then there is an 'impulse' line in the explosion definition, this gives the target a shove...


    cut n paste the explosion code from a torp say, all the syntax is there, edit to match your custom guns ammo definition


    make the explosion very very small, say radius 1, and make it impack based, no proximity line in the code, and use the weapon impact effect you chose for the ammo af the explosion effect too, so you dont get a 25m fireball for a 0m dummy explosion


    for the gun, high muzzle velocity, low refire rate, MASSIVE energy drain ( for the mag lev field that powers a gauss weapon) and set the impulse settings there too, to push the firing ship back/off-course with recoil

  • Few questions about missiles

    it loses lock if the target leaves its fov cone, with a 'all aspect' 360 fov, that doesn't happen, so you don't need to mess with the turn rate, or if the target is further away than the seeker range


    oh and vertical missile launchers have a name... 'jagdfaust' if i remember correctly, used on the wwII german rocket plane, me163?


    There is an entry in the weapondb ini for missiles n guns, 'force_origins = true/false' or some such (not at a pc with fl on it just now) , if set to false, like most guns, it only fires when you are looking the way it points either from cockpit or turret, set to true and it fires whenever you hit the 'fire missile' key, so set it to true then you dont have to switch to turret mode to launce your jagdfaust, just fly under the target and press the little button.



    Personally, I'd fit two minelauncher hardpoints instead in the cmp, pointed straight up, code up a custom minelauncher weapon with a much higher than standard initial launch speed to throw the mines clear of the ship, and code the ammo as impact fused dumb seekers, no fov to worry about, just set the seeker range to something suitable


    Mine based FL Jagdfaust would be far more in keeping with the spirit of things, I coded up a custom minelauncher like this for a fighter in a mod i'm working on, 3 launchers at the stern, low yield mines thrown out at angles to create a wide triangular spread that then close in from 3 sides on a pursuing fighter, much harder to evade, hence the lower yield, for 'fair game balance' etc...

  • Auto Turrets

    As far as i can figure, autoturret was supposed to be available for players once, the key you press to switch to and from turret view seems originally (after peeking in the exe and dlls) to have been meant to switch from one turret to another, and allow the turrets you weren't manning to auto fire


    They seem to have ditched that at some point, along with a turret cam cockpit mesh


    I THINK it's still used tho for something in NPC pilot job blocks, there are statements in there refering to autoturret fire enabled and how long the fire bursts are and how often the bursts are fired. As a rule if the ship has turrets, and the ship will be flown by npcs, set the autoturret entry in the weapon definition to TRUE

  • Problem with engines

    the num nozzles entry in the shiparch ini relates to how many exaust flames you have on the model and needs hardpoints in the cmp to match the number


    the number of engines in the loadout


    ie
    addon = bwfrengine01, internal


    sticks in an engine without a hardpoint, for ingame calculations about energy refresh rates for the guns and thrusters, top speed etc


    putting that line in more than once adds extra engines, giving more power, and more speed


    it's a bit silly tho, if you want a faster ship, clone the engine entry, and mod the custom engine to a higher power output


    48000 gives you top speed 80, 60000 gives 100, thats for fighters n freighters, cap ships n transports have different values as a rule due to higher engine mass and diff ship type coding in the game exe

  • A few tips...

    Okay....


    Somebody who doesn't play modded fl says 'lose the mods nobody plays'


    Which ones are those, exactly?


    'lose the buggy unfinished mods'


    Hmm, which ones are those? Is 'Really Cool MP Server My Fav SciFi TV Series Total Conversion Mod version 7.15.08c' a finished mod? Is it TOTALY unbuggy?


    I know that my Ptah Gunship upload isn't finished, its just a ship mod, the 'finished version isn't finished and has a damm sight more than just a ship, or even a bunch of ships. So you could kill that, it's old, and doesn't have (or need for that matter) a support forum, and you're more likely to find an mp server with the Ptah included in somebody elses mod than JUST running my measly little ship mod...


    But, there are presumably people out there who HAVN'T downloaded it but who might want to, to get a 'clean' copy to put in THEIR mod.


    This is also true of many of the smaller, older mods on the list.


    Need to exercise some care here methinks.

  • Welcome to all new and old TLR members

    Aloha campers.


    And so I'm back in outer space
    I just walked to find you here
    with that mad look upon your face


    Damm, now I'll have to finish that mod I stopped working on because nobody played FL anymore and there was no TLR to post it on...


    Corporate War Fleets anyone?

  • The VHFs - No, this ISN´T a ´Best Ship´ Topic...

    I´ve flown the anubis (who hasn´t, and the titan (nomad thye 3 cannon x 4 of course) but my favorite ship is the mod I recently posted, the Sutekh. Guns? Only lvl 7, same for the shields (4), but it looks good, and handles well. Personally, I don´t like the "Celebrity Deathmatch Multiplayer Lvl 10 Tankfest Special" fighters. I like the sutekh so much I redid it, v1.1 and added a stable mate, the Sekhmet. so now I have a choice, Capitol ship killer, no cargo, or Commerce raider, less firepower. AestheticDemon - Terror Trooper #666