Posts by Moonhead

Hello All,

A lot of things on the modding scene seem to be better then a few years ago. So I wondered, if someone came up with a plugin for 3D Studio Max that can import and export the Freelancer's formats...

Or do we still have to use that outdated MilkShape version and importer/exporter?

Thanks.

Nice work, Buck Danny!

Btw will you or Louva-Deus ever release a new Unofficial Patch or FLSDK?

Adoxa's Territory addon is a must!! Actually it was the incentive I needed to pick up modding Freelancer again.

A word of caution: I found that there might be issues using custom non-resource DDLs with an FLMM mod if you also have FLMM-made IDS_NAMEs and IDS_INFOs: FLMM tends to write them into the [Resources] section of Freelancer.ini, before the custom resource DLL that contains your IDS_NAMEs and IDS_INFOs, giving those unnecessarily high numbers.

FriendlyFire was so kind to put me in the right direction to overcome this issue.

To avoid the described issue, put the Territory.dll not into \EXE but in a folder named \NewDLLs, rename it to Territory.newdll and use the following line in an .xml script:

Territory.dll will then be created by FLMM when the mod is activated, and will not be regarded as a resource DLL and not be added to the [Resources] section of Freelancer.ini

Of course, this works with other custom DLLs too.

I recently rediscovered the game. Still had the old shortcut to the LancersReactor, but it lead me to some portal for an "online-game based loosely on the original game" :? Or something like that. When I tried later, the shortcut lead to some error page.

And now, while googeling for an error message, I find the LancersReactor is back - with an .org extension! And my old login (must be years ago since I last used it) still works! :shock:

So - what happened to the LancersReactor? When did it come back.

Btw, nice that it's back. And nice to be back :geek:

Quote from "code:9999"

Apparently, the original version is in the archives, which are inaccessible/do not exist/whatever, so if someone could upload their copy and post a link, that would be great, as long as that doesn't conflict with any copyrights.

It is hosted on TLR too - I downloaded it some days ago.

First, get the downloads name & password here. Make sure to log in into the download section.

Then, download Frontierspace 1.75 from this page (page 27 from the Mod download section; the arrangement is alphabetically so the page number might chance). Frontierspace 1.74 is there too, and according to the creator it is "far more stable."

Quote from "Gibbon"

In situations like this, a re-install would propably fix things. I mean how long does it take, 10mins?

Yeah around 10 minutes I guess, but that excludes searching for the CD

I figured, just in case it would be a well-known problem for which such-and-such solution would required, to just ask it on this forum, and save me the frustration in case a reinstall wouldn't work.

Hello!

I decided to start up FL after quite a while. To my distress, I find the sound is not working properly. Actually I can only hear the sound effects. not the background noise or the music. I've dealt with this problem before but can't remember what I did back then to fix it.

In the FLSpew / FLSpit I find this line (repeatedly):

Quote

ERROR:General:StreamingSound: missing MP3 codec?

So, apparently I've lost the mp3 decoder FL uses. Sound progs (WinAmp, MediaPlayer, Audition) work fine though.

What mp3 decoder does FL use? Can it be downloaded somewhere separately? Or is it installed automatically with (a fresh install of) FL?

Any advice in general on this issue?

Thanks!

Done.

Hey, I created a female Order suite a long tima ago... I´m not sure (it´s so long ago) but I think I used either the Female Liberty cop or the LSF agent as a template... I can email the .dfm file; you can use in your mod it if you like it (I´m too sleepy now to make a snapshot and find a web site to upload it to).

I believe Mknote opened a thread about this months ago... I´ll share with you what I remember from it. These names, the House names, are in resources.dll and they are the same entries that you see when you enter a Starsystem that belongs to one of the four houses: &quot;Stuttgart System, Rheinland space&quot;. So any changes you make will not only show up on the Universe NavMap but also when you enter a starsystem belonging to one of the Four Houses. Each of these Four Houses has a couple of specific starsystems´ ids_names linking to it, to put &quot;Bretonia Space&quot; etc. behind it, when you enter such a system. This behaviour, unfortunately, is hardcoded (meaning, it is not arranged somewhere in an ini-file). I say &quot;unfortunately&quot;, because it means that you cannot just add like 6 new Kusari systems; they will not show &quot;Kusari Space&quot; when you enter one them. (There is, however, room for one more Rheinland Space system). It also means that if you want to get rid of the Houses´ names,, you´d also better make new ids_name entries for the Starsystems connected to them, otherwise the player would see &quot;Stuttgart system, space&quot; when entering the Stuttgart system. You also cannot move the location of these names on the NavMap (at least not by changing some values in an ini-file; I believe Alcander wrote he found a way to do this by hacking the exe, but he didn´t reveil it - yet). So, depending on what you want to do, you will have to think up a creative workaround... ________________________________ EDIT: you can edit resources.dll using <A href=´http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/´ Target=_Blank><b>Resource Hacker </b></a> Edited by - Moonhead on 9/17/2005 3:13:00 PM

<font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>second you know the space station type that newark is of i want to create 4 of these togheter so that the semi circle part of the 4 station form a complet circle <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> Hey I did that too! Indeed the way as M-A-C-E_166 suggests. But then the square brackets you see when you select a base, won´t be in the middle of the total construction; it won´t use the satellites but will just center on the one that you use as a dockable. So I used a prison archetype in the center as the dockable, and all 4 large-stations as satellites. I also created a much larger base, existing of a 15-level tower made of prisons (each level consists of 4 prisons, creating an octagon. I have placed them slightly different on the vertical axis, to avoid flikering bitmaps) and a couple of circles of various archetypes (one made of 8 outposts and another made of 32 space_police01 archs). I found that you´d still better add the <b><i>dock_with = ????_??_Base </i> </b> line to each of the used archetypes; even though you use them as satellites now, there´s be a lot of &quot;base so-and-so is dockable but there´s no valid base assigned to it&quot;-error in FLspew (FLspit).

Yeah I thought that you´d knew that, but it wasn´t clear from what you wrote... and I was in a good mood and thought &quot;better take the risk of telling what´s already known, than let a person wadering in the dark&quot; <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> However, I´m still curious what Argh means with &quot;putting out DLL entries with specific IDs&quot;and if it means you could put properly set-up bases to a mod by using scripts exclusively...

<font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>How would you make the XML script edit a .dll? I mean, as much as I´ve seen, that would be very hard to pull off. <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> It doesn´t as much edit a DLL but makes FLMM adding a custom one (flmm.dll) - we´re talking about the DDLs for ids_names and ids_infos here. examples: ids_name = 0 ;GENERATESTRRES(&quot;Beam&quot<img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> ids_info = 0 ;GENERATEXMLRES (&quot;&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-16&quot;?&gt;&lt;RDL&gt;&lt;PUSH/&gt;&lt;TEXT&gt;AST XTech Cruise Engine Mk1&lt;/TEXT&gt;&lt;PARA/&gt;&lt;TEXT&gt; &lt;/TEXT&gt;&lt;PARA/&gt;&lt;TEXT&gt; Top Speed (theoretical): 53.4&lt;/TEXT&gt;&lt;PARA/&gt;&lt;TEXT&gt; Energy Drain / sec: 0&lt;/TEXT&gt;&lt;PARA/&gt;&lt;PARA/&gt;&lt;POP/&gt;&lt;/RDL&gt;&lt;/xml&gt;&quot<img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> See all the ship XML files from Argh´s XML Toolkit mod to see how to implement it.

<font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>Actually, you can make XML scripts put out DLL entries with specific IDs. I was going to demonstrate this with custom Factions at some point, but never got around to it... <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> You mean there´s a way to have the same (really the same, not just identical) script-generated DLL entries at more than 1 place? Like, in a star system´s ini AND in InfocardMap.ini?? If so, would you mind giving the proper XML-script syntax, if it´s not too much trouble (it´s okay if you don´t wanna.) ? (You can ofcourse workaround by just generating the first ids_info of a pair, activate the mod, see what the ids_info ref number turned out to be and script that in InfocardMap.ini, together with a generated string resource, but that´s lame...) Edited by - Moonhead on 9/11/2005 3:50:36 AM

@ Argh I wasn´t trying to push you to get Alt OpenSP into the Toolkit <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Your goal with the Toolkit is clear, and admirable. Was just trying out to merge them myself, and as you are

Thanks for the suggestion; good idea (to have a dummy line written by each xml file). I´ve noticed that little errors in XML files can trigger errors at places you totally won´t expect them, so it might indeed appear that there´s a little error that doesn´t really hurt by itself but somehow gets activated by the options script. I deleted the mission files from the Toolkit, and replaced them by those of Alt OpenSP. There´s no problem with that (apart from the problem I described, but I don´t think the mission files are the cause -- I don´t see how they should keep xml files from being not performed by FLMM.) Actually I should work the other way around: have Alt OpenSP as a basis, and the Toolkit as an example on how to expand it. ____________________________________ EDIT: Surprising (but on the other hand, somehow logical) debug result: <b>NONE </b> of the scripts, except for the options script (starting base &amp; money) are executed. I even put a debugging line in script.xml itself, which is not written to the dummy ini (I used engine_good.ini). Oh well. The dummy mission files (the OpenSP part) seem to work fine. Edited by - Moonhead on 9/8/2005 11:35:18 PM

Argh , I tried to integrate Alt OpenSP into the XML-Toolkit. But it seems like it´s only working correctly if you choose the first starting location. I stumbled upon this problem when I trying this for my own little XML-Toolkit-based project, and I

What about FLScan not being able to complete its task? Am I the only one getting the following error? <font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>An unhandled exception has occured in your application <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> There´s a details button leading to a large error log, which is beyond my knowledge. Maybe this error is triggered by the empty ini-files? (In the SDK the empty ini-files contain a <b>;blank file </b> line, so these aren´t really empty.) There isn´t much else in Alt OpenSP that could trigger the error... EDIT: It works!! Adding the line <font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade><b>; blank file </b> <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2> to all the empty ini files in Alt OpenSP makes FLScan working again. It seems that FLScan simply cannot handle empty files. This is not really an error of Alt OpenSP, but I suggest Argh corrects this in the next version (and don´t forget that Colorado thing <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> ) because FLScan´s just too cool and too useful! We can´t do without. (at least, I can´t <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> ) Edited by - Moonhead on 9/6/2005 1:45:37 AM

Hey Argh, Alt OpenSP seems to work fine. Haven´t tested it with new factions yet but I guess they will be actively involved in the game action. If you build on classic (Xerx´s) OpenSP, custom faction NPCs will not attack their supposed enemies; all they do is shoot back at the player when he attacks them. I was once told that this was due to how Xerx´s OpenSP was setup, so I´ve good hope Alt OpenSP will solve this. Some things that might be nice to have improved: 1. {importance level : low; just cosmetic} In the menu, you labelled an option &quot;California&quot; where it should be &quot;Colorado&quot; 2. {importance level : depends} The ´blocked out´ factions are not in the Act_SetRep list in M01A.ini. People wanting to use those factions need to put them in here, I guess 2. {importance level : quite high!} Alt OpenSP stops FLScan from working! Not good!! A question about the XML (feel free not to answer them, as I must confess I didn´t try to find any documentation on this - to which thou mayest redirect me): why do the first two options (of question 1) have id=&quot;0&quot; and id=&quot;1&quot; added, and the other ones don´t have id=&quot;2&quot;, id=&quot;3&quot; etc.? The possibilities of this options script (I guess this is Chips´s) are great! It´seems like it´s possible to also change one´s starting rep according to where one starts, like having the Rheinland Cops and Military like you instead of the Liberty ones, if you start at New Berlin. (Of course most people have already been excited over this when Chips released OpenSP Lite, but I didn´t catch that at the time <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> )

That´s weird... I´m using a hacked tlr_lod.3db in a mod that´s largely based on your XML Toolkit. Doesn´t cause CTDs in this part of the Galaxy. However, a disadvantage of this hacked tlr_lod.3db method is, that the player can select tradelanes on the other end of the system; just click on the horizon and there´s a good chances you selected a trade lane ring. Haven´t overcome my laziness yet to see if entering a lower value into the 3db file will do any good. <font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>given that IDS stuff has proven to be tied to the EXE´s behaviors before <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2>In what case was that? PS Thanx for Alternative OpenSP! Haven´t tried it out yet, but I suspect that custom factions will now actively participate in killing their enemies (which they don´t when one uses Xerx´s OpenSP. They just mind their own business and ignore others.)