Jumpgates and tradelanes are unfortunately not included in that easy part, some more testing is needed and already there are lots of problems.
Dockable player ships are possible, have been done and are in use on many other servers.
There are little to no issues.
I'd say if you were to contact Dev or Devast8tor over at the Freeworlds: Tides of War mod, he would at least help with the writing of the plugin. He wrote his own and we used it on another server for a while, working with no hitches.
' Wrote:Wait... what did I say? *Looks around madly*
Anyway, I talked with Cannon about this and the way to do it would be an Flhook plugin so that when you "dock" with a player, you're sent to a station about 300k above the plane, and when you "undock" you magically re-appear outside the ship again. If the ship dies while you're docked in it, you undock at the last base you were on.
It is possible, just a lot of work. Cannon would need to write the plugin and someone (I'm willing to do it, just need a few spare hours at some point) would need to add a base to every system.
Seth
Adding over 60 new bases that will not be used for any other purpose than the plugin is a silly solution. Take for example that no matter what ship you dock, you will have the same equipment, etc. available, and the base inside will always look the same. It's too artificial, and for me it means this plugin shouldn't really go any further than the idea stage, unless a way to implement it without adding 60 empty bases is found.
' Wrote:Adding over 60 new bases that will not be used for any other purpose than the plugin is a silly solution. Take for example that no matter what ship you dock, you will have the same equipment, etc. available, and the base inside will always look the same. It's too artificial, and for me it means this plugin shouldn't really go any further than the idea stage, unless a way to implement it without adding 60 empty bases is found.
On such a base (player bs), you should only be able to purchase bats/bots, maybe ammo. Not more. So I don't really see a problem with all bases selling same.
In a brilliant tactical movement, i charged backwards.
' Wrote:'Figther 1 : Cap, can I dock on you?'
'Cap : Sure.'
'Figther : Ok, docked, thx =)'
'Cap has logged off.'
Woops! Server crashed!
'Figther 1 : Cap, can I dock on you?'
'Cap : Sure.'
'Figther : Ok, docked, thx =)'
'Cap has been killed by lol'
Server dies.
Unless it's somehow made that the player ship doesnt count as an actual base as in, respawn on the player ship but respawn on a planet or station, I doubt itt'l work. Maybe not even with the above.
The old Tekagi's Treasure and Flak 88 did it by the same technique and no server crashing.
It does work fine in other mods. In flak if the player you are docked on moves a few systems you are warped to his location from the point you docked first. It is kinda wierd but it works. No crashes.
Eh, I didn't expect this number of replies. Hadn't even suggested the idea before, however, it seems that the link you provided falls under what I had in mind (almost).
So I was playing Hardwar the other day. I realized that while Freelancer is in many ways very similar, there was something about Hardwar that made it significantly more interesting to play (despite being 11 years old and having awful controls).
First there was the dynamic economy, but after reading numerous threads, I threw that suggestion out of the window.
Second element of fun was that you could trade with NPC ships docked at other bases. I started to hink of how you could successfully implement it in Freelancer so that it can be properly coded, moded, and implemented in a multiplayer environment. After reading your replies, it would appear that the technical achievement is within the "doable" department.
And while Kurosora has already expressed a similar idea, I wanted to take it in a different direction: make the dockable ships NPCs only. The reason being is that few players, even when considering Role-Playing, want to trade commodities. Turrents and armour upgrades are useful, but if you're carrying commodities the only thing that has use for them is the station to which you're heading. So the trading sequence is typically this:
Gets goods from point A, travel to point B (occassionally pay the local pirate), rinse and repeat. It's too predictable. Each base always sells/buys the same stuff and we can't (and probably shouldn't) change that. However, what if we had NPC trading ships that would stop (or appear) near various stations. The NPC ships would carry cargo depending on their associated Faction. As far as commodity trading, this could add an element of change.
The specifics of how you would execute the idea would be up to developers and beta testing (and whether it can technically be done at all). But look at it this way: there are 3 ways in Freelancer to make money: Mining, Trading, and Missions. I think it's safe to say that Mining and Missions are rarely used for cash flow. Most everybody trades and when you get down to it, it feels more like performing an office job than playing a game. There's no sense of surprise or change. Smuggling past the police and Pirates can be fun, but most of the time you come across the "give 2 mil or die!!" treatment. So we can't have dynamic econmy. That's fine. But maybe we can have traveling NPC traders (implemented in whatever way works best) to spice things up.