Today we release the 4th update for Discovery Freelancer 4.86. This release has taken somewhat longer than hoped largely due to my tardiness at completing aspects of the work.
As always, thank you to all of the development team, in particular Aeternus and Xoria for their work on fixing many bugs in models, systems and the economy. This update is massive and this update is double the size of the last update.
We expect to make one more minor update in the 4.86 series to fix any issues that show up but most of the development team's attention has now turned to 4.87. We have picked a release date and although I am not ready to share this publicly we will do everything possible to meet this date.
What's changed?
Many many model and system bugs have been fixed. Although we probably have not found all of the NPC bugs that result in crashes we think we've found and fixed most of them.
The ship equipment system has changed. All equipment including externally mounted guns uses cargo space. Some ships have been given slightly more cargo space to accommodate this. This change allows us to balance ships, guns and new equipment types in unique ways.
The shield system has been modified to support the mounting of hyperspace jumpdrives, hyperspace survey modules, docking modules in specialist shield slots. Cloaking devices are mountable in the countermeasure slots. Note that although various types of module can be mounted in these slots, your ship might not be able to use the equipment if its power plant is too small.
Player built and controlled bases are now available. These can be built anywhere by anybody and players can control their diplomacy based on ship names. A warning though, they require a lot of effort to maintain as they need crew, spare parts and fuel to survive. Space is dangerous. More info: here and here.
Cloaking devices, jumpdrives and survey modules are manufactured and buyable from player bases. These three modules need fuel to operate and in general the better the module the more fuel it requires. The largest jumpdrive requires fuel ships to supply the jumping ship as it is charging its drive. Also this equipment has a small but non-zero probability of being destroyed on ship death. It is important to maintain good a relationship with a faction who can supply your ship with replacement units.
The mobile docking module software has been disabled in this update as it is buggy. We expect to fix this within the next month. Docking modules can be manufactured but they can't be used for now.
Almost all planets have been given a slow spin and all suns now have a layered deathzone. There is 2km of low damage, then you die quite quickly.
The jump hole between Connecticut and New York has been removed. To get to Connecticut, dock at a base, remove all of your cargo, type /conn and undock. To return from Connecticut, dock, type /return and undock. Thanks to MadHunter for writing this plugin.
Faction reputations and empathy settings having been updated to better reflect the storyline and fix issues reported by players.
NPC-missions have been updated to make the NPC ships fly smarter and provide something of a more realistic challenge.
The installer has been updated to support non-English Freelancer copies and the Cyrillic patch for Windows 7 is included by default.
The full list of changes is in the post below and the readme when you install the game.
As always, these changes are tentative and if they don't work, are not balanced well or have other problems we will change the changes until we find a better balance.
How to install?
If you have NOT DOWNLOADED AND INSTALLED Discovery Freelancer 4.86 then CLICK ME
Please read the instructions and download and install it. You can not upgrade an existing 4.85 installation.
If the automatic update does not work, the update can be downloaded manually from here. Unzip the contents of this directory inside your Discovery Freelancer installation.
If you are a server operator and are not in contact with other Discovery server operators, please post in the Other Servers section of this forum to obtain help or go to http://the-starport.net.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
We've had a little technical issue. If you had trouble upgrading in the last 10 minutes, wait for 5 minutes and try again. If you still have trouble, quit Freelancer and run the dsupdate.exe program in your Discovery Freelancer directory.
Proud member of "the most paranoid group of people in the community"
