Alternate backgrounds for Freelancer Explorer

[Igiss]

This post may be useful to all system developers out there.

I started creating alternate Freelancer Explorer backgrounds myself some time ago for own specific purposes, but now my edits reached a stage when they can be released to general public. There are two backgrounds. First one applies to systems, second one applies to universe. I wasn't able to find a reliable way to replace the universe bmp. System bmp can be replaced with ResHacker, downloadable from here:

http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/

Download link to FreelancerExplorer.exe revision is at the bottom of this post.

System map background

http://igiss.net/images/discovery/137259_3.bmp



This one is self-explanatory. Default background doesn't contain axis or coordinates, so they're added.

One thing that may not be obvious is the red border near the edge of the image. This is where navmap in Freelancer stops working and displays direction to your ship instead of the ship itself. Generally, it's a bad idea to place anything beyond this border, except for zone edges. Bases, holes and other notable objects must be placed some distance from that line, and never beyond it.

Universe map background

http://igiss.net/images/discovery/136257.bmp



This is a simple file displaying coordinates of systems on the universe map. For reasons unknown, I was not able to get it work.

The bright red box displays the area into which Freelancer systems can be placed. I figured out those borders by experiment. As you place a system beyond that border, its in-game position will be reverted to this border.

.exe file with changes

This is an .exe file with those images integrated. Universe map doesn't work (at least for me), system background works perfectly.

http://igiss.net/files/dev/FreelancerExplorer.exe

I remind that credits for FreelancerExplorer goes to Shsan and contributors. This is just a small modification for local modding needs, and it should not be re-distributed or included into Freelancer Explorer full package distributions.