<FOMD> Freelancer of my dreams. Work in progress (permanently).

[Swallow]

I will be writing down the progress. Most recent changes are at the end of this post.

Turret Steering as main ship controls for each class.
No small vessels.

I will be writing things as a reminders for myself.
How about finite amount of energy for pwercore?
How about removing engines and using thrusters only for propulsion?
How about Newtonian motion laws (FL engine suports it, if you set drag coefficient of the vacuum to zero and use real masses and propulsions for ships).
How about finite ammo for all guns and removal of laser weapons? (or pushing projectile speed to maximum)
How about one system=one planet (with belt for mining and atmospherical flight like tomioka has?)
How about planets on which you can land without burning in atmosphere? I mean putting a base directly on surface.
How about realistic ship designs? Inertia momentum symmetry and mass symmetry? Using the rule "every gram counts" to cut everything that is not needed to be on a ship?
How about ships without windows?
How about real-sized bases?
No TL, cruise only. (with high mass and high speed - extremely risky and hard to do).

Spoiler

Visibility limit pushed up to 1 000 000 k.
Though at distances starting from ~300 000k and up from the origin a small jitter appears, and it grows with distance. Possibly, not enough precision in floating point calculations. If one will be using ships sized as battleship, it is not noticeable, unlike for smaller ships. So, roughly, we have a "playground" sphere with 1 million k radius or 2m k in diameter. The planet is a custom .cmp and sized up to 40k in radius.
This is for the first variant, one system - one planet. Either, once I find how to, this could be used as a "small satellite" location with gas giant in the background (starsphere).
Another option, as mentioned before - moving planets into background, leaving all space for stations and small objects.
Simultaneously I am attempting to tune the ship handling. And again, with the tweaks provided by Dev, Cannon, Adoxa and others, I disabled autolevel, camera autolevel (neither ship nor camera won't orient the ecliptic plane anymore, no more useless rotations), put in TZ plug-in, toyed a bit with .ini parameters. Though yet have to be careful and see how NPCs react on those changes.
Next on list is making custom starsphere.

Spoiler

A fictional planet in starsphere.
http://p3d.in/zIGJ9 - my little mecha. Why not?

Spoiler

Planetside view (4096x4096 texture on ~220000k radius planet):

Spoiler

Fighting pesky Defenders:

Spoiler

Planetjump:

Spoiler

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Spoiler

Found out a good way of making nice rocky surfaces for planets. This one is 600k in diameter.
Also 3dmax for cmp export here is a must..

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Fresh conceptual writings: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9qK1X...zVHSGxPM3c
Environment separation and ship type control: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9qK1X...XRNUmtyM2M

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FL MOD(EL)MAKING: TOOLS, RESOURCES, TUTORIALS AND MY SHIPS (OLD)

I am on discord: Roal-Yr#5994, I don't log on forum more than a few times a year.

I am not making ships for FL anymore, I am making my own space game instead:
https://github.com/roalyr/GDTLancer
https://roal-yr.itch.io/gdtlancer
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HQB...cdH45LZgjj

[Toaster]

Yeah, planets are terribly small. Though yours are a bit very big...
Sadly, resizing the planets would also mean rescaling the systems they are in (I think).

What really annoys me is that some planets that (according to their infocards) are similar in size, are not so in-game. (Like Manhattan and Canaria, I think).

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Olivia Sable
On hiatus

[Swallow]

Yeah, planets are terribly small. Though yours are a bit very big...
Sadly, resizing the planets would also mean rescaling the systems they are in (I think).

What really annoys me is that some planets that (according to their infocards) are similar in size, are not so in-game. (Like Manhattan and Canaria, I think).

There are alot of empty space around...

Also - one rumour on Harris says that planet is loosing its atmo, while the planet itself two times bigger and there is not much of solar energy to make inner gas energy that high.

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FL MOD(EL)MAKING: TOOLS, RESOURCES, TUTORIALS AND MY SHIPS (OLD)

I am on discord: Roal-Yr#5994, I don't log on forum more than a few times a year.

I am not making ships for FL anymore, I am making my own space game instead:
https://github.com/roalyr/GDTLancer
https://roal-yr.itch.io/gdtlancer
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HQB...cdH45LZgjj

[Linkus]

http://i1179.photobucket.com/albums/x387...uk/ny1.jpg
http://i1179.photobucket.com/albums/x387...juk/ny.jpg
http://i1179.photobucket.com/albums/x387...uk/ny2.jpg
http://i1179.photobucket.com/albums/x387...uk/ny3.jpg
http://i1179.photobucket.com/albums/x387...uk/ny4.jpg
http://i1179.photobucket.com/albums/x387...uk/ny5.jpg

There are still some inherent problems with this idea, notably it'd require a lot of fiddling with systems to resize them properly.

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Facilitating the rise of robotics since 0 A.D.

[Ursus]

problem with huge planets is it takes too long to get around them--come from colorado jumphole to manhattan will take an hour, because you have to fly a 100k loop

one fix for that is to put mutliple docking rings and mooring posts around the planet so you can dock from anywhere, but then you have other problems (which one to undock from?). another fix is make the systems much much larger and change the position of stuff like jumpholes so that they are properly related to the larger planets, but ...

it's a game designed for lan parties, not an mmorpg

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Swallow]

Well, I noticed lose of atmo when you make some manipulations with UTF editor... But well yes. not in this game...Just not.

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FL MOD(EL)MAKING: TOOLS, RESOURCES, TUTORIALS AND MY SHIPS (OLD)

I am on discord: Roal-Yr#5994, I don't log on forum more than a few times a year.

I am not making ships for FL anymore, I am making my own space game instead:
https://github.com/roalyr/GDTLancer
https://roal-yr.itch.io/gdtlancer
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5HQB...cdH45LZgjj

[Evan_]

Dunno. I never did mind their size as much as the fact they don't orbit anything. But it's cool, how else would people build lanes to them?

:unsure:

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[Alley]

Freelancer wasn't made to receive big planets or real scaling. You'll face technical issues.

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Alley was right.

[Govedo13]

nope. I prefer more player interaction instead of reducing player interaction like in Gallia- eye candies are useless.
Freelancer is not realistic at all so it does not need realistic planets- it needs properly balanced ships and features together with proper balance of official factions and indie players with drastic less systems(less useless space objects&NPCs less lag).One properly made guard station/installation can sell all of the needed stuff for each faction like the blood dragon one. Systems that are not visited enough should be wiped out- witch are they- ask Ingenious with his genial tracker.
I find it sad that I have 10% lag with perfect net in less then 250 Km from server with 170 people on because someone took 10 capital ships in one system. I know it is hard and time consuming task but stuff like Freelancer Mod studio make it a bit easier.

The result a lot of players to interact with and have fun.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Troubadour]

There is a way to make planets and sizes more realistic an beautiful without lowering player interaction or the necessity for reballancing. I read it somewhere on this forum:

Rescale all ships and stations to half size. Make all weapons speed double size to compensate without need for combat reballancing.

Reduce thruster and normall speed to half, keep cruise speed and trade lane speed as is.

Keep asteroid sizes as is.

Keep sensor and chat ranges as is.

Halve all prices.

Result:
Planets and systems appear larger, you see just as many players, travel with cruise and lanes will not take longer. Combat will appear unchanged, just the outside universe larger, and cruise and lane speed faster compared to combat speed. It will be easier for all ships to not bump into asteroids. It will be harder for people to escape any siutation by just shieldrunning to a base even if its 20 k away. Because of the smaller ship size, NPC collisions will also happen less frequently. Characters can store double the money before becoming corrupt. More expensive equipment will be possible.


A better universe all in all.

All you need is a way to rescale these things with a single program, without having to do everything manually.