This guide should be useful for everyone who has (or had) problems with installing or reinstalling Discovery mod. It's quite long, but I tried to take into account all possible situations and explain things so that you know what and why you should be doing.
I. Uninstalling Freelancer
To perform a fresh install, you will need to uninstall the game if you've installed it before. Uninstalling a modded game is a bit tricky.
1. Use Freelancer uninstaller. If you are prompted to choose if some files should or should not be removed, choose to remove them all.
2. Uninstall Freelancer Mod Manager. Choose to remove all files from FLMM mod folder.
3. Check folders where Freelancer and FLMM were installed. If there are any files or folders inside, delete them all. The most important is to remove all mods from FLMM folder.
4. Registry. Clearing registry when uninstalling Freelancer is entirely optional, and you shouldn't ever need to do this (it's not related to modding). However if you need a complete and clear install of Freelancer for some reason, just like when you reinstall Windows, remove all Freelancer and FLMM entries.
Note that if you don't back up your multiplayer key while clearing registry, you'll lose all your multiplayer chars with no chance to recover them. Instruction on how to back up keys is here:
Installing Freelancer is very easy (but takes longer than for most other games of its size).
The only thing to note here is that if you install Freelancer several times, your initial registry entries created during the first installation still remain and will be used for all instances of the game.
III. Installing Discovery mod
1. Install Freelancer Mod Manager. The mods that you install will be located in FLMM folder, so choose a place where there's enough disk space. For example, Discovery mod takes up 50 Mb of disk space (unzipped). Larger mods use alot more.
Make sure that you have correct path to Freelancer in FLMM options.
2. Download Discovery.zip.flmod file and double-click it to open. It should unzip to FLMM folder automatically. If the system cannot identify .flmod files, launch FLMM once and close it, then it will work.
3. Activation.
After unzipping is complete (it's usually pretty fast), FLMM window will open and you'll see a message that you may now activate Discovery mod.
Make sure you have no other mods activated. All mods that are compatible with Discovery, for example Spinning Planets or OpenSP, should be activated after Discovery if you need them. I don't advise to activate any other mods after Discovery - it will almost surely cause problems.
When you select a mod and click "Activate mod" in FLMM, two things (basically) happen. First of all, FLMM copies all files from the folder of the mod you are activating into Freelancer folder. Then FLMM FLMM looks for XML entries in mod files, reads them and implements changes directly into Freelancer ini and dll files. Some mods are purely XML and don't contain any Freelancer files at all. Some mods don't contain any XML, just files to be copied.
Discovery contains both, that's why you need FLMM to activate it. The XML part of Discovery since 4.78 is quite significant, so you won't be able to update the mod without FLMM anymore.
If the activation is complete with no errors, you are almost done.
4. Launch Freelancer. The version number should now be 4.78, and you should be able to connect to any Discovery 4.78 server.
IV. Updating Discovery
1. Updating Discovery mod via FLMM is buggy. Let me explain why.
All versions of Discovery have the same file name. I had reasons to do it (in the future versions, name will be different). FLMM creates a mod folder depending on mod filename. So if you have a previous version of Discovery mod installed, the new version files will overwrite the old files in FLMM mods folder. This always causes problems. So...
You must uninstall and delete Discovery from FLMM before installing a new version. I advise to browse into FLMM mod folder and make sure that Discovery folder is not there.
If you've done that, you may try to install the new version via FLMM. Proceed as described above in Installation section.
2. Updating Discovery mod without FLMM.
Since Discovery 4.78 updating Discovery without FLMM is impossible.
