Woot woot. This looks great. Now I just need to get back into doing modding and contribute to the KnowledgeBase…

Hi all,

Just been looking at the Forum stats over the past week and noticed one of our most popular searches is “no cd”.

So just thought I’d copy the guide we have on Discord over so people know how to get Vanilla Freelancer up and running in 2023.

This guide is only intended for Vanilla players, that means no other mods.

Download and Install Freelancer

The first step is to download and install the base game. I won’t post a link to the download here, but it’s pretty easy to find.

We recommend that you don’t install Freelancer to Program Files as this has caused issues for users in the past. If you have another drive, installing to D:\Microsoft Games\Freelancer or something would be ideal.

Patching

You have two options here, only select one of these.

Freelancer HD Edition
This contains all the fixes (JFLP, No CD EXE, and more) as well as additional bug fixes and graphical improvements.

Download the latest FreelancerHDSetup.exe from https://www.moddb.com/mods/freelancer-hd-edition/downloads Open the setup file and read the instructions on-screen carefully

Vanilla Patch (Combined 1.1, JFLP, No-CD)
This contains just the fixes required to get you up and running with no graphical improvements.

Download the self extracting zip Extract to your Freelancer installation e.g. D:\Microsoft Games\Freelancer

You will need to right click and “Run as Admin” for the patch if installing to Program Files.

Installing other mods

If you are intending to install other mods, we recommend not installing the patches above and instead following the mod’s installation instructions. HD Edition and the combined patch are intended for Vanilla players and are not compatible with other mods unless otherwise stated by the mod’s developers.

Hi Folks,

We’ve made a huge effort over the last year or so to expand and build up the old TSP modding wiki. Most of the coordination has been taking place on Discord, but I want to open things up a bit to people who don’t use the platform!

The wiki is hosted on github and builds to this site with each edit made to the repository. You can make edits by submitting a pull request, or if you’re planning to contribute regularly, asking to be added to the TSP wiki contributors group so you can commit directly to main.

The whole thing is written in .md and .mdx and follows standard format for the syntax. The one exception is the Crash Offsets page, which builds from a .json file so it can be easily parsed by debugging scripts.

We’re super keen to make sure that there’ s an authoritative, correct source on what the various bits and pieces of Freelancer do. Please make sure that any submissions you make are confirmed, as we want to try and eliminate any incorrect assumptions about what certain values do (Looking at you repop_time and sort).

If you’d like to contribute, please feel free to make a PR on Github, or post here (or on Discord!) to request direct access. If you’ve like to volunteer information to submit without faffing around on Github, or would like a particular section filled out, do feel free to just post here as well.

I wanted to give you guys a quick update after my last post. I still am working on the renderer and have fixed many bugs (mostly visible rendering issues) since the public beta release. Also there has been a lot of optimization work and I am currently working on some more optimizations for the shadow calculation/rendering. After that the list of remaining bugs is very small (and are minor ones). It should be out of beta once the last ones are fixed. Then I hopefully can start working on releasing the tools so that everyone can use it.

One recent change is the improvement of the light scattering. Now it knows where the suns are and only is enabled for them (before that it only used the first light source (not sun!) in the system). Also you now can have up to 8 suns with light scattering in one scene (the maximum limit actually is currently arbitrary set from me). You can reduce the maximum number in the settings window of the renderer (e.g. if you have a slower graphics card).
If no sun is visible light scattering is disabled now (before it was always on when in an asteroid field or nebula).

Example screenshot of 3 suns with light scattering:

One bug that has given me trouble for a very long time is some weird memory behaviour. After some time the renderer just could not reserve any more memory resulting in missing textures and crash of Freelancer shortly after. On some PCs this even was after 15 minutes when switching between many systems (I finally was able to reproduce it after switching nonstop systems for about 45 minutes on my PC). For the technically inclined: Address Sanitizer using VS2022 (https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/cpp/sanitizers/asan?view=msvc-170 and Visual Leak Detector using VS2017) do not find anything. Also lets just say I usually know how to avoid and also find memory leaks.

My current (also not so good solution) is to enable the Large Adress Aware flag for the Freelancer.exe. After I have had the registry setting “MEM_TOP_DOWN” on for some weeks I can at least confirm that Freelancer has no problem with the flag (while the registry setting funnily broke some windows 7 control panel applications, meaning they are not large address aware). For now that solved it for our players (unless you play for lots of hours).

I suspect memory fragmentaion going on here, but that remains to be seen. I will come back to this later and it also might have disappeared by then due to my optimization work and code cleanup process.

I was planning for some time now to post some sort of FAQ thread where I explain what the renderer can do and what you need to do to convert your mod, but (as always) I did not have the time to do that, yet.