Uberlancer & The Future
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That’s really good to hear Zyos. I am really pleased to know you are serious about this. You gathered together a small but loyal and keen community, and I hope they continue to support you.
I think its safe to say we all support your efforts and if I can ever be of help, please let me know.
Roo.
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as a person which many critics towards Uberlancer from its begining and as a person which is familar with organizing big projects i need to say that of course mistakes were done but the initial idea had lots of potential
Uberlancer showed many ideas and good concepts but lacked in straight forward comments about the future plans. And still an idea is no concept yet.
It was more a “tell us your ideas and we will see what we can do”, while i think it would have been better to think about what the entire project should look like and include ideas just as “measurement” to create the project.
Im project leader of currently 5 FL mods and one new game. I wouldnt have took care of those project if the main modder wouldnt have a presented a working concept. That the different modding teams of those 5 projects currently stopped working on their projects for a while to help me with CF is a different topic (but was neccessary).
That im also involved in countless other mods helping these modding teams atm also is neccessary but the most important thing is those modding teams have concepts which keep them working and which keep the community interested in their work.
Uberlancer might be a good project… a good mod but you need to rethink the ideas behind it in order to make it attractive to the community again and to get the neccessary people which have enough experience to help you
From what I can discern from your experience there needs to be a working concept as opposed to a laid back and tell us what you want approach.
Could you elaborate on this because if I create a concept, then it is just me setting the tone and direction of the project which is counter productive to a community collaboration, it then just becomes a mod like any other to compete with the rest, thats not what the project is about.
So if you can elaborate on your point that would be great, thanks for the input
@Roo:
That’s really good to hear Zyos. I am really pleased to know you are serious about this. You gathered together a small but loyal and keen community, and I hope they continue to support you.
I think its safe to say we all support your efforts and if I can ever be of help, please let me know.
Roo.
I’ll be sure to ask for it, I believe I was away when all that stuff happened, was a bit of a surprise when I got back and found you’d been removed from admin, these conflicts will be absent from now on, theres no point to them and no place for them in the future of this game.
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the problem starts with the statement “Uberlancer is a community mod”
until this point it was not a community mod and i doubt that it ever will be one… its an ordinary mod like all others
to have a community wide modding project would mean to involve ALL communities including every community site that currently is available
that would mean that you first have to start to contact them all and convince them to support that project and based on the current situation (the fact that one part of the FL communities are working together while they refuse to work together with a 2nd part because of incidents that i dont want to explain here) i doubt that this is even possiblenot to mention that you will never be able to represent the entire FL community due to its different taste
at the moment your mod goes into a direction that some people dont like you will loose the support of a part of the FL community (and lets be honest… which starwars player is much interested in a mod which does not contain SW stuff? which SP gamer would be interested in a mod that has no SP?.. there are thousands of reasons why parts of the community would not want to take part in this project)And with concept i dont mean to make a preselection of features of the mod… i mean a structure of the mod building itself beginning with the “what do we want to do”, “what resources do we have”, “who is supporting us” and “how can we orginize everything” leading to more complex questions which are essential for building the mod and for moderating the entire project.
If these questions are not 100% clear then you will jump from one problem to another and someday you see how the community does loose its trust in that project.
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I was thinking last night.
You should start the project as any normal Mod Project. Create a base Mod, improved graphics, A combination of ship packages, all rebalanced etc. You get the picture. Lots of additional extras.
Then release the project with access to all Modders to take your project and do what they like with it. A FULLY opensource Mod available for all to use, edit and change.
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The original way I had planned to code this was with the use of FFs FLDev and have every item or individual component template based to avoid errors, originally in individual and isolated xml scripts (basically would include all the relevant elements, weapons would have all ini entries including effect related entries) not only simplifying things for me and others with troubleshooting but allowing for a plug and play approach with items with minimal editing and or adding required.
System addons would be packaged in a similiar way, where possible to segment the code enough to almost drop scripts in some way to add extra items to a system, anything unique would just be an adjustment of whats there.
Any additions of new things was planned to be an enhancement over the multiplayer, features everyone has come up with such as the player docking for battleships, graphical enhancements, subtle gameplay enhancements like proximity dock to jump gates and planets, long distance docking would also work without dropping you out of cruise with the whole out of range thing along with many many other tweaks.
Some of the extra features I had planned were things to promote roleplay, such as the whole idea of the hypergates I had.
Just as an example, I had planned to have battleships and some high end freighters have a jump drive (just a piece of equipment) that allows access to hypergates, these hypergates would take you to “hyperspace” which is simply a system with slow radiation damage, in this system are exit points (invisible wormholes) positioned relative to the systems in the universe map.
This allows battleships or freighters to travel across a few systems at once wherever there are hypergates (obviously these will be sparse). In conjunction with a fully working player docking feature you could technically have a clan battleship with a bunch of fighters on it, travel through hyperspace and drop them off to fight another clan.
You could hide systems in hyperspace where it would require teamwork to find, say for example a secret system is quite a distance away from the central clump of exits, you could use a battleship, have a friend pilot another, give you his nanobots once yours are low, so when he blows up you can continue and get to that secret system.
Or in the case of roleplay, pirates would naturally hang at these hypergates to catch freighters, police would be there to help protect them, and theres an element of risk for all, especially with battleships involved.
With the above features you could say have non violent roleplay where say for example you have the cruise liner ships, you could theoretically get a newbie taking a trip to some remote system onboard a cruise liner and pay for this service.
There are also opportunities for clans to have private bases where no other clan or player can dock by using the dock limiting feature to restrict access to players with a clan license equipment mounted on their hull.
To access one particular base you would need a security pass you obtained from some mission where it was dropped in a different region of space, allowing you access to say higher level weapons or ships you can only buy via this method.
These are just a few of the ideas I had at the beginning
All of which I think add a twist of gameplay and some strategy along with some extra roleplay that enhances the game, I’m sure others will point out flaws, and thats why I’m here anyways, so point away
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yeah right
but if you only use normal FL as reference you might end with a “community” project which is far behind the possibilities of the “ordinary” mods
or in other words people might start saying that the ordinary mods have more to offer than the so called community project which brings me back to the point that Uberlancer is nothing else than an ordinary mod -
I’m not using normal FL as a reference I’m using todays mods as a reference to update Freelancer to be more than it was originally, true as in other mods, but where did I say it wasn’t going to be a mod? It is a mod unless I have the source code which I do not, the major difference is it will have a lot of features everyone has come up with, along with some twists, packaged in a way that allows people to customise it in a general sense without too much fuss.
Only difference is providing the submissions are sound, others will be able to contribute without the need of a dedicated mod team.
