[Freelancer Mod News]Jason's Freelancer Patch
-
I will have written a news article at www.station-network.de about the patch, I hope you don’t see any problems with this additional PR
-
btw: How about writing a front news article at MOD DB about this one?
-
@RimShot: Dunno, it might take a bit more effort to search for the details. Besides, mods tend to customise it, so it might prove more of a hindrance than a help. However, I guess I could at least combine the two pages so you don’t have to create the third. Hm, perhaps I could detect an id of 0 and generate it automatically, otherwise use the supplied resource. That way a vanilla game could do it automatically and a mod could still customise it. Or maybe try and use format substitution (for example: “%g” would mean number of guns, “%t” number of turrets), so it would work with both, as well as being easily tweaked for your own preferences (possibly like putting turrets first for freighters). I guess that’s what M0tah and foxUnit01 were considering… I s’pose if I do it for the ships, I’d have to do it for all the other ones, too. In for a penny, in for a pound…
@Bas: Not a problem. I guess the warning was enough for you?
(How about that, “jay-flip” is the same in German. :D) I was going to submit it to Mod DB, but wanted to gauge the reaction here, first. Now I’ll wait a bit and see if I can do the above, which would warrant a new release, I think.[d]–----------------------------[/d]
Other than the first reply, there’s been no mention of widescreen. I guess that means it’s working fine? Not having a widescreen monitor, I was doing all my testing in a small window (960x576), so I was hoping it would all scale up okay. Does the desktop resolution (which I assumed to be the preferred widescreen resolution) show up in the list (replaces 800x600)? It’s just I received an email who hasn’t replied, so I’m not sure if he missed it or there’s a bug.
-
Huhu,
regarding the widescreen-solutions: I hope you have changed the settings in the perfoptions.ini? Moreover, be careful with the freelancer.ini as some anti-cheat measures will detect it as cheat, for instance, Hamburg City. -
@Bas: Hamburg City asked for and received a custom jflp.dll to provide a cameras.ini anti-cheat (ignore fovx/fovy, always calculate it). There should not have been a need to change perfoptions.ini, but apparently I do have a bug if Gibbon isn’t seeing his resolution. I don’t change *fonts.ini like the previous widescreen solutions, since the patch uses the height or equivalent 4:3 width. I just hope I got them all…
Oops, there is a bug. I changed my desktop to 1280x800 and it didn’t show up, although the list was successfully patched. Now why didn’t I think to test that before I released it.
@Gibbon: Get the stats working, at least?
[d]–-------------------[/d]
As you may know, FL Hack has an option to put the sector letter first, which seems to be preferred. Should I remove it from FL Hack and fix it into JFLP?
BTW, if there’s no negative responses on the 8-Way Strafe topic, that shall also be incorporated into the next release of JFLP.
-
@RimShot: Looking at the customised ship info used by Evolutions 1.30, it’d pretty much require another plugin for the format, so I might wimp out of that. Should still be able to combine ids_info2 + ids_info3 to make ids_info, though…Ah, but they use different “Stats” lines. Bugger it.
-
I could do the next best thing and write a separate program that scans shiparch.ini and creates the infocards. Of course, the same problems exist, but they’d be a lot easier to manage outside of Freelancer. I find it hard to believe that such a thing hasn’t already been done, but admittedly I haven’t looked.
-
I’ve put up the new version of jflp.dll. It fixes the widescreen problem, adds the 8-way strafe and puts the sector letter first (FL Hack can be used to put the number first). The cameras.ini anti-cheat version is also included. The resources have also been updated, using En Dash instead of Hyphen-Minus for the jump gate arrows (jflp.dll does it for the trade lane).
-
Regarding the DLL portion of your mod - do you know if it can be forcefully loaded and/or unloaded without causing the game to crash and burn?
ProcyonHook, a client-side element for the server I help run is designed first and foremost as an anticheat solution - given the addition of eight way strafe to your DLL, we’re probably going to have future versions unload any unrecognized DLLs upon connecting to our server (restoring them once the player has disconnected).
ProcyonHook itself is designed to be able to be loaded and unloaded as needed without causing any problems, however we’ve noticed during testing that the same cannot be said for many other client-side DLL hooks.
Any information that could lead to peaceful cooperation between the two DLLs would be appreciated.
-
Excellent, means i can remove at least one dll from my growing library lol
On the widescreen front i’m getting this.
1280x960 non widescreen - As it should be
1680x1050 widescreen
The ingame visuals are as they are supposed to be but the HUD and menu sizes are way off.
Do these need to be resized manually or does your dll do the job?
-
@Gibbon: jflp.dll will do it, but only if fovx is set to 0 in cameras.ini (or you use jflpac.dll). BTW, as with the other ws solutions, it is still necessary to load a game to force the new camera values to be read. The initial intro will also remain 4:3, since the cameras are initialised before the resolution is set; fortunately, WinCamera is handled differently, so the menus are okay.
@Sion: as it stands, I don’t think loading it (at any time) will cause problems, but unloading it definitely will, since Freelancer will still point to now non-existent code. I guess I could add the necessary “undo” code on unload, or if you really want cooperation, add entry points to enable/disable stuff. As for 8-way strafe, well, if you already disallow vertical strafe, it won’t work anyway. And I did ask if it should be included, you should have spoken up sooner.
(I had intended to wait longer, but wanted to get the widescreen fix released, so while I was there…) -
I guess I could add the necessary “undo” code on unload
If you could do that, it’d be really awesome, and appreciated - with client hooks being on the upswing, it’d be really nice if they were all capable of such things, as it’d be very nice if a client-side anticheat hook were able to simply unload unrecognized libraries upon connecting to the server it’s linked with, without fear of side effects.
As for 8-way strafe, well, if you already disallow vertical strafe, it won’t work anyway.
Aye, we’re just starting to get a bit wary of the potential for… ‘unfriendly’ client hooks in general to spring up in general - I probably didn’t do a very good job of communicating that however.
At any rate, I apologize for the semi-derailment.
