3D System Editor (part of Freelancer Mod Studio)
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Dunno if giving the community free access to everything is keeping it alive. Giving out a good information on how to mod yes, but give away things with that ppl can easy “cheat” ? Sorry if this sounds harsh to ya, but finding out a way through a mine filed maze ingame is completely different than just looking on it in 3D view. It´s a bit like playing a game with “trainer” or “walkthrough”. Giving out such informations instantly spoils the game a lot and afaik, if you know everything about a game it makes it even quicker dying und more uninteresting for players. So in my case of view it´s the same as if you give out all informations about the “anti-cheat-tools” or server side things.
my 2 cents would be to restict it to admins
talking about the other tools that expose systems, they can be made useless.
cheers
CURSOR -
That viewer tool… It’s not cheating - doesn’t modify a single file.
Besides, mods like Discovery don’t have trouble with such tools. Why should anyone else have trouble? If anything, that would be where use of said tools would be worse.And yeah, keep this as free access to the community. Everyone has a choice about how they use it.
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There is already enough information in the public domain for sufficient cheating to be done, its not hard to look for a way to cheat.
Not everything is completely public domain, why do you think we have the Server Admins Anomaly? It’s for Admins to get together and talk about these issues and such.And for players just finding stuff out, locations etc. Anyone can decompress an .ini and read its contents to find out the location of stuff. the tools just make that process easier and more visual. Can’t stop people from taking shortcuts.
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No, cursor. If we did that, we’d have to lock down FLE, Companion, the system placer… I’m alright with hiding things that are very sensitive (IE some hypothetical program that would allow to edit memory in real time quickly and easily with no knowledge required), but this must be published and shared as it’s an important advance that will help people make better mods.
There’s no way in hell this goes private and I’ll stand firmly about this.
If you want to hide things in your mod, find ways to hide it better. Trust me, there are multiple ways to hide stuff so that even moderate cheaters can’t find stuff.
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FriendlyFire wrote:
No, cursor. If we did that, we’d have to lock down FLE, Companion, the system placer… I’m alright with hiding things that are very sensitive (IE some hypothetical program that would allow to edit memory in real time quickly and easily with no knowledge required), but this must be published and shared as it’s an important advance that will help people make better mods.There’s no way in hell this goes private and I’ll stand firmly about this.
If you want to hide things in your mod, find ways to hide it better. Trust me, there are multiple ways to hide stuff so that even moderate cheaters can’t find stuff.
Totally agree with FriendlyFire.
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You know, especially after reading the following I have again become very sensitive about tries to make FL tools “private”:
One thing I am considering is canceling all the temporary permissions I have given out to various sites to allow them to host our files. There have been various abuses over the years but one of them I can’t allow is people repackaging our projects without permission as at least one person has done that I know of on Starport. It is bad enough that people feel like they can host files without crediting the authors, again as Starport has done. I also don’t like it when other people start claiming ownership of our stuff. One example, though I don’t think P1p3r intended it, is the claim that P1p3r is the author of one of the Milkshape 3D plugins we created. He fixed a few things and extended it with our permission, but we still retain ownership.
I have no desire to harm the community. I will say that straight out. But some things need to change or I will pull the plug.
The other thing I am considering–instead of or along with the first issue–is releasing our project source code with a GPL or similar license that legally binds anyone who uses it to let us know what they are doing with it.
But we will see because many have spited us by stealing our stuff and we are not necessarily feeling very benevolent because of it. So just maybe we could revoke all the distribution permissions we have given out and shut down our site so nobody will have access to the things we have kindly offered this community through our own sacrifice and hard work.
Source:
http://forums.seriouszone.com/showthread.php?59807-Site-Working-Again-But-Changes-Coming&p=939961 -
We’ve said time and time again that if someone has a problem with any file we host, they can contact us about it and we’ll do what is required.
As we’ve received nothing whatsoever, I find these accusations to be insulting.
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Some more progress on the 3d system editor:
- implemented display of universe in 3D Editor including display of travel connections using jumpgate (yellow), jumphole (red) and both (blue)
- implemented emissive materials because of perfomance reasons
- display vignette and exclusion zones in a different color
- lots of fixes
just ironing out some bugs before release
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Sorry for losing the plot - is the first release a viewer only, or an editor (creator) too?
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That looks great.
Even without editor the 3D viewer helps a lot in defining locations of things, and with the editor that generates clean code… wow. That could be an awesome improvement over Freelancer Explorer.
So, keep up with the good work, I guess there are quite a number of modders around waiting to test how it works!
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I just want to point out seeing as it looks like you have a system placer section, i’m pretty sure you can use a decimal for the positioning of systems so you don’t have to use straight 7, 8. Rather you can use more varied 7.5, 8. As in this picture ive just made:
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Igiss wrote:
That looks great.Even without editor the 3D viewer helps a lot in defining locations of things, and with the editor that generates clean code… wow. That could be an awesome improvement over Freelancer Explorer.
So, keep up with the good work, I guess there are quite a number of modders around waiting to test how it works!
Thank you =]
oZed wrote:
I just want to point out seeing as it looks like you have a system placer section, i’m pretty sure you can use a decimal for the positioning of systems so you don’t have to use straight 7, 8. Rather you can use more varied 7.5, 8. As in this picture ive just made:
Thank you for that hint. Well it was already working but I was not sure if FL supports it
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Some more things you could use - I’ve tried creating alternate backgrounds for Freelancer Explorer. Important info they contain are x/y coordinate directions, letter/number sectors, and border (dark red) where the ship is displayed as “out” of the system…
…and system grid with the border of navmap cutoff for the universe map. Even if you implement flexible system placement (which does work), you cannot place systems out of that border.
I think that info could be useful for the editor (as a display option).
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stfx, this is awesome. Being able to look at zones in 3D and make sure everything hooks up right is incredible, especially since you can’t physically see zones in Freelancer (unless they’re a nebula I guess, but that isn’t exact) and you always just had to assume your math was correct.
Very much looking forward to full release. This may be the tool that gets me to not hate system modding with a passion.
