Freelancer | LEGACY - project canceled
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Some background:
The Freelancer Legacy modification was born out of an idea from Akira and Maverick to put together a mod that was designed with one very important word in mind:- COMMUNITY.
The world of computer games evolves extremely fast. New games are released all the time, featuring more impressive graphics with each new release. Freelancer as a game, is quite unique. Even though it was released way back in 2003, its graphics still don’t look outdated. Its gameplay is arguably the best ever made for a computer game. This all makes for the fact that even though the game is nearing its ten year anniversary, it is still capable of drawing and maintaining a large crowd of faithful followers.This community is without a doubt the most unique thing about the Freelancer game. It consists of all sorts of players; those who bought the game years ago and just can’t stop playing it, and those who just recently happened to stumble upon it and got hooked on it, despite its age.
The relative ease with which the game code can be edited, meant that it quickly received a large group of people with a deep love for the game, who developed an interest in improving the game code in every way that they could in an attempt to keep it up to date to today’s standards - the modders.It is this love for the game that has made the game and its community survive for as long as it has and, even after 8 years, still makes it a popular game with up-to-date features and graphics, and most importantly, a loyal player base.
It is what we believe sets Freelancer apart from all other games.Where we are coming from:
We (Akira & Maverick) felt that these modding efforts should be used to their fullest potential, as they represent the true spirit of the Freelancer Community.
With that in mind, we wanted to design a mod that would be unique in the sense that it would be composed of as much community input as possible. There are numerous 3D Designers, Coders, Modders, Graphical Artists etc out there who unselfishly release their awesome products and tutorials to the public to use for free and share their knowledge with the rest of the community to help Freelancer remain the popular game it has been for years.The Legacy Spirit:
For these reasons, the Freelancer | Legacy modification was brought to life.
We will work off of a vanilla install of Freelancer. Over time, more and other content will be added to the mod. Apart from content designed by ourselves, we are aiming toward adding content designed by and for the community and which has been released as freeware as much as possible, while retaining a stable, challenging and balanced mod. Ships, textures, bases, systems, audio and graphical FX, add-ons, and any other content you can think of.Our main goal:
Our ‘free-spirited’ approach will be followed all the way throughout the mod and the way it’s set up. We are aiming to create a friendly, relaxed but still challenging environment for our players, and the server staff will always strive to remain close to the regular players and maintain a low threshold. Rules, guidelines etc will be as straight forward as possible.
The key word here is FUN and this will be our main drive in developing the mod.This concept also means that we will use as much free software and applications as we possibly can. The forums will be hosted on a free board, we will use a free server operating program, free software is used for editing audio and graphical content as much as possible, the server itself will be running off one of our own boxes, etc. We might expand on more professional equipment in the future, but only if the circumstances demand it, and no other options are reasonably available.
Although the mod is only still in its early development phase, our hope is that our initiative receives a lot of support from the community.
We encourage you to pay a visit to our forum and register. You can do so by clicking on the logo on the top of this post or the link on the bottom.
Although it is still being worked on as well, the public area of the forum has been prepared to receive visitors. It could use a little content. We are looking forward to welcoming you there.
The news articles on the portal are updated every time progression on the mod has been made.Hope to see you out there!
Regards,
Maverick & Akira,
Freelancer | Legacy -
Sounds great.
Good luck with it, don’t give up easily!A side note: If you want people to follow your upgrade project, it might be wise to begin the work with graphics and effects, as those are the easiest thing to show off to users. Just to get a bit more motiviation for yourself.
PS: YOu can of course also upload your ss to this forum’s gallery.
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Good luck and I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with!
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Time for a bit of an update.
Progress on the Freelancer | LEGACY project so far:
*** Server added to global list [Legacy Test Server]
(will remain closed to the public as long as development is in progress)- FL Hook installed and running
- Remote access set up
- Splash screen (draft) added
- Intro music changed
- Main menu screen (draft) changed
- Lots of add-ons added (list will follow)
- Custom HUD interface added
- New NavMap background added
A list with credits will be added in due time.
Some in-game screenies of the new HUD:**
Splash screen draft:
3 Intro screens:
New NavMap background:
General HUD:
As you can see by the list above, we have chosen to sort the graphics, sounds, add-ons etc first, before changing or adding mod content. Next step will be to address HUD icons and in-game fonts, then it’s in-game sounds and gfx. After that we will start changing/adding actual mod content.
In between, things like the main menu screen and the splash screen are discussed, changed, discussed etc until we are satisfied with it.Hope you guys like it so far. I’ll post another update when there’s news to report.
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Nice stuff, lookin’ good!
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You should change the dust type in the asteroid intro screen, it doesn’t look very well in blue. Dark grey should look better.
The planet in the splash screen seems to be a bit stretched.
What do you mean with new HUD icons? Do you want to replace all these buttons for docking, scanning cargo and so on? I would not do this because it’s something the user is used to.
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Quarks wrote:
You should change the dust type in the asteroid intro screen, it doesn’t look very well in blue. Dark grey should look better.The planet in the splash screen seems to be a bit stretched.
What do you mean with new HUD icons? Do you want to replace all these buttons for docking, scanning cargo and so on? I would not do this because it’s something the user is used to.
The intro screens originate from the Frontier Space mod, off which we are working.
The splash screen is a quick 2 minute draft and is used for us to discuss in what direction we want to go with it. In no way is this the definitive version. I wanted to display it though, to give everyone a view of what direction we’re going.
Yes, those are the icons I am referring to. I have to disagree with you on this; if you do it right, it might even be appealing to new players. The new icons are not going to be something totally different, but rather better looking versions of the existing ones.Thanks for your feedback!
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I’d suggest if you’re going to take that route with the icons, do as FWTOW has done.
That is, the static icons are different (In this case I think they’re letter of the Galactic Basic alphabet) but the ‘hover’ icons remain the same.
That way old users won’t be so disorientated, even when their feel fails them it just takes a quick scroll over the icons to find the correct one.
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Note:
We have decided to ditch the Frontier Space mod, and start with a clean vanilla install as a basis for Legacy.
The main reasons are:
- We don’t want to lose time anymore trying to figure out how some of the files have been put together by the original mod author. Weird errors can appear when adding stuff to an already modded game version, and if you don’t exactly know what is modded and how it is done, the amount of time involved in analyzing can be immense and is, in fact, lost time.
- There are obscurities regarding the ‘freeware’ nature (as it is described in the readme of Frontier Space) of the mod. We do not want for these obscurities to influence the way players and the community at large will look at Legacy.
Initially, it will cost more time to add content which Frontier Space already had. But the benefits of this outweigh the disadvantages. We believe that in the end, it will pay off for both us and our players.
Regards,
Maverick & Akira,
Legacy Dev Team. -
I agreed with Maverick on this subject. I by in no means want to infringe on someone elses work and its true that it has taken me and maverick a good week just to decifer some of the mistakes frontiers had. Going with the vanilla foundation is the onlyway we can truely be glitch free in the end. We made the decision to start at ground zero on this now , and happily i can say it wont put us back too far in our release date.
I also want to thank the community for being so helpful …
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Sounds like the sensible thing to do guys. I have a feeling all those headaches would have demoralised you pretty quickly.
Also, it would have been a huge kick in the nuts if you’d done a load of work, released a mod, then run into trouble with the original author or anyone who gave him permission to use material in the mod.
Perhaps the biggest thing though, you might have called it Legacy, but some would have undoubtedly said that it was really Frontier Space and possibly criticised you for changing certain things.
My own personal mod is based massively on Itano Circus by WHY485, because I absolutely love it and he’s cool about sharing stuff. A lot of my content, although heavily modified by me comes from the old Asylum51 mod which I used to be a part of. So I call the mod Asylum51 Circus. Even though it’s for personal use I still like to stay true to where it comes from.
What I’m saying I guess, is Frontier Space Legacy would possibly have made more sense. Clear then what it was, and Legacy would be true.
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Sounds good Maverick / Akira.
Can’t wait to start seeing more progress
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Thanks Roo , i’ll be sure to keep your yaht in its ritefull place
( you may not remember me from our TFL days ) -
I am angry and disappointed to announce that all work on the Legacy mod has sadly been suspended until further notice.
The reasons are as follows.It has been well over a week since I heard from my partner Akira. The server has been offline since, and I was unable to connect remotely during that time. It was only just now that Akira was able to let me know why.
It seems that certain people have made his IP address a target for a flood of attacks. This has affected the server box and Akira his other personal hardware to a level where serious security risks outweigh the fun we had in doing the project. It also made working on it near impossible.Akira also depends on his hardware for work he does for (paying) clients, and it is not worth risking losing all this over a game.
I fully back his view in this, and share his opinion that it’s not worth to risk damaging our hardware over a modification of a game which we do for fun, for free and in our spare time.So until further notice, we see no other option than to suspend the project.
It is worth mentioning that ever since we started the project, I have had the impression that certain people did not want our project to succeed. I have no proof what so ever whether these same people are responsible for the attacks, nor do I have the technological means or knowledge to find out either way, but it is all a little bit too coincidental for my taste.
Either way, I find it deeply sad that some people lower themselves to low level practices like this, and try to sabotage a project that is done by two people in their free time, for the love of a game and to nobody’s expense.
If the situation does not change, this decision might become final. If it does, I will offer the Legacy forum board and any mod content we had prepared to anyone who sees a good purpose for it.
If it comes to that, I’ll let you know. -
This is horrible to hear, I can only imagine how disheartening such a thing would be.
However, is having the server running ultimately important in creating the mod? If you’re creating content based on players on the server, then I certainly understand how devastating it would, but otherwise mod work can quite easily be done in an ‘off-line’ state, using a local server.
Or perhaps you could set a Hamachi network or something? I don’t really know how much of a defence that would be, honestly, networking isn’t my strong suit.
Regardless, I definitely don’t want to see Legacy go under the water, and more minds on a problem is never bad.
I hope you’re able to resolve these issues, however it may become possible. If you need a hand for anything to help you achieve that, give me a shout, I can do monkey work for you if it means keeping you afloat!
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Thank you for the kind words, Bob. But after a long hard think I have decided to pull back from the project. I still haven’t heard from Akira (although he will probably have his reasons), and to be frank there is not much point in continuing to work on a project which is constantly targeted by people who want to see it fail.
Like you said, it is quite disheartening. And frankly, I have better things to do with my limited time. It’s sad but it’s the way it is.
I have had more negative experiences in the Freelancer world and although I am not going to address them here, I have made a decision to draw the line here and move on to other things.I have made a post in which I offer a couple of things of which I hope may be of help to others though. You can read it here. If you are interested in some of it, leave a reply there and I’ll get back to you.
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Sorry that things turned this way.
Also, very generous offer to share the things u did so far.
Maybe someone will appreciate your wish to continue the work and call/offer the place in molding a rest things as a new team.Anyway, however it turns out - wish u good luck in future and dont turn back to this community. The place is full of interesting news from time to time.
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You know what, you’re dead right, there’s a lot of negativity in the freelancer community, always has been, but honestly, every game I’ve ever played has the same issue. That’s people for you! You either let it get to you, or you laugh it off.
It’s why I take the piss most of the time. People don’t pay much attention to me as a result, (quote sizer “nobody listens to Timmy”
) but that doesn’t matter because the truth is I’ve not got anything much to offer in terms of modding. What I know, I know because someone here or Glock36 told me how to do it.The reality of freelancer these days is one where a handful of mods and projects are relevant to the community, everything else is just background noise. Whatever you had in mind for your mod, there was a damn good chance it was only ever going to be a part of the background noise anyway, so look at this as a chance to break free of all the pressure you put yourself under by announcing you were going to be making a mod in the first place. Lots of the modders are borderline nuts, you’ve had a taste of why!
The real question you have to ask yourself, is do you like modding freelancer? I love it, but the reason I do is that it’s just for my own pleasure. No pressure, no deadlines, no worrying about what anyone else thinks about it, nobody to please but myself. If you like modding just do it anyway, either for yourself or as part of someone elses team, don’t let whatever the hell it is that’s happened stop you doing something you enjoy.
