Freelancer Project
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Hello guys, I haven’t been active for about 4 years back since Uberlancer failed and with no new exciting space sims/combat games of interest I faded away from the scene.
Star Citizen has re-vitalised my interest in the genre as I’m sure a lot of you are now.
I’m not here asking for help with my new mod project, just to tell you a little about it and gauge your own ideas.
In essence I am going to produce a more PVP feature orientated mod with some elements of trade and exploration. I hope to model some of the balance and concepts on Star Citizen not to capitalise on it at all but just to mimick it as a staging ground for players to prepare and improve their flying skills for when it is released.
It will be built from a stripped bare version of Freelancer and built back up from scratch using where applicable some aspects of the various mods out there (I won’t be using anything without permission, I have already spoken with Fox and have the option of using Flak 88’s amazing AI) I would really like to upgrade the client to DX9 first, but thats contingent on Why and FriendlyFire and the others involved.
What I’m looking for is your opinions on what things you look for in PVP in space combat games in general and what kind of balance you expect to help form this mod, I have my own ideas but I’m interested in what you guys think and what would pull you into a PVP mod that would lead us into the age of Star Citizen.
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freelancer’s server can barely handle heavy pvp battles.
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Zyos wrote:
What do you define as heavy?at least 25 vs 25 in a single system
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Zyos wrote:
Never seen battles of that size on any Freelancer server, but it’d be interesting to do stress testing to find outsuch battles occured during several events provided by Discovery community on a seperate server.
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Welcome back mate
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On Hamburg City we had battles of up to ~60 or 70 players without it getting too laggy and that was on older CPUs.
So nowadays, I guess it’d be possible to have 50 vs 50 battles with relatively low lag on the latest CPUs (i7 3.5 GHz). The other thing that can be limiting with such playernumbers in one system is the required bandwidth.
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w0dk4 wrote:
On Hamburg City we had battles of up to ~60 or 70 players without it getting too laggy and that was on older CPUs.So nowadays, I guess it’d be possible to have 50 vs 50 battles with relatively low lag on the latest CPUs (i7 3.5 GHz). The other thing that can be limiting with such playernumbers in one system is the required bandwidth.
I guess it would only matter about the fastest GHz since the Freelancer engine does not take advantage of CPUs with more than one core.
w0dk4, how close are the DX9 upgrades to completion? I know you’ve had a big hand in its development and I’ve been interested in it since I heard about it. Would it be difficult to implement in a more vanilla setting? Require a lot of mods to ships and textures etc?
SolCommand wrote:
Welcome back mateHey dude! Still working on those models? I hope you are going to try and build some for SC, otherwise I’ll have to hunt you down and ransom some models out of you
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Why not just Void?
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I just started making them again after quite a big break. I’m doing a small carrier right now but it’s not yet finished.
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Back to the subject anyways…
I’m working on various aspects of the engine and interface and learning how to improve visuals and changing things from vanilla right now.
But my actual plans are to start small and expand with an auto-updater.
The initial demo would have the re-designed New York system and the Fight Zone, a system setup for PVP. This will act as a form of alpha test to allow feedback for the balancing and to gauge interest.
Ships will be released over time but everyone will have an equal playing field and a little choice over the configuration and style of their ships.
You will be able to opt for more firepower with less hull and shield capability. Or choose the more heavily armored and shielded ship with less superior firepower available.
Missiles and Torps will only be one per ship for balancing reasons (no more missile boats). Guns will have regular, overloaded, and focussed versions.
Regular will be your standard gun, medium refire, medium power usage, decent projectile speed.
Overloaded will be higher refire, increased power usage, slower projectile speed.
Focussed will be slow refire, high power usage, faster projectile speed.
This is to allow for folk who want to fine tune their weapons more to their style. I like sniping for example, but others like a brawling style (fast refire).
Obviously damage per second rating will be calculated and balanced.
Players will have access to varied cruise engines. Some ships will only be able to mount certain types of cruise engine. The faster engines will require ships with very little firepower capability and little armor in order to be fitted and will take a lot longer to charge up (meaning that these would not really be very suitable for fighter craft and they could not be used to catch up with trading ships)
Certain ships will have cloaking available to them but these ships will not be able to fit the faster cruise drives and will also not be heavily armed or armored - the high end trading ships and the lesser armed heavy fighters have this capability.
The heavier your ship the less time you can stealth for, with trading ships for example, the more you have in your hold the less time you can cloak for and the longer the recharge.
If you have no cargo then you can stealth for longer and it recharges faster.
Please bare in mind that not all features will be available immediately and are subject to change depending on development / balancing and time concerns.
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Welcome back, Zyos.