Vanilla Server - Advice for Retaining Equipment After Death
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Hello all,
I’ve been hosting a public vanilla server for a while now, where exploration and co-op is the primary goal, instead of PVP. As such, for the sake of improving the player experience, I am trying to let players retain unmounted equipment and cargo upon death.
It appears that the “death_penalty” option in the freelancer.ini file does not actually do anything, and applying any value from 0 to 100 has no intended effect.
I understand that the only alternative is to make use of FLHook with the “PlayerControl” plugin.
I have been able to install and configure FLHook to my server, but upon repeated testing and tweaking, regrettably I cannot successfully configure things so that unmounted weapons and cargo are indeed retained upon dying.
Does anyone perhaps have experience with this kind of setup? I was not able to find a previous forum post here or on Lancers Reactor on this topic with a confirmed solution.
For context, the primary reason for wanting to implement this change, is because of the famously buggy mine fields. Dangerous enemy ships are simple enough to avoid, and dying to them feels more fair. In contrast, dying to an invisible mine, which all do significantly more damage than the visible ones, feels like being cheated out of the intended experience.
Even the strongest VHF shield in the game can’t take more than a handful of hits from invisible mines, so the situation is even more hopeless for players with middle or lower-end shields.To sum up, my intention is to run the server as close to vanilla as possible, with only this relatively minor change, so that a player keeps their equipment and cargo after dying.
If anyone has any advice, or a potential solution in this context, I would greatly appreciate the help
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An update on the above, upon further digging I discovered that the PlayerControl plugin wasn’t being loaded, it appears to be due to the way PlayerControl’s files should be installed, which don’t work with FLHook 2.0.0. Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
1 . FLHook 2.0.0 works with my server, but the PlayerControl plugin requires a “dlls” folder in the “flhook_plugins” folder, which isn’t there by default. Creating it manually does not rectify the problem.
2 . FLHook 1.6.0 and 1.6.0-p3 both do not work with my vanilla 1.1 server, where FLHook.dll fails to load upon the server starting up. These versions of FLHook do however have the “dlls” folder that PlayerControl requires.
Can anyone advise how PlayerControl should be installed to a 1.1 vanilla server? Specifically, which versions of both FLHook and plugin should be used?
I have done my best to try and find different versions of both, mixing and matching to try and get both to work together as intended, with no success so far.
My thanks for your patience in advance. I’m very new to Freelancer modding, and have little in the way of programming experience.
