Anyone still around?
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Bolte wrote:
I keep coming back to this game, if I’m honest I made a lot of friends there that I wish I had kept in touch with. But started to get burned out of playing, and burned out on modding.To me the community is what keeps the game going, but I feel that if only more people could access a version of FL where they don’t have to tinker and apply patches to get started, that we’d actually have some player growth.
Golden years over? Pah. We are in charge of that I think…
FL modding is very limited and very annoying to do.
That’s why the Discovery mod is in the process of being ported to Unreal Engine 4 by a secondary development team made of a few current developers in order not to affect the ongoing FL mod development cycle.
Same base game and behavior (as closely as possible), improved models and visuals while still compatible (hopefully) with toasters and later on new features once all the existing stuff is ported over.
We are very quiet about this project in general though, so don’t expect to hear much about it until we feel confident we have a playable beta.
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FL modding is very limited and very annoying to do.
I highly disagree with that.
I have modded many games in the past +20 years and FL was by far more open to modding than most of the others.
Almost everything can be modded with ease. There are tools for everything, tutorials on pretty much every major FL site and lots of mods showing what is possible with this game.Im sorry but for me it sounds strange to question the modding capabilities of a game that in the past 11 years always managed to reach a top100 position on the annual mod awards (often with multiple mods).
For a game that doesnt even belong to a mainstream genre this is remarkable (and probably only beaten by halflife mods).I also have my doubts that UE4 would improve the modding abilities in any way. The engine can implement mods via plugins which clearly wouldnt be as easy as modding currently is.
I got to work with the Unreal Engine a few years back, before it went free for non-profit use and I clearly see the benefits of the engine but I also see its limitations and how much work is needed to get FL ported.
If possible, cool…. but I am sceptical.What I clearly dont see is a general support of FL mods under UE4.
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What I meant by limitation is that you are limited by what the engine allows you to do. In Freelancer, that’s really not much.
We’ve gone really far (and probably still can) with FLHook plugins, passionate starport devs tearing the game apart, various hacks and so on, but down the road we are always constrained by the engine in one way or another.
As a member of the SvenCoop team for several years now, I can assure you getting engine access changed our lives. This is what I want for Discovery. I want to be able to say something else than “No we can’t do that” whenever a community member asks about a feature that should be simple to implement, and instead be able to say “It’s possible but we’ll have to consider if it’s worth it”.
It will take a while to get somewhere, but we will.
Also, bear in mind we are working on it as a game of its own. We are not creating this as a modding platform. While mods may be possible, this is not a priority in our roadmap and it might never be if it ends up being a huge undertaking. There would be a higher chance of seeing the framework (without assets) opensourced.
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My undertaking is a little more focused on getting a working FL into the hands of players with no messing around or tinkering with files.
Key to that is a launcher, which I am working on as we speak.
This will serve to bring players together for forums, chat via discord and Freelancer related blogging etc.
I also intend to build portable freelancer into it, so you could have multiple game instances with different mods applied, different settings, different saved games all active at the same time.
Working on portable freelancer now, while I ponder over logic pertaining to autoupdating.
Freelancer is NOT dead to me. If anything I want to give it some more life!
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Well, I can understand your point about UE4 being a way to move away from the limitations of the FL engine.
But it is also a way moving away from FL in general and from 99% of all modding work that ever has been done for FL. Yep, more than 99% of the modding work done in the past 14 years will be incompatible.I am working on a similar project on a different game engine and that is one of the first issues I had to realize. Even if I use FL assets and if I get the gameplay halfway right…. it still wont be FL because FL is more than that.
FL is storyline with cutscenes, voice overs, missions,etc.
FL is multiplayer on various servers, supporting various mods.
FL is easy access modding support.
FL is so much more than anything any other game engine could provide (unless you have a full staff of working willing to work on it for multiple years).No matter what game engine you (we) use, you (we) will never get all the stuff done that we already have today.
It simply isnt more modding friendly if nearly all the modding stuff, that defines FL and its community, isnt working with it.However, its good that people care about their players and I wish you all the best with that project.
I just have one little advice. Read the engines licence agreement and the terms of use.@Bolte
looking forward to see it in action -
+1 for Discovery’s repeated bungled suicides being a major detriment to the global player base. If the admins and devs there didn’t have such obsessed hard-ons for finding ways to use FLHook to rules lawyer their RP environment to death and had actually listened to long-time players, maybe things would have gone differently.
I dunno. It was interesting being on that team but more in a “watching a mid-air collision recorded in 240 fps slow motion” kind of way.
Freelancer’s pretty much dead at this point, and nothing’s going to fix that short of someone doing a full recreation in an engine that doesn’t rely on a fixed function DX8 pipeline and DirectPlay for networking.
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I am wondering for about modding FL if it might be wise to focus on the PVE - Simply because RP and PVP is hard to develop when you don’t find many players. As such, it snowballs downfalll if your focus your mod on that aspect.
I once had some concepts of introducing more RPG elements for freelancer, such as obtaining skills and gaining level ups and experience. Maybe by NPC and PVP kills, missions done, wrecks found, bases/holes found etc.
I believe such a thing could be implented via FLHook.
Skills could be, for example, dmg increase/decrease, being requirements for equipments, ways to fly faster, to purchase certain goods (to make some user for Traders in this RPG system), increase cargo, explosive aura damage on own death, higher paying jobs, increased damage for certain weapon types, increased damage for missions done from a certain fraction, credits on kill on certain fractions, hyperjump to more than one system away, etc. etc.
Also, some dynamic missions might be coded, which are given by the server universe-wide at random, for instance, visiting a certain base, killing a specific number of a specific NPC ships or exploring a certain wreckage. Maybe this is just me, but I mostly saw only dynamic trading systems, but not dynamic missions.
Bonus: Dynamic challenges in doing something specific with specific weapons or ship.
Dynamic missions and archievements could also earn bonus XP if paired with the level system.In theory, this hopefully would motivate players enough to play basically solo on the server, yet rewards them still for doing PVP and showing their skills (Couldn’t resist here) and hopefully extends to a snowball effect of players staying longer on the server which means more players will be online to interact with each other.
Before anyone gets me wrong; I am not working on such a thing, but made some thoughts about it.
I did got quite some inspiration regarding this from an UT2004 RPG server mod.
If anyone is considering coding this, I could assist with RPG concepts I guess.
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Bas wrote:
I am wondering for about modding FL if it might be wise to focus on the PVE - Simply because RP and PVP is hard to develop when you don’t find many players. As such, it snowballs downfalll if your focus your mod on that aspect.I once had some concepts of introducing more RPG elements for freelancer, such as obtaining skills and gaining level ups and experience. Maybe by NPC and PVP kills, missions done, wrecks found, bases/holes found etc.
I believe such a thing could be implented via FLHook.
This…my thoughts exactly, and is the direction I’ve been focusing on for our next version, rebalancing PvE for a real challange (historically our mod has been more PvP… PvE was lacking), in tests now hostile players are just another blip in the scanner, no more a threat then the npcs.
A while back I started implementing a basic rpg system…skills, traits and experience system with critical hits with hook…its pretty rudimentary so far, skills are broken down into piloting (one for each ship class), and weapons (gunnery and guided), % chance of xp granted on hits, various traits effect the odds or add critical hit effects: lucky break (small chance of rerolling any skill check), finesse (effects from successful rolls are higher), shield by pass critical hits, etc etc
It was more of a ‘wonder if i can make this work’ question then a actual useful system…it was side-tracking me from other tasks so I didn’t refine the concept, but its defiantly doable. -
Speaking about RPG, it could be nice to do some side quests in planète and stations. Creating new rooms with for exemple helping a guy that needs money and when you give it to him, he shows you a trick or a special information which can’t be found anywhere else or a special equipment to improve your ship or also a small reputation gain without paying a cost-full bribe, it can add also XPs. It could be solo but it would expend the univers. You could engage mercenaries or wingmens, and if you get a capital ship, you can engage a fleet creation and due to that make a space battle system via a specific mission type called “Military operation”.
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Meh… I am going to hijack this thread now and ask (I apologize in advance)…
What has happened?
Its mid December… today I got a mail from Moddb telling me that the 2nd phase of the annual mod awards just has started. Today is also the day where I noticed once more that the rest of the FL community completely wasted this opportunity to promote their mods and FL as a game.Ok, I have to admit that I have noticed exactly the same last year and probably also the year before.
The thing is… every year I see discussions here about “Anyone still around”… or “The future of FL” or anything else about how to support FL and save the game, etc.
It is great that there are still people which care about FL.
It is not so great that the outside world (the people that dont visit TSP) never notice that people still care about this game.I tell you how I see it.
Once a year, in December, Moddb allows us to show that we still care about Freelancer. It allows us to show that our mods are not outdated junk that can not compete with modern stuff (really many FL mods are great). It allows us to remind old players how much fun FL was/is and show new players what they have missed so far.
I am totally aware that we will not get hundreds of new players to play FL now but I know for sure (due to many years of experience) that it makes a difference. Every year during and after the Mod awards I see new players trying out FL and my mod. Every year I see that old players return.Isnt that what we want most?
Players.
10-20 additional players on the servers would make a huge difference already.
Moddb had almost 3.3 mio visitors in the past 10 days. More than 53k votes have been submitted.
Dont you think that FL could benefit from that?I am not writing this here to promote my mod or to sound like a smartass. Id like you to think about if its worth to promote FL and FL mods even if its just for a slight chance to bring players into the game again.
The results might not be a game changer but I can guarantee that they are better than doing nothing.In the end it is your decision.
I just felt that I had to share my views about it and maybe even make suggestions.
The Mod Awards are not over yet eventhough phase one is done. But lets face it, its not about winning an award here. Its about getting attention.
Right now Freelancer belongs to the games which managed it into the Top 100 (it doesnt matter with which mod). There are 10 days left in which you can use this attention to promote ANY Freelancer mod out there (it doesnt have to be my mod). Players interested in the Mod Awards will browse the games which are now listed there, which means that the chances that players visit FL mod profiles is higher than during the rest of the year.
Update your mod profiles, post picture, write articles… use the attention to make people interested in FL.And maybe next year our communities might remember to post news and ask our visitors to support FL and our mods.(?)
