[Freelancer Mod News]New demo of Freelancer: The Nomad Legacy released!

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Wow. Drake with big gun 8-[…]

robocop

I tried it out this morning. Really nice work. I especially like the effort that went into the base designs. One thing that always bugged me about FL is that so many of the bases looked like they’d been ordered out of a catalogue.

Obviously the Russian is an issue for we english speaking players. I had some difficulty figuring out what equipment was what, especially the equipment that is not standard vanilla equipment (scanners, armor plating, etc.)

I also like the barrel-roll feature. When I tried strafing (left/right slide) I found myself barrel-rolling in space which I thought was really cool. Does this replace strafe left/right or is it an additional maneuver? Any hints on how that’s done? I’d like to add it to my mod.

The game told me to meed Alaric at the bar in Bismarck (I think but there was nobody there). I found him outside waiting for me when I undocked.

I’m stuck in a mission right now that’s too much for my little ship and weapons so I have to figure my way out of that situation and I’m looking forward to continuing.

Jeider

Hello, robocop. Thanks for your playing!

Obviously the Russian is an issue for we english speaking players. I had some difficulty figuring out what equipment was what, especially the equipment that is not standard vanilla equipment (scanners, armor plating, etc.)

Yes, that’s huge problem. I want to fix it together with rebalance and retranslation of all equipment.

I also like the barrel-roll feature. When I tried strafing (left/right slide) I found myself barrel-rolling in space which I thought was really cool. Does this replace strafe left/right or is it an additional maneuver? Any hints on how that’s done? I’d like to add it to my mod.

Barrel-roll feature it’s additional maneuvers from original freelancer. Activated by disabling of “disable level camera toggling”. That’s because barrel roll featured is blocked by “arcade-style automatic rol” (look at “max_bank_angle” param in shiparch). Deactivate “max_bank_angle” and you can you barrel-roll without any problems.

Buy my barrel roll is improved. I never removed strafe and that’s still active. For example: on pressing A in my mod you’ll activate “left strage” and “barrel-roll on left side”.

The game told me to meed Alaric at the bar in Bismarck (I think but there was nobody there).

This is after mission 1?

I’m stuck in a mission right now that’s too much for my little ship and weapons so I have to figure my way out of that situation and I’m looking forward to continuing.

What is this mission?

robocop

Jeider wrote:
Hello, robocop. Thanks for your playing!

Barrel-roll feature it’s additional maneuvers from original freelancer. Activated by disabling of “disable level camera toggling”. That’s because barrel roll featured is blocked by “arcade-style automatic rol” (look at “max_bank_angle” param in shiparch). Deactivate “max_bank_angle” and you can you barrel-roll without any problems.

Buy my barrel roll is improved. I never removed strafe and that’s still active. For example: on pressing A in my mod you’ll activate “left strage” and “barrel-roll on left side”.

Is this an exe hack? I can see where you changed the max_bank_angle values in the shiparch but don’t see how you ‘deactivated’ max_bank_angle.

Any hints on where to look?

I remarked out the
;[key]
;id = USER_TOGGLE_LEVEL_CAMERA

entry in keylist.ini and changed the max_bank_angle for my ship from 30 to 5 following the example in your mod. Still no roll.

edit: Clearly it’s more than just the keylist.ini and keymap.ini files as I copied your files over to my mod and still no joy.

Running the latest jflp.dll file as well.
Thanks,
R

Bas

Hi Jeider!

While I was just revisiting some old FL pages I had saved as bookmarks, I wanted to use this opportunity when I just saw this news to tell you this looks awesome! Keep going if you want to! YOU CAN DO THIS ️

I am going to try this one out!

Regarding VA, I am active on a MLP community. Am i given free leeway for asking there?
How many different voices do you need? (I think background characters could re-use the same VA)

adoxa

JFLP already supports roll:

DATA\INTERFACE\keylist.ini
DATA\INTERFACE\keymap.ini

added some more options to Controls:
Ship Controls:
…

Rotate Clockwise (USER_Z_ROTATE) - turns the ship clockwise;

Rotate Anticlockwise (USER_Z_UNROTATE) - turns the ship anticlockwise;

Rotation Lock (USER_TOGGLE_LEVEL_CAMERA) - toggles rotation in third view.
(Rotation will really only work with both Auto Level & Rotation Lock off.)
…

Without a patch you need to explicitly turn off Auto Level and Rotation Lock in order to roll.

robocop

Thanks Adoxa, that works (all hail Adoxa!)

Jeider, how did you get both the strafe and rotate functions to work off one key? If I put it in keymap (strafe left and rotate clockwise to A, strafe right and rotate counter-clockwise to B). It only remembers the strafe commands.

When I try to map it in game it will only allow one function or the other.

Bas

Uhm, any reason why the mod/campaign is not in the FLMM format?

Jeider

Is this an exe hack? I can see where you changed the max_bank_angle values in the shiparch but don’t see how you ‘deactivated’ max_bank_angle.

Sorry, this is was a long time ago. May be I forgot, how I did that. Anyway, you already resolved this issue.

Rotation Lock (USER_TOGGLE_LEVEL_CAMERA) - toggles rotation in third view.

I recommend to not use of this button. Because you camera can get strange bugs after reloading of the game or after launching from the base/planet. That’s why “disable level camera toggling” is better. Thanks to Adoxa for help, I forgot to insert links.

But…

(Rotation will really only work with both Auto Level & Rotation Lock off.)

I do not recommend to disable auto-level altogether. That’s can cause problems for NPC in space. Very funnny problems.

Regarding VA, I am active on a MLP community. Am i given free leeway for asking there?
How many different voices do you need? (I think background characters could re-use the same VA)

Hello, Bas! Sorry, I don’t understand what is VA and MLP. Can you explain that?
This is about voices, I understand it. If you want help us, you can join our Discord. You can find link on project’s site. But… For this moment my development progress in some crisis… That’s why development of english version will not so fast.

Anyway - I waiting for any help.

Uhm, any reason why the mod/campaign is not in the FLMM format?

My mod don’t support any other mods (total conversion), saved games isolated by common.dll-hack. So, I don`t know, why I need FLMM.

Bas

VA = Voice Actor, the one speaking for a character.
MLP = My Little Pony community.

Bas

OK, loaded it up.

Looks great so far, I think you got nice screenplay and cutscenes (pre-gameplay)!

Also, heh, I know Gudrun from HHC.

Accomplishments:

So I bought a new engine for my ship and then it turned out my power plant can’t handle it, so I had to durdle with donkey speed.
After failing a bar mission multiple times, I had to abort it because it was too impossible for me on hard difficulty.
The auto-drive system did crash me right into a weapon platform.
I almost did end up in the atmosphere of a planet (= instant death)
I flew back to a previous solar system, only to find out the STRONGER enemies are there, and I pretty much got pulverized pretty quickly by overpowered pirate vessels. :x
Damn pirates! This is pretty unfortunate because ANOTHER star system further away I spotted some wreckages of vessels that might carry some better guns.

Suggestions & bugs:

It is “Magdeburg”. You got that wrong the some dialogues.
First station: Some equipment was not translated successfully it seems.
Consider the option for subtitles even for dubbed parts in either language.
When showing the Starflier, I think it basically invites for a VO of “Oh, #$%%…” of Trent when he sees it.
Initial Popup is still in Russian
Lutzer in space dialogue: farther -> further
No Eng-Sub for dialog right after existing New-Berlin jumpgate (m2?) to sigma
In dialogue, missed slash / at start of a convo before heading to asteroid fields
When ambushed by pirates, there was an EngSub without a russian VO. Known?
Bismark landing dialogue: mone -> money, maybe just go for “creds” for sci-fi slang
In Bismark bar, Alaric talks about Luts instead of Lutz.
Same conversation, in subtitles something like his “you could replace it’s parts with” and then not updating the subtitles after for that sentence.
Bismarck popup not translated.
Too huge damage from crashing into other objects
Balance: First mines the enemies are using are FAR too overpowered, IMHO. A single mine did destroy 75% of the hull of my starflier, and that’s with an armor upgrade. (That was on hard, however)
Battleship conversation (misson 2): on 1440 x 900, some subtitles are too long for the screen and the last row can’t be seen. Also, Trent replies to something, but his subtitle for that only lasts like half a second or less.
Too short subtitle in comm to Omege-15 JG when speaking about discretion and knife and dagger (Trent)
It is pretty weird for Mission 2 to fail when attacking the shipwrecks too much. Some people might actually think they need to destroy instead of scanning them, so maybe you want to fix that one.
I believe in the Eng version of FL, it is called Rhineland, not Rheinland.
Mission 2: “I see a base” -> “I detect a base by the scanners. This must be it where they are headed to!”
Finer refinement of difficulties: 5 real ones instead of 3.
Critical: Generic “destroy base” missions couldn’t be completed, not possible to damage the base (usual gun equipment, can submit savegame)
Balance: Basic tractor beam sucks WAY too much. It it impossible to ever collect life-saving nanobots or shield batts during a fight.
Balance: The power of NPC ships often range between “pretty easy” to “almost impossible” by a single ship upgrade. You might want to do it less polarizing and more ships in-between. I felt especially the sudden upgrade from like 8k hull ships to 30k Valkyres has been pretty harsh.
Balance: I think there should be anti-shield weapons for every projectile speed. If you do not want to code additional ones, you could simply put the speed of other weapons to the same level. This goes directly with the point above, when I was facing overpowered ships, I often barely took down their shields, and even damaging the hull was a huge task already. Having had anti-shield weapons for my ship might have helped a lot on this.
Consider to include FLHack and very, very short doc about it, such as that it allows saving in space. If you do not want to include the tool, I especially liked the ability to save in space, and personally, that the game doesn’t pause on alt tab, so I can surf the web or stuff or chat while cruising.
München (spelled Munchen by you ingame) is Munich in English.
Sale price for lv1 weapons should be higher, like 300$ at least, or ships should drop lv2 more oftne. It is rpetty frustrating fighting for your own life (and their death) only to get 90$ creds in return for random encoutners.
Credits. It is Star Wolves, not Star Wolfes
Weird to have shield batts dropped, but they cannot be bought.

Q & A:

How long did you work on it so far?
Any ETA on next demo or test release?
Will the old systems be visitable?
Is the drake better than the Stiletto?
I suppose there is no way (FLHack?) to replace mission requirement by money requirement (past mission 3)?

Cpt_Rei_Fukai

Bas wrote:
OK, loaded it up.

1 I believe in the Eng version of FL, it is called Rhineland, not Rheinland.
2 Critical: Generic “destroy base” missions couldn’t be completed, not possible to damage the base (usual gun equipment, can submit savegame)
3 Balance: Basic tractor beam sucks WAY too much. It it impossible to ever collect life-saving nanobots or shield batts during a fight.
4 Balance: The power of NPC ships often range between “pretty easy” to “almost impossible” by a single ship upgrade. You might want to do it less polarizing and more ships in-between. I felt especially the sudden upgrade from like 8k hull ships to 30k Valkyres has been pretty harsh.
5 Sale price for lv1 weapons should be higher, like 300$ at least, or ships should drop lv2 more oftne. It is rpetty frustrating fighting for your own life (and their death) only to get 90$ creds in return for random encoutners.
6 Will the old systems be visitable?

1 No, it called Rheinland in the english version(see e. g. the english starmap)
2 The destroy base missions don’t work like you expect them to.(they are pretty neat imho)
3 Well you can upgrade the tractor. Also should you be able to loot bats/bots during combat?
4 I felt that way too, but try upping your engine, this helps a lot
5 Fl lets you only define a resale percentage afaik. Any increase works globally…
6 There are no old systems anymore. Which is also why FLMM format does not make any sense

Jeider

Thanks for playing. Let’s answer questions.

So I bought a new engine for my ship and then it turned out my power plant can’t handle it, so I had to durdle with donkey speed.

That’s why in the lastcutscene of mission 1 Alaric says “BUY POWERPLANT”.
I don’t know how avoid this issue. Only by changing of UI, but I can’t.

After failing a bar mission multiple times, I had to abort it because it was too impossible for me on hard difficulty.

I don’t know what I can say. This version of mod is 50% easier than 2017 version.

The auto-drive system did crash me right into a weapon platform.
I almost did end up in the atmosphere of a planet

That’s FL’s issue. Enhanced speed limits cause this problems. So… autopilot is dangerous in my mod.

I flew back to a previous solar system, only to find out the STRONGER enemies are there

This mod have alternative game balance. That’s why some NPC have autolevel, some NPC is fixed. Pirates in “dangerous” systems is fixed.

Suggestions & bugs:

Thank you, I’ll take a look on this list.

When ambushed by pirates, there was an EngSub without a russian VO. Known?

Yes, we know this issue.

Balance: First mines the enemies are using are FAR too overpowered, IMHO. A single mine did destroy 75% of the hull of my starflier, and that’s with an armor upgrade. (That was on hard, however)

Rheinland mines has big shield damage. Current balance is based on 2 mines per faction and quantity of mines per ship. May be I can do this better. But later.

Critical: Generic “destroy base” missions couldn’t be completed, not possible to damage the base (usual gun equipment, can submit savegame)

That’s ok. This is advanced missions. You need to attack “vulnerable points” of base and crack way to center of this base. Look at this old example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BYO3Oga9uU

Balance: Basic tractor beam sucks WAY too much. It it impossible to ever collect life-saving nanobots or shield batts during a fight.

This tractor beam already improved. Tractor in 2017 version was a lot slower. How to avoid: just buy better tractor.

Balance: I think there should be anti-shield weapons for every projectile speed. If you do not want to code additional ones, you could simply put the speed of other weapons to the same level. This goes directly with the point above, when I was facing overpowered ships, I often barely took down their shields, and even damaging the hull was a huge task already. Having had anti-shield weapons for my ship might have helped a lot on this.

Interesting. But I’ll think about it later. I already implement generic anti-shield guns. In 2017 version that’s gun was not exist and situation was worse. For this moment - premature optimization (sorry, don’t know how to tell it on english).

Consider to include FLHack and very, very short doc about it, such as that it allows saving in space. If you do not want to include the tool, I especially liked the ability to save in space, and personally, that the game doesn’t pause on alt tab, so I can surf the web or stuff or chat while cruising.

I have special .exe-file with possibility of play game in window mode without freezing of the game. But this is not implemented in demo version. I can. But it’s very dangerous on alt-tab.
Save in space - just use console. Open console, enter “save” command and you saved in space. Do not do this inside storyline mission.

Weird to have shield batts dropped, but they cannot be bought.

Yes, I forgot that. In 2017 version batts not exist. In this version it’s returned back, but I forgot about shop.

About other question - I’ll try to fix it later. Main balance problems - for this problems I don’t want to fix this, because I can fix it my entire life. For this moment balance will stable. Current objective - complete main work on this mod. I already make balance changes and balance become better. Not perfect. But this is not easy job, because - you already see it - this is not just “level 1 > level 2”, this is really huge balance system. For this moment - that’s enough.

How long did you work on it so far?

Very long. May be starts from 2011 or 2012…

Any ETA on next demo or test release?

Real life and slow speed of my voice actors destroyed my plans… I don’t know how answer this question.
Anyway - your activity really motivated me to continue my work.

Will the old systems be visitable?

No. Old system isn’t supported.

Is the drake better than the Stiletto?

Stiletto - Standart (level 2) Rheinland Fighter
Drake - Advanced (level 3) Kusari Interceptor
Drake is better, because can mount advanced and nomad guns. And elite shield+internal equipment. Stiletto supports only standart guns and advanced shield+internal equpment.

I suppose there is no way (FLHack?) to replace mission requirement by money requirement (past mission 3)?

Ohhh… you are about “just play in mod without story”?

Sorry for bad english.

P.S. about balance fixes. Sorry for ultimate answers. But we have a lot job to do. This is fine tuning. Now we need to do main content.

Bas

3 Well you can upgrade the tractor. Also should you be able to loot bats/bots during combat?

You can in theory, but before you upgrade it isn’t possible in practice because of very low range and very slow tractor speed, you basically need to stand still for 5 seconds in order to get anything.

That’s why in the lastcutscene of mission 1 Alaric says “BUY POWERPLANT”. I don’t know how avoid this issue. Only by changing of UI, but I can’t.

heh, the issue actually only arrived after I bought a new engine, lol.

That’s FL’s issue. Enhanced speed limits cause this problems. So… autopilot is dangerous in my mod.

That was less strict feedback and more telling of my adventures!

Rheinland mines has big shield damage. Current balance is based on 2 mines per faction and quantity of mines per ship. May be I can do this better. But later.

It is rather that these are the first mines the NPCs are using, and they turned out to be devastating. You could add mines for stronger NPCs only, or add weaker ones for earlier NPCs.

Ohhh… you are about “just play in mod without story”?

After story mission 3, yes, because the readme says that anything further in story won’t work. There is still that one side mission though.

Sorry for bad english.

Oh don’t worry, I am sure my Russian is worse!

If you are short on time…have you tried recruiting modders, maybe here or at the global FL discord server?

6 There are no old systems anymore. Which is also why FLMM format does not make any sense

FLMM offers more than just adding mods together, such as not having to have seperate installs for FL.

Bas

Tau 4: Mislabeled tradelane near jumpgate
Manuf. Platform -> Manufactory. Is cleaner. (Defunct equip dealer at battleship)
Avalon: Prison has no equip dealer, but equip area- Planet Kil -> Planet Kiel

On a space adventure…
Start:
Discovered systems: About 5
Game time: Roughly 6 hours
Credits: About 37.000
Ship: Stiletto

Coming back to Bismark:
Discovered systems: 22
Game time: Roughly 8 hours
Credits: 128$
Ship: Titan
2 Lost weapons
Ships is a wreck
Lost a thruster too. :<

I really struggled also because I had no income. Overpowered enemies for me aside, I simply couldn’t take job offers because my reputation was too bad. :x

Bas

I would like to leave something pretty important. Motivational words.

I was just checking randomly some FL websites as I do periodically. I haven’t touched the game for years, except when I went for campaign again with the Trent the Monkey King-mod.

Yet, your mod pretty much sparkled my interest instantly. There was NEVER - to my knowledge - ever a (real/custom) fan-campaign of FL for all the 17 years! You can fully can term yourself as pioneers without a doubt!

I also prob didn’t expect too much. And boy, was I wrong! While I don’t understand a single word, the Russian VA sounds great! And I can’t even remember there being an option for subtitles to begin with, so I was quite baffled about that one, too!

You also don’t “only” came with a new storyline, but rather a whole new universe to boot. Also with some features FL was missing, like Engines or Power Plants, tractor beams and stuff (albeit were featured in many mods meanwhile). Also, a sidemission sounds intriguing.
You also made quite some surprising UI changes!

Also, take a jumping motivating cartoon filly! (GIF)

robocop

Jeider wrote:

Is this an exe hack? I can see where you changed the max_bank_angle values in the shiparch but don’t see how you ‘deactivated’ max_bank_angle.

Sorry, this is was a long time ago. May be I forgot, how I did that. Anyway, you already resolved this issue.

The question I still have is how did you keep the strafe feature with the roll feature? I can roll now but not slide left/right and when I try to map the keys in game I’m advised that the key is already mapped. When I try to map it in keymap.ini it doesn’t work, nor does it show as mapped in the options/controls page ingame.

Jeider

The question I still have is how did you keep the strafe feature with the roll feature? I

Oh, sorry, forgot about it.

That’s easy. But only by ini edition. This is content from my initial keymap.ini:

[KeyCmd]
nickname = USER_MANEUVER_SLIDE_EVADE_LEFT
ids_name = 1956
ids_info = 3228
state = keydown, keyup
key = "A"

[KeyCmd]
nickname = USER_MANEUVER_SLIDE_EVADE_RIGHT
ids_name = 1957
ids_info = 3229
state = keydown, keyup
key = "D"

[KeyCmd]
nickname = USER_Z_ROTATE
ids_name = 1463
ids_info = 3300
state = keydown, keyup
key = "A"

[KeyCmd]
nickname = USER_Z_UNROTATE
ids_name = 1464
ids_info = 3301
state = keydown, keyup
key = "D"

Just 2 keys with same default keyboard buttons.

Bas

(Also posted 2x on page2, in case you didn’t see it)

Nanobots should be more in line in price - x10 price for x2 heal seems way too overkill
Hornviper MK III has the same energy usage as MK II, at the very least in the tooltip.

Also, please contact me if you need any testers, or if I can help you getting some English VAs.

I will add a few paragraphs for FLHack and the generic base missions for the readme which you can copy.

So….aside of further focusing on new missions, I consider these stuff priorities to be done, either because of the impact and/or the low opportunity cost (time to work on it). In no specific order.

Price fix advanced nanobots. I’d advocate for 2x the heal -> ~250% price of the previous
Hornviper #3 energy usage fix
FLHack inclusion, simply add the tool/files and leave everything in the doc else. Not coding or anything, just delivering along the mod.
Inclusion of sold shield batts (if the work is not too much to do)

Bas

I have updated the readme file, included a short guide for FLHack and the generic destroy base missions. I also fixed some grammar and spelling errors from other sections. (attached on the post)

I also have a suggestion to make:
You focus on storyline missions and the like. There are likely only some very few people who can do some.

Meanwhile, get some other modders on-board. For good resource usage, it is best if others do the more routine and common modding and fixing; such as adding, fixing or balancing equipment, systems and the like. Of course, you are fully encouraged to communicate your visions and wishes.

For the same reason, I don’t think you need to be the one needing to translate. I bet there are tons of other people who could do such a thing. Same for spelling errors and maybe dialogues.

For getting modders, one place would be right here, others would be like the Global FL discord server (I can ask and redirect them if you allow me to).

Edit: http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=00237162831566835514