Is there a mod to make the story missions not mess with your reputation so much?
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Hello all, I’m new here. I just rediscovered Freelancer after many long years. I had a good time playing through the story, but one thing that really bothered me is how the story mode messes with your reputation with the various factions to the point that earning reputation during the story is essentially meaningless. It makes sense for Liberty’s peacekeeping factions to turn hostile when you get publicly shitlisted by all of Liberty in-story, it makes sense for the Rheinland Military to become hostile once you start openly fighting them in-story, and it makes sense for various criminal factions to become neutral or friendly when the story requires you to cooperate with them. But the other scripted reputation changes feel excessive. The first mission in the Bretonia arc resets your reputation with the Bretonia Police and Armed Forces back to neutral for some reason. After one late mission, nearly every faction becomes hostile except for certain criminal gangs and a small handful of other factions. And when you finish the story, your reputation with nearly every faction (if not all of them) is changed to what appears to be the default values. I’m really not a fan of this. I spent a lot of time and credits trying to build up my reputation as I went through the story, and with it effectively being reset at the end of the story, it feels like all that effort was pointless.
So I ask, is there a mod that tones down those story-based reputation changes to not effectively reset everything towards the end? If not, could one feasibly be made without being too much of a hassle? Ideally, the only reputation changes I’d want to happen as a result of story progress are the ones that I said “made sense” up above, as well as Liberty peacekeepers/Rheinland Military becoming friendly/neutral again at the end of the story.
Thanks in advance to anybody who can help me out with this. I greatly appreciate it!
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The reputation changes done by the story are required to make the story mission work. It would not be so great if you are supposed to dock somewhere in a mission and that station is hostile and won’t allow you to dock there. It also would’t be cool if your mission allies start shooting at you.
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adoxa wrote:
Assuming you’ve got JFLP (or otherwise decoded files) search the mission files [c]DATA\MISSIONS*\m*.ini[/c] for [c]SetRep[/c], then figure out which ones you want to comment out…I’m sorry, I don’t really understand what any of that means. Could you explain it to me, please? Sorry, I’m not a very tech-savvy person, so if there’s a way to do it manually, I’m going to need a bit of a walk-through. I appreciate the help.
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JFLP is a patch to fix some things (in particular, it provides widescreen support); it also replaces the original binary-encoded [c]*.ini[/c] files with their text equivalents, for easy editing.
The mission files are stored in folder [c]DATA\MISSIONS[/c] where you installed Freelancer. The individual missions are in individual directories, e.g. [c]M13\m13.ini[/c].
Using a text editor (Notepad will do in a pinch, but you might like something with a bit more oomph - Notepad++ seems pretty popular) you can edit those files, searching for [c]SetRep[/c] (more specifically [c]Act_SetRep[/c]). This is the command that changes your reputation with a faction. If you place a semicolon in front of the line ([c];Act_SetRep …[/c]) it will comment that line out, thus leaving your reputation with that faction unchanged.
Then it’s a matter of determining which factions in which missions you want to preserve/comment.
Here’s a factions list, relating the nicknames to the name.
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I tried to install that patch you linked to, but it didn’t work. It fails to install every time I try. Is there anything else I can try?
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Whats the error? Usually the issue is:
You will need to right click and “Run as Admin” for the patch if installing to Program Files.
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That worked, thank you! Alright, now I’ll see if I can edit the reputation changes for story missions so that next time I play through the story, I can have my reputation not be completely reset upon finishing.
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A while ago I played with [c]Act_SetRep[/c] to see whether it can be used to change faction-to-faction reputations. The result was negative. This surprised me because faction-to-faction reputations are stored in save files, which may suggest the possibility for them to be changed during the storyline.
Anyone else looked into this? Did I miss something?
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Out of memory I would say that faction to faction rep is set during the first launch of the game based on the content of the initialworlds.ini and stored in the restartl.fl
Story mission do not change this at all. These values won’t change.
If you want a certain behaviour of factions in story missions you need to define this manually to the ship or the group/formation (depending on how you spawn the NPCs).
Act_SetRep only alters the player reputation.
