A trio of perl coded tools
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Few small perl FL tools I did up a while ago, if their useful to anyone, great
These need to be run from a command prompt, and you need perl installed for them to work.
Their also outdated, devel version (not ready for public yet) adds these (and a number of other scripts) into a GUI program, but these versions are a little more dynamic…their not FL specific (even though they were designed for FL) and have a number of other uses… thats up to you to figure out though (note these are cross-platform tools and will run on any OS as long as perl is installed)
Thought I’d share these dynamic versions before their lost in my file archivesFLP-Patch (Offset Editor)
http://yspstudios.linuxniche.net/files/freelancer/FLP-Patch.zip
reads the known offsets from Freelancer.exe, Common.dll, Content.dll and Server.dll, and can either print the values of these offsets, or edit them (changes to be made are read from a ini file). Basically takes all the nasty hex editing out of modding these files. The known offsets are also defined in a ini file, so can be easly updated as new results are found by the community. This script isnt limited to the files listed above, and can be used on any files/program if given a list of offsetsFLP-mExtract (the Mod Extractor)
http://yspstudios.linuxniche.net/files/freelancer/FLP-mExtract.zip
Sort of the opposite of FLMM, it looks at your freelancer directory, and copies all non-vanilla files to a backup directory. Why? You have 2 options when modding, 1) edit, activate with FLMM, test, deactivate, edit again, or 2) edit ‘in place’ and manually find the files you editted in the FL dir and copy them to the mod dir after. Both are tedious and annoying. This tool allows you to edit the mod ‘in place’ and just run the script to copy all the files. Supports blacklists too, so some files will never be copied (ie: server specific files when making a client-only mod). Also useful for things other then FLFLP-StuffGenerator (Random INI Section Generator)
http://yspstudios.linuxniche.net/files/freelancer/FLP-StuffGenerator.zip
Random generation of stuff (ini sections). Uses input rule ini’s and output template ini’s, and a point system to calculate. Randomly generated items are given (or not) a amount of points (which can be based on level for things like guns) it is allowed to spend on various attributes (also has a priority system for more important attributes). With the point system and the right set of input rules, this can be used (one example) to generate hundreds of unique and balanced (depending on the rules used) guns, missiles, thrusters, shields, whatever in seconds, ready to copy and paste into the mod (depending on the output template). Hard to explain the different ways this can be used and the dynamics of the system without spending hours writing, but trust me its cool
Again, not limited to FL, but designed for itHave fun and happy modding
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GUI version (aka the FLP-Toolkit) is sorta a mixed grab bag of various stuff, part FL IDE, part Errorchecker, part i dont really know yet lol…. everytime we find something thats too tedious to do by hand I end up scripting it, ironically filling out config files for the scripts and running via command prompt was getting tedious itself, which is why their all getting stuck in a single GUI.
heres a few really early screenshots:Offset Editor:
Spreadsheet Editor: (similar to Tinyfish, but different. If showing [Good] sections, will show all [Good] sections from all goods files, also shows FL Hash codes for the section nickname)
Error Checker: rule template ini files define the parsing rules for the FL ini’s, so things like valid keys, required keys, min/max values, which keys can have multiple entries in a section, etc etc etc can be easly redefined by the user.
still got a long ways to go though, lots more to be added
