Problem: Cruise Jump Drive

Hey folks,

A couple of us are starting work on a new mod called Freelancer Exodus. In Exodus, there’s no trade lanes, since it takes place in a different sector altogether. So we decided we’d build a “jump drive” using the cruise engine.

Now, we want to do it up so we can fire up the engine, the weapons power will drain to zero over a few seconds, and then the drive will cut out and drop you back to impulse. So I started working on it, but I’ve had no luck in getting it to work.

I’ve tried using cruise_power_drain = 375 to cause a 1500 unit power plant to drain over four seconds, but the power drains while charging and the ship will just stutter at high speeds instead of dropping out of cruise like we’re trying to have it do. This is kind of problematic, as we don’t want to have unlimited-time drives that run at 3000 m/s available on a multiplayer server because it’s easily abusable. We also don’t want to use FLHook, because then the drive won’t work in OpenSP.

Does anyone have any idea what to do to get this working the way we want it to?

Cheers,
–Troy