Making / Hiring / Earning wingmen for Tren

Well, Flak 88 also provides some other features, I actually never played it, but I guess the other features are very good as well - Might just try out, you will see if you like it or not.

Vital wrote:
Afaik it won’t work in MP, some other way than 88Flak maybe…

I meant it won’t work in SP(it works in MP).

There is sample mod with explanations by fox.

kingjame wrote:
well i didnt like flakk 88 because it changes almost all freelancer. i want something that doesnt change freelancer so much

Only flak has ever done wingmen.

Fox also offers Flak’s wingmen as a “do it your self” mod.

You have to add the info in but he provides a more than comprehensive guide on how to do it.

The only problem you will face is that the way Fox’s wingmen work messes with functions needed for single player to operate.

So you have 2 options.
Add them your self and just play sp with bugs
or
if your only wanting Sp cos you play by your self
if you have finished the story missions and just wana keep roaming.
then play open single player. basically singleplayer with out missions.
Wingmen will work fine in this mode. And even if they didnt Open single player is just the same as Multiplayer by your self.

Just make your own server by starting the server.exe
put a password on it. and make it not for internet.
then just join and play by your self.

As for not doing the work your self.
Well Flak88 does it perfectly as its the originator.
But with foxes awsome info i coded wingmen in to the Rebalance mod which in manyways is slightly more like original freelancer and not as advanced as Flak so you might find it to your liking.

But if you just want vanila then Wingmen tutorial here

Aye, Flak’s normal wingmen don’t work in SP (it’s a voice thing - wingmen rely on an INI voice duration hack which MP reads, whereas SP reads the voice file length directly - this is explained in the Wingmen Tutorial)

However, Flak’s special AI Companions do work in SP, and quite well at that. You can hand pick up to 4 wingmen, and even convert your un-used SP game saves into selectable wingmen (and, in the soon-to-be-released version, assign their combat tasks as well - see http://www.moddb.com/mods/88-flak/news/a-gift-for-opensp-players).

Edit: Oops, missed a few posts.

Would love some persistant npcs on my server, will this be a stand alone mod Fox or are you keeping hold of the code?

It’s not so much “holding the code” versus not being very easily ported to vanilla Freelancer. If you’d like to see how I do it, feel free to take a look around Flak’s code (I think the vanilla wingmen tutorial mentions this) - the AI Companions are basically spawned with a standard network of patrol paths placed in every system (as shown here and here), with a generic dockable bot_station placed at the end. The bot faction itself is just a custom faction with all the bots defined and faction_weight added to every base so that the patrol paths don’t cause crashes (since they technically weave through the bases). Then, a separate FLMM addon script (again shown here) configures the bot encounter to spawn the selected bots with the selected jobs.

As for converting unused players into AI bots, that is done via an AI Companion Bot Generator tool written in VB by M0tah. The tool itself, as well as the source code for the tool, is included with Flak as well.

I may some day port a bare-bones version of the AI Bots to vanilla, but due to the massive system/base editing required, it’s not a very clean task, and the framework is all there in the wingmen tutorial to begin with (the AI Bots are just a very specific application of wingmen wrapped up in a lot of pretty).

Edit: Also, there are roaming versions of the AI Bots that appear if you don’t have them in your Bot squad. Those use separate mini-factions that spawn using a density_cap to limit one spawn per unique bot (which is why they don’t spawn if you have that particular bot in your squad). These mini-factions are then hidden from the rep list using Adoxa’s StoryFactions DLL found at http://adoxa.110mb.com/freelancer/index.html. To see how I handle these, please view Flak’s missions/faction_prop.ini and universe/systems/sysinfo.txt

Edit 2: I also forgot the AI Companion Generator makes a lot of assumptions. It assumes that there is a vaild custom_bot_ships.ini and custom_bot_loadouts.ini in data, and that there are Ioncross gamedata hash files in a “Ioncross Hashcodes” directory located in the root mod folder. It will use said gamedata hash files to convert item hashes into plaintext names which are placed in custom_bot_loadouts.ini - it will also automatically convert certain items like ge_s_scanner_01 into ge_s_scanner_01_npc; this is hardcoded and I forget the exact list of conversions it does. Again, reference the mod itself to see how it’s layed out. Feel free to use anything and everything in there as you please, credit to myself and M0tah is of course appreciated though.

Nice, thanks Fox I’ll take a look