Dev's Limit Breaking 101 Techniques

…. but unmounted items do…

Even mounted internal equipment does

• that’s how i tried to balance our capital reactors, armor etc.
  before you came out with your Hp-hack.
  
  …. that would have safed me a nice bunch of work …

I realised a little afterwards that I should perhaps have been more specific. It actually checks the mount point, not the mounted flag. This means my Hp-hack should have the side-effect that mounted engines and powerplants don’t use cargo space.

True… @ F!R… I just finished phase 1 of intergrating the engines/power into X… might have saved you a ton of work… but it makes a ton more m8 especially when the ship-counts are high like in our mods…

and yes… a small side effect adoxa… but only a tiny one as long as all the ships are “leveled” it shouldn’t be a issue (trading powerplants between chars… ect…)

Oh and a final note here… when re-coding your mods to work with Adoxa’s engclass.dll… Don’t pull ye hair out when getting to your loadouts… the game don’t care what NPC mounts what ENG/PWR…
as they’ll never need to unmount and remount in space…

That should save ye’s about a day or 2… just add the HP its attached to though… (just like a gun or shield) although i dont think that is even needed in the loadouts… but safe to have it there as Lancers-FLEC sees it as a loadout error if not there…

Hehe… anyone done all this and actually ran the FLEC… I have…

btw.
Is there a special technic to find these hacks in a disassembled file?

Depends what you’re trying to find. For example, the bat/bot HUD limit I found by simply searching for 000003E7 (999), plus knowing how it recognises bats & bots. Disabling buttons is also not that difficult, since button creation uses text strings as identifiers. So to disable the “Select Ship” button, I searched for the resource string (0000039A), which led me to the “ShipTraderBuyButton”, which is stored at offset “[esi+0380]”, so searching for “+0380]” takes me to “cmp edi, [esi+0380] / jne”. Change “jne” to “jmp” and bye-bye “Select Ship”. The same technique will work to disable any button.

0xC74424440000007F->0x8944248D642400 in freelancer.exe, 0x37ECB, 0x37ECB = market files control items in stock ~adoxa

This didn’t work for me - it just prevented any items from showing up at the commodity/equipment dealer. Here’s what worked for me:

C74424440000007F->0x8944244490909090 in freelancer.exe, 0x37ECB, 0x37ECB = market files control items in stock
```The value used is the second unknown value in the MarketGood entries, so the format is

MarketGood = , <required level=“”>, <required rep=“”>, <unknown>, <stock>, <sell>,</sell></stock></unknown></required></required>

Oops, I left out a byte; fixed the original post.

The unknown value looks to be the minimum in stock - retrieved by pub::Market::GetMinInventory as part of a function in content.dll. That function suggests a dynamic economy was planned, but not fully implemented.

For those unaware of it, bases also have a “price_variance = float” value as part of [BaseInfo]. It picks a random number between (1 - price_variance) and (1 + price_variance) to adjust the cost of each good (equipment and commodities).

That section also contains “ship_repair_cost = float” (default 0.33). This affects the repair value of the ship and its groups, but not equipment. The formula is: repair_cost = (1 - damage) * hit_pts * ship_repair_cost. Damage is the fractional health value (75/100 = 0.75).

That’s 100% correct. This price randomizer feature was something Cold Void came across a few years back and only seems to work in SP. I played around with this and it works wonderfully in SP but not in MP as it causes crashes. I wrote a little tutorial explaining the functions of this a while back as well but can’t find it on here so here it is again for those interested.

The example here is for the Battleship Missouri. You need to add the variance line to every base to see it work properly.

This code needs to go into you base ini files. DATA\UNIVERSE\SYSTEMS\LI01\BASES

[BaseInfo]
nickname = Li01_03_Base
start_room = Deck
price_variance = 0.001

[Room]
nickname = Bar
file = Universe\Systems\Li01\Bases\Rooms\Li01_03_Bar.ini

[Room]
nickname = Deck
file = Universe\Systems\Li01\Bases\Rooms\Li01_03_Deck.ini

What this does is vary the prices of any commodity, weapon or ship sold on a base each time you land. The lowest number you can have is 0.001. I’ve been messing around using 0.1 giving varying prices of between 10 and 1000+ per item depending on initial commodity price. In mods that have high prices for items i’d keep the variance a lot lower.

While not a totally dynamic economy, as it is not dependant on other items being present to affect the price, as in say X3, it gives the impression of a working dynamic economy and is a vast improvement over the pricing structure in the original game.

Here are some number variables and their meaning

price_variance = 0.001 - gives a 0.1% difference in price
price_variance = 0.01 - gives a 1% difference in price (not the most realistic but no abuse)
price_variance = 0.1 - gives a 10% difference in price (most realistic and open to abuse)

There is room for abuse by players here with people no doubt docking and undocking to try and get a better price so try to keep the variance number reasonably low. I personally wouldn’t use anything bigger than 0.01 (1%) but i will be experimenting with this to try different values.

… but not in MP as it causes crashes…

Can’t confirm, it causes crashes,
but player who sell or buy stuff on such a base,
will have a very high chance to get banned,
cause server + client won’t have the same price.

d8aaf in content.dll v1.1 1400i - distance from the disrupted tlr that tradelaneattackers are created.

d3d93 in content.dll v1.1 4000f - distance from the last tradelane ring that patrol path npcs created when you enter tradelane will still exist.

A little explanation: once you enter tradelane freelancer immediately generates npcs in the zones that the last tradelane ring(of the direction you travel to) falls into or is within a 2000f( in content.dll v1.1 0xBB1DA) distance. They will persist until you leave tradelane.
If patrol_path encounters are generated further than 4000(if formations are edited for example), they will not exist until you change this offset.
set your scanner range and MP npc detection distance to 100k and you’ll see what I am talking about.

11bb58 in content.dll v1.1 1200f - distance from the last tradelane ring that patrol path npcs are created. 2750 and more - no npcs are created

A request: there is a short period of time that npcs that are beyond max npc persistance range will still exist, looks like it’s 3 seconds, anybody could find it??

1.75f in freelancer.exe, 0x1c94fch, 0x1c94fch = multiplier of mouse speed
0.25f in freelancer.exe, 0x1c94f8h, 0x1c94f8h = grid size for mouse (multiplier?)

It multiplies by 1.75, then adds 0.25 (which is used by other things, so I don’t recommend changing it; 1.75 is unique, though).

is there a way to make the npcs red but not to attack
say when you hit -0.60 your still ok with them but red and when you get to say -0.65 they will attack on sight

When you get the respawn screen you see the message “You are dead, better luck next time”.

I’ve tried using a hex editor to search the exe and dlls for this string in order to modify it but I’m not seeing anything. Has anyone come up with the location of this string?

R

It’s in resources.dll as a UNICODE string…
0x00015516

Since it’s resource dll better to use some reshacker to edit it: string table 115, resid 1827.

um… FLdev?..

Takes the pain outa Resource.dll rewriting

I have resource source files (687k) for these DLLs. Even if you can’t compile them, at least they’re in plain text, for easy searching. They’re JFLP versions, though, slightly different to the originals.

Reshacker it is. That worked perfect.

Thanks,
R

For reference, FLDev automatically loads resources.dll and allows you to search through all DLLs for any keyword.

shameless plug