Dev's Limit Breaking 101 Techniques

NeXoSE, player profile?

I do have FLServer + FLHook working under Wine, but Freelancer in my XP VM can’t see or connect to it.

=Alex= wrote:
NeXoSE, player profile?

I do have FLServer + FLHook working under Wine, but Freelancer in my XP VM can’t see or connect to it.

I mean save game. Wine will correctly provide %USERPROFILE% for Freelancer?

Sorry for my ignorant, Im not using wine yet.

alex@alex:~$ wine cmd.exe
CMD Version 1.3.17

Z:\home\alex>echo %USERPROFILE%
C:\users\alex

Certainly looks like it.

I looked in the wiki but didn’t see anything on this.
I seem to recall having read at one time that you could extend the scanner range to detect other players but also had to do an edit to freelancer.exe.

Does anyone have a link to that info available?

Thanks

IIRC after adjusting the values for the scanners, these need to be modified as well,

100000000f freelancer.exe 1D15B8 Dev square of max distance that a ship can be selected
6250000f server.dll 086AEC Dev square of NPC disappear distance in MP
25000000f server.dll 086AF0 Dev square of player disappear distance in MP
100000000f server.dll 086AF4 Dev square of grouped player disappear distance in MP

I know i adjusted everything to 10k in my mod but that’s just me.

All right, I made the edits to freelancer.exe (changed 100000000f to 10000000000f)
and server.dll (changed 086AF0 from 25000000f to 2500000000f and 086AF4 from 100000000f to 10000000000f) which should make players visible out to 50k and groups out to 100k. And it does…

But, even a player without the edits can now see anyone 50k away.

I have the following two scanners:

[Scanner]
nickname = ge_s_scanner_01
ids_name = 263750
ids_info = 264750
volume = 0
mass = 10
range = 2500
cargo_scan_range = 4000
lootable = false

[Scanner]
nickname = ge_s_scanner_02
ids_name = 263751
ids_info = 264751
volume = 0
mass = 10
range = 50000
cargo_scan_range = 50000
lootable = false

The ge_s_scanner_02 is intended for admin use, but even ge_s_scanner_01 can see a player out to 50k, they just can’t select the player.

Is there a way to make ONLY ge_s_scanner_02 have the increased range or is it an all or nothing deal.

Scanners do not affect player visibility.

What I’m trying to do is take the second scanner in the files and dedicate it for use by admins. I’d like it to have a range of at least 50k, but just changing the range of the scanner didn’t make it see any farther.

I thought the edits to freelancer.exe and server.dll would make it so that the scanner range could be increased and then the edits to the scanner would take advantage of that range increase.

I suppose I might expect the ge_s_scanner_01 to need an edit to reduce its range, but even though it’s significantly lower than scanner_02, it still sees the same distance, so reducing its scan range won’t help.

robo, did you read what I said? Player visibility ranges are universal, no matter what scanner you use or what’s the range given. As long as the player is within the range, he’ll be visible. Whether he is selectable depends on I think object visibility ranges, but again scanners do NOT affect players in any way.

Yeah, I read what you said, but due to its limited content I didn’t understand its meaning.

It looks to me like it’s a dirty fix, but it really doesn’t tell the player anything they wouldn’t see by looking at the chat list to see who’s in the system with them, so I guess it would work. They can’t select the person so they don’t really know where he or she is, they just know they’re in there somewhere.

Well, I know from SWWT that people would use the distance in the radar list to quickly home in. Just move by a few Ks and as long as your target is stationary and/or moving in a stable pattern you’ll know where to look for him. Sure, it’s not as easy as selecting the target and hitting F2, but you really shouldn’t assume that just because people can’t select a target, they can’t know where he is.

I can see that…
I don’t really like how it’s not working as intended. I don’t believe I’ll be incorporating it in the mod after all.

Thanks for the advice and input.

Here’s a plugin to do what you want; install to dacomsrv.ini. If a player has ge_s_scanner_02, they will see other players at 50k and group members at 100k. Haven’t done any configuration, but search for the nickname and you’ll find the square of the distances before it. Let me know how configurable it should be…

Nice 1.

Any chance to get cloaked players @ that admin scanner?

Awesome. And it works just as I had hoped.
Now, let’s say I wanted to increase the range of the scanner. Let’s say I wanted to be able to see where a player was in the system, no matter how far out. Is that possible?

I see you (Adoxa) say to “search for the nickname and you’ll find the square of the distances before it.” Are you speaking of the plugin? I searched the plugin using tiny hexer but it didn’t come up with anything for ge_s_scanner_02.

edit: And that’s because I was doing it wrong… Now I find it and am experimenting with distances.

All hail Adoxa!

This is truly amazing, Adoxa.

I haven’t checked out the source just yet, but tell me: do you know whether this will be affected by interference values on zones? If so, it could add an entire new layer of gameplay to the game and make scout-type ships truly have a purpose.

F!R wrote:
Nice 1.

Any chance to get cloaked players @ that admin scanner?

No, cloaked players are handled differently and you wont see a public hack for this because it could easily used by players to un-cloak players (aka cheating).

I’m looking at cloak now, but I’m gonna have to stop and go to bed. Looks like cloak has to be done client-side, so if I find a solution, I’ll put it in the private section.

I didn’t include source this time (I was just going to attach, but decided to put it on my site, anyway), but all the plugin does is dynamically change the server offsets, so any interference will remain. Should be able to hook that too, although I’m not sure if it’ll be client or server.

I was almost going to make the ranges based on the scanner, but robocop wanted different values (range & cargo were both 50k, players at 50k, but groups at 100k). I could use range for player and cargo for group, or just add a ‘command line’ or ini setting. What about the scanner itself? Different values for different scanners?

The logical thing would be to make a multiplier, so that group range is X times player range, with X being a float. Could be per-scanner or global, depending on how hard it is to implement.

If I get it right, at the moment the plugin makes player/group ranges 50k/100k if you have ge_s_scanner_02 mounted and uses the default values otherwise?

actually, as i’m only planning on using it as an admin-only item, the group settings aren’t that important to me. I just knew they were typically twice that of the ungrouped player.

I set the plugin to detect at 500k atm. We’ll see how that works.