Draw Distances for engine trails and asteroid fields

Hi all,

I have recently started playing Freelancer again and played through the storyline and now wish to make some minor changes to make Freelancer visually more realistic. And with that I mean the terrible draw distances that Freelancer suffers from.

I have already been through solararch and shiparch ini files and have replaced all the LODranges to 0, 500000 which basically means that those objects don’t lower their LOD til 500k. This has worked a charm for all the objects contained in those ini files (now ships and stations and stuff don’t just pop in and I can see them from anywhere in their respective system).

I would also like to make the engine trails and lights on ships and stations never fade out (as they still do, even after the LODranges edited in the aforementioned ini files). And additionally, I would like to be able to edit the asteroid fields so that asteroids don’t pop into view at about 3k. It would be great to be able to do the same to the clouds in nebulas but that isn’t all that important.

Any help appreciated, thanks!

Hey thanks for the warm welcome and quick response!

And as regards your tip, I don’t fully understand. What exactly would this do? I have tried it, btw, and haven’t observed any difference at all. And I am also assuming that the html code is not required in the ini file…?

Again, thanks for the brisk response.

I see, well that’s fine but this has unfortunately still not solved any of the original problems I had. And from my research of the space_farclip command, it seems to only effect stuff like planets and suns and other such effects, it does not seem to effect tradelanes (which is something else I would like the game to draw at a much further distance)or asteroids. I could be wrong about this of course…
Thanks for the reply anyways

Ah this has been a great one! Funny turning that one up, really brings even an overclocked i5-2500K to it’s knees (although it seems to only use a single thread it seems). Only thing left now are the tradelanes. Anyone got any ideas for that? Thanks for the step by step guide btw.