Freelancer Project

What do you define as heavy?

Never seen battles of that size on any Freelancer server, but it’d be interesting to do stress testing to find out

Was this in systems with NPCs and other things happening or a very minimal system designed for PVP?

w0dk4 wrote:
On Hamburg City we had battles of up to ~60 or 70 players without it getting too laggy and that was on older CPUs.

So nowadays, I guess it’d be possible to have 50 vs 50 battles with relatively low lag on the latest CPUs (i7 3.5 GHz). The other thing that can be limiting with such playernumbers in one system is the required bandwidth.

I guess it would only matter about the fastest GHz since the Freelancer engine does not take advantage of CPUs with more than one core.

w0dk4, how close are the DX9 upgrades to completion? I know you’ve had a big hand in its development and I’ve been interested in it since I heard about it. Would it be difficult to implement in a more vanilla setting? Require a lot of mods to ships and textures etc?

SolCommand wrote:
Welcome back mate

Hey dude! Still working on those models? I hope you are going to try and build some for SC, otherwise I’ll have to hunt you down and ransom some models out of you

I play Void as well Zeus

Back to the subject anyways…

I’m working on various aspects of the engine and interface and learning how to improve visuals and changing things from vanilla right now.

But my actual plans are to start small and expand with an auto-updater.

The initial demo would have the re-designed New York system and the Fight Zone, a system setup for PVP. This will act as a form of alpha test to allow feedback for the balancing and to gauge interest.

Ships will be released over time but everyone will have an equal playing field and a little choice over the configuration and style of their ships.

You will be able to opt for more firepower with less hull and shield capability. Or choose the more heavily armored and shielded ship with less superior firepower available.

Missiles and Torps will only be one per ship for balancing reasons (no more missile boats). Guns will have regular, overloaded, and focussed versions.

Regular will be your standard gun, medium refire, medium power usage, decent projectile speed.

Overloaded will be higher refire, increased power usage, slower projectile speed.

Focussed will be slow refire, high power usage, faster projectile speed.

This is to allow for folk who want to fine tune their weapons more to their style. I like sniping for example, but others like a brawling style (fast refire).

Obviously damage per second rating will be calculated and balanced.

Players will have access to varied cruise engines. Some ships will only be able to mount certain types of cruise engine. The faster engines will require ships with very little firepower capability and little armor in order to be fitted and will take a lot longer to charge up (meaning that these would not really be very suitable for fighter craft and they could not be used to catch up with trading ships)

Certain ships will have cloaking available to them but these ships will not be able to fit the faster cruise drives and will also not be heavily armed or armored - the high end trading ships and the lesser armed heavy fighters have this capability.

The heavier your ship the less time you can stealth for, with trading ships for example, the more you have in your hold the less time you can cloak for and the longer the recharge.

If you have no cargo then you can stealth for longer and it recharges faster.

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Please bare in mind that not all features will be available immediately and are subject to change depending on development / balancing and time concerns.

lol thanks, now get back on void!!