Testers Needed for Freelancer Chronicles
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Hey all.
I’m the founder of MAK-Corp. Its a pleasure to meet you all here. I just wanted to stop by and let you all know a bit about us.
We began as a mod group in the sim-racing genre with the aim to become a self-made game development company similar to Simbin, Blimey Games, Slightly Mad Studio’s etc. With our commercial and modding success in the sim-racing genre now reaching quite high levels, we’ve wanted to expand the modding side to a new genre and help modders in that genre become more well known and even reach industry standards if that is their desire.
Freelancer Chronicles is a free mod project. As fans of the game the aim is to expand it with fresh new content, create all the original content in higher poly, update the graphics and provide fans of the game a whole new revamped version of the game.
Xeltron245 is heading the development of the project and will keep you all up to date with all the happenings. We also welcome any modders who are wanting to be a part of this project or who are looking to learn how they can become industry capable to get jobs in the industry. You can contact me at any time on our forum as I am on there every day.
The FL Chronicles website will open very soon as its having the final stuff being done to it to be released to public. We hope to provide a fun and enjoyable experience for all of you and hopefully we can revive Freelancer into new heights.
I look forward to getting to know the FL community and hope you will support our project.
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Just don’t be disappointed if there are just few players playing your mod, after you finished it in maybe 3 or more years.
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Original content in high poly with updated graphics, can’t wait to see that
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Timmy51m wrote:
Original content in high poly with updated graphics, can’t wait to see thatYes, we want to stay true to the original content which brought the fans to love this game as well. We don’t just want to add better quality content and neglect the original so we decided to remodel all the original stuff from scratch to ensure everything is at the same quality and utilize all the new graphic enhancements also.
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Well, what can I say, I’m really curious about what will you be making so I wish you guys the best of luck with this
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Will it be combat racing mod?
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Essentially we are pushing the boundaries of Freelancer. A new nav map will be needed as we are adding far more systems than you could imagine, they’ve all been planned out which took me quite a while. That’s so hopefully they will work well when they are released in terms of commodity trading etc. Lots of new factions too. New alien races, but essentially it will be well beyond what you would imagine in Freelancer. We have even managed to contact someone from the original development team of Freelancer to ask a few questions about the limits of it and believe me its exciting what we can actually do. If I tell you that the number of systems is larger than 3 figures that should give you an idea of the scale of this. Obviously it’s going to be a project that will develop as time goes on and we will allow you guys to test it as we are working on it but you get the picture.
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I certainly hope you can share the code that will be necessary to achieve just about all you are saying, because vanilla FL most certainly can’t support that.
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Yeah as we go we will share the info with you. We aren’t gonna hide too much about what we are doing because ultimately we want to help revitalise this community so yeah we will share stuff with you as it happens.
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That would be really great! Hope you guys are successful with that.
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The aim is to make this the largest mod out there. We are planning to redevelop much of the GUI in Freelancer also to give it a fresh look. Textures will also be redone. Basically its a complete revamp of the original game.
Quite ambitious, looking forward to more info
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You guys want some promoting images?^^ Most of my work was with vanilla FL models, but I wouldn’t limit myself to that. Besides, updated graphics might have me try to replicate them and thus help me practice; that is aside from the promoting effect it may or may not have for your mod, of course.
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I’ll have a word with Shanakar. May well be that we can use you Gisteron yes. I’ll let you know soon as I do.
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Good luck! I know the FL engine can handle at least 1 million bases, I tested it a while back. One caveat though, it took over seven minutes to log into the server hosted on the same machine…
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Yeah I’m aware of that I read about your work. We will be looking at ways around that situation and to be honest with modern computers getting better all the time we can expect that time to be faster. We also are hoping to run the server from a dedicated server so that will obviously help.
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If you guys need someone who should explain how to create multi part space ship models exported into Freelancer and how to make their physical model for them on the ideal way, ask me. Would call myself an expert here.
Because over the years a lot of plugins for this appeared, but most of them are outdated. -
Well that test was done on a quad core system with 8 gigs of memory FYI so it is a pretty up to date test on a modern system. I did finally settle on around 13k+ bases and it only took a few seconds to log into the server so if you keep the base count 20k or below, which is still a massive number of bases to visit, you should have no issues. BTW the final version was at 350+ systems. In my case the test included all 1 million+ bases plus all interior markets so the files were pretty massive. I am using a similar technique to generate all of the procedural systems for GE, giving me 262,144 systems to explore. I haven’t added the base generator yet so no count there.
On another note, never make over 8 overlapping nebula/asteroid fields, you will get an instant CTD when looking at the starmap when 9+ have been explored.
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First of all, I’d like to wish you luck with the project. It’s truly an ambitious one, but if it succeeds I can see it becoming a great asset to the longevity of Freelancer.
I do have to say though, it’s hard to have faith in your ability to back up your claims. You’re asking for testers before even showing the community what you’ve achieved. Until you’ve reached an alpha or beta state, testing can generally be done internally by the creators.
You sound very confident of your abilities, which is great, but this is not the first time someone has come along and said ‘We are going to make the best thing for Freelancer since Juni’s butt’, and I’d wager you won’t be the last.
The Starport is home to many veteran modders (and so not to be accused of bias, I am certainly not one of them :P) who have done absolutely amazing things with the engine, but that didn’t come without a lot of work. And time. And probably tears.
What I’m getting at is, if you want to become more than every other group that has made similar claims in the past, I would suggest you knuckle down and get something done to show us. Pretty renders of models is not enough, give us something with substance, that tells us ‘These guys know what they’re doing’.
I don’t mean to sound nasty or whatever, I just want you to know it’s extremely hard to get excited about this sort of project, when we’ve seen so many of them before.
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Yeah I understand that will release some screenshots in the next few days. Would have been earlier but been in hospital over the weekend. Nothing serious just some muscle damage but means I haven’t been working on this last couple of days. Back to it now so you should see some screenshots either today or tomorrow.
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Greetings all.
I just wanted to inform everyone that our current website and forums are down. We will be opening our brand new company website on our company domain on Monday the 17th of June 2013. Furthermore we will be posting here the new URL and the old one will re-direct to the new.
One of my personal aims after developing this mod for Freelancer is to put in the funding to develop our own full fledged new title following the style freelancer set forth. I build mod groups into game development teams and have done so for over a decade now. My aim with the FL Chronicles mod aside from building the FL community back up, is to also give modders with the talent and desire to work in a game development team to acquire that experience through our modding side and as they progress and we develop, we bring them into the commercial side. Of course if there are any who wish to remain in modding only and just do it as a hobby, they are most welcome too. We have many like that too.
Helping those who have the talent but are often overlooked by the industry are the people I want to help. No matter what your skills may be, whether you are a veteran or a newcomer who is starting out, I have helped people with zero knowledge become industry standard in 3D Art and 2D Art. We hope to build a team of passionate, dedicated and reliable artists not only to develop this mod, but to move on to developing a full game after it. The mod would be the testing ground so to speak, to ensure they stick to it, don’t disappear and can work in a team environment. If you feel you want to try this out, send me a message. I’m eager to meet anyone who wants to try. Remember, it is better to have tried and failed then to not have tried at all!
Thank you all for your time. I’ll be posting the new site URL on monday. Stay tuned!
