Testers Needed for Freelancer Chronicles

That would be really great! Hope you guys are successful with that.

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

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.

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…

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Because over the years a lot of plugins for this appeared, but most of them are outdated.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.

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.

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!

I’m going to be straight with you, you’re probably not going to get much in the way of support from around here, and I’ll tell you why. A) most of the experienced developers here ARE professionals. We work on modding as hobbyists. We work IRL as programmers and artists and designers. We’ve only got so much time to dedicate to this. B) Those who are only hobbyists have thier own projects to work on, and are usually one man teams that want to work on thier ideas. C) We’ve… already done extensive work on what you’re proposing to do. The leadership of The-Starport are all working on a project called Freeworlds: Tides of War. On the surface, it is just a Star Wars mod. Underneath that mod, however, its a massive engine overhaul. In fact, internally, we’ve done so much that we feel confident enough to declare that we’ve essentially made a fork of the FL engine. We have made massive strides in graphics in making the move from DX8 to DX9, we’ve created more powerful tools for asset implementation, we’ve re-written much of the effects code, added massive amounts of gameplay features, such as a dynamic economy, additional communications methods, tactical views, target tracking, etc.

Now, I think what you’re trying to attempt is great. Really, I do. But let me also explain what you’ve done wrong. I know you didn’t mean it, but you came here like this - ‘Hi, we’re new, and we’re going to rescue your game for you. We’re professionals.’ And those of us that have done around 3-5 years of work on our engine improvement project kinda sat here and went ‘huh, they’ve made NO apparent attempt to see what’s actually going on with modern FL development…’ Can you see how that can be somewhat annoying? I don’t know, maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, but especially with that last post, it feels like you’re making assumptions about our levels of professionalism and professional status without any knowledge of the situation.

Again, I’m just being totally straight with you about the atmosphere brewing here, I don’t want things to go sour without anyone realizing it’s doing so because no one mentioned the elephant in the room.

Sizer wrote:
I’m going to be straight with you, you’re probably not going to get much in the way of support from around here, and I’ll tell you why. A) most of the experienced developers here ARE professionals. We work on modding as hobbyists. We work IRL as programmers and artists and designers. We’ve only got so much time to dedicate to this. B) Those who are only hobbyists have thier own projects to work on, and are usually one man teams that want to work on thier ideas. C) We’ve… already done extensive work on what you’re proposing to do. The leadership of The-Starport are all working on a project called Freeworlds: Tides of War. On the surface, it is just a Star Wars mod. Underneath that mod, however, its a massive engine overhaul. In fact, internally, we’ve done so much that we feel confident enough to declare that we’ve essentially made a fork of the FL engine. We have made massive strides in graphics in making the move from DX8 to DX9, we’ve created more powerful tools for asset implementation, we’ve re-written much of the effects code, added massive amounts of gameplay features, such as a dynamic economy, additional communications methods, tactical views, target tracking, etc.

Now, I think what you’re trying to attempt is great. Really, I do. But let me also explain what you’ve done wrong. I know you didn’t mean it, but you came here like this - ‘Hi, we’re new, and we’re going to rescue your game for you. We’re professionals.’ And those of us that have done around 3-5 years of work on our engine improvement project kinda sat here and went ‘huh, they’ve made NO apparent attempt to see what’s actually going on with modern FL development…’ Can you see how that can be somewhat annoying? I don’t know, maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, but especially with that last post, it feels like you’re making assumptions about our levels of professionalism and professional status without any knowledge of the situation.

Again, I’m just being totally straight with you about the atmosphere brewing here, I don’t want things to go sour without anyone realizing it’s doing so because no one mentioned the elephant in the room.

I think you got my post all wrong. I was generalizing in what we do. We too run our own game development company and developing standalone games is what we do. Modding is also only our hobby so it doesn’t sound like you and I are so different.

The point I was trying to make was a simple friendly one. For those who may have interest in our project, whether they are professionals or not, they are welcome to contact us to discuss the project. Of course there will be those here who are working on projects, of course there will be teams like the-starport already making strides years before we came along. That’s all well and good, we’re not here to claim we’re the best, we’re not here to claim we will beat anyone else. We’re here to share our vision of FL and what we want to achieve to it, and offer a welcome to anyone interested in joining.

If my post sounded the way you thought, then I apologize as it was not intended that way. I come from a genre whose modding is not filled with professional’s who do it for a hobby. In fact, the simulation-racing modding community is very closed minded and dwindling due to it. My group turned company has done so over years of hard work and by helping those with the desire to grow. I’m not saying everyone is not talented, nor am I saying we’re more highly talented then everyone here.

All I can share is my knowledge of the industry through my experience in my years running my company and developing games. I offer that to those who are interested, those who are already in their own places or not interested, all the best wishes to them and I truly hope their projects are successes because I genuinely feel everyone deserves to succeed. Well everyone except the idiots who like to put people’s work down for no apparent reason.

What we have stated is what we aim to achieve with FL Chronicles, whether others are making better work then us or not. If we see others with better work, hey, that’s a good thing, it pushes us to strive to achieve better ourselves.

Which is why I spoke up. I figured that it was simply unfortunate framing, which it was. For my part, if I were less busy, I’d contribute. When we release our engine upgrade, there’s gonna have to be a team that provides assets that take advantage of DX9 (higher resolution models, normal and specular mapping, etc), so you’ve got a big chunk of space to fill, cause as I said, we are working on a Star Wars mod that’s a full, one server wargame, that requires a lot of time for maintenance and balance. We’ll only just have time to strip our engine out of FWTOW for use with vanilla FL, and even that will take time.

In any case, I look forward to seeing some samples from you, good luck.

To clarify some things up here:
Xeltron is so far the only member of the mod team and it’s leader. He knows how to work with .inis and (it seems like) a little about exe hacks and modeling.
MAK Corp are supporting his mod with 3d and 2d artists and programmers. They don’t have any experience of FL. Neither in exporting models nor in how to program FL Hook.

So far, the story of the game isn’t written yet and just a rough concept of how the game will work exists.

And about the topic title: There isn’t really anything to test. At least not at this point.

This is all getting a little fuzzy innit. With all the stink being raised lately on sites like Kotaku etc about companies scouting around for people to do what is essentially QA work for free, you can forgive me for being a little concerned about exactly what is being said here too.

Be nice to see some evidence of a mod that requires testing to help clear some of the fog.

I think also the the problem is, that we modders know how complicated it can get. The programming level is nothing an average programmer has seen. You need to know all the low level asm stuff, debugging tricks, cpu registers, opcodes etc. Knowing the CPU architecture might also help. Plus it is really time consuming and most of the time you get nothing.

If you don’t have that you will have to make a lot of compromises. Which, granted, you will have to do anyway, but the impact is a lot larger. As a guideline I would suggest that everything you want to change does not work without hooking. That should lower the expectations accordingly and you can work your way up from there

So all in all it is more that we know the obstacles and also that what sizer said. Time is also a big factor.

Its not that noone has released a game yet, y’know… I think we’re talking to people, who know fairly well what it takes and what to expect and who also learnt at some point to deal with frustration, eventhough I dare postulating that one-man modding teams use to get frustrated much, much more, than a proper game developing company, that does the engine from scratch and thus knows it pretty well and has team members dedicated to specific areas so there is a certain development speed, quality and success to be accepted as realistic, even if not expected or anticipated.

I don’t mean to sound overly enthusiastic, but just scanning over the latest posts in here I get an impression of that our community is tired and in fact somewhat cynical. Its not even constructive criticism here where we’d be pointing out likely obstacles, but just a general notion of “you guys even know what you’re talking about?”. Gentlemen, please. Be nice.

… says the one goading newbies when they don’t know something. Give everyone a break, Gisteron.

I think it’s less cynicism and more a genuine concern that these people might not entirely know what they’re getting into. We all know that FL can do a lot, but that a lot of that requires to go through its extremely temperamental nature. Moreover, the really cool stuff requires extensive hooking and hacking which isn’t usually expected of modders.

Goading? As in having them use the search function so that there is a reason to keep it at all? Guilty as charged

Though really, we’ve been there and we got this far and not everyone who happens to get to work on a mod is in fact merely a “modder”, and we’ve seen that before, too. Seriously, we’ve been there, we got this far, so why couldn’t anyone else who happens to work with games anyway? Besides, the ambition is less in an uber-mod or let alone a decent player base but really in getting to know what it takes and how it is like to work on a game in the space-sim genre. If you ask me, Freelancer is a very good start and regardless of just how far they get with the FL mod, they’ll quite likely get what they’re looking for just through the process of trying. You wouldn’t expect anything less, would you?