Testers Needed for Freelancer Chronicles

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?

Xeltron245 wrote:
Providing all goes well we should have a video and screenshots for you of our progress by the end of the week. Stay tuned.

Now that sounds good ! I’ll be lurking around to see it

Well that sounds rather promising, good luck