Lessons you've learned from Freelancer

While I am just a returner to FL modding myself, and missed most recent discoveries and engine enhancements etc, I may still give you some advice

• Make multiple backups! This may sound stupid but seriously, there is a lot that can go wrong and if you edit several things at a time you may soon forget what exactly you altered and why it causes crashes etc
• Similarly, note down what you alter, test the game after smaller modifications even if it seems stupid
• Delete savegames, sometimes they may cause crashes
• Do not give up too fast

Freelancer is a highly modifiable game and relatively easy to do so, but sometimes the weirdest things may happen. I have had entries being no longer valid all of a sudden even though I did not change them at all…

All that r4zor said and make backups!! Dropbox. Google drive are great for this

Tools

A lot of FL modding is copy, paste and edit, you can do this with notepad (or similar) but my choice for system building would be FL Mod Studio

http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2174

Info cards I would strongly suggest you do these as you build the mod and not leave them till last, trust me in large quantities they will be a pain!!! my preferred program FL Developer

http://forge.the-starport.net/projects/fldev/files

Hard CMP for hrdpoint editing

http://the-starport.net/freelancer/download/singlefile.php?cid=2&lid=16

The Mancer SP 5 ship pack has a number of enhanced vanilla style ships but I’ve been unable to find a link so far packs 2 and 3 are available here on SP but contain mostly Star Wars ships although the Behemoth in pack 3 is an evolution of the Humpback.

http://the-starport.net/search.php?query=mancer-shippack&action=results

I have a copy of Mancers SP 5 if you need it but it’s too big to attach to this post PM me if you’re interested.

FL Companion but commodity/trade balancing

http://wiz0u.free.fr/prog/flc/

Found a link to the Mancer 5 ship pack, enjoy! (view using Hard CMP)

http://the-starport.net/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?cid=5&lid=1564

You already got excellent advice. Here’s my take on it (for waht it’s worth, as I never completed a major project or even uploaded anything.)

• Gather all the tools, utilities etc. and all of Adoxa’s hacks.

• Take notes: copy important how-to’s (like there are many on this forum) into .txt documents

• And Indeed, make multiple backups:

  • of your own work: make a backup before every major change (and note what change it’ll be, not unlike how you make system restore points in Windows)

  • of all the tools and utilities you download

  • of your notes documents

CK256 wrote:

Info cards I would strongly suggest you do these as you build the mod and not leave them till last, trust me in large quantities they will be a pain!!! my preferred program FL Developer

Now with Adoxa’s Names plugin, it is possible to entirely render all the infocards, including those for factions, nebulas & asteroid zones, and dockable bases, in the XML files (the last was already possible and is unrelated to Names). However, this is only works (for me at least) in FLMM 1.4 beta 4, which seems to be generally regarded as unstable (I think this is because uninstalling a mod sometimes leaves behind files — which is not a big problem to me as I do I clean install every now and then).

This mean that you can write all the infocards ‘on the spot’ (bases of course require two entries: one in the Star System .ini and one in Universe.ini).