Freelancer Definitive Edition
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Hey guys, it’s been a long time since I’ve been here, found myself thinking of the game recently, so just thought I’d pop in and see what the state of things are.
Given all the advancements that have been made in the modding scene for the last 12 or so years, how come no team has come up with something like a Freelancer Definitive Edition?
You know like a collection of all the enhancements you’ve all made, the directx enhancements, better textures, the custom starspheres, the multipart SURs and destructibles, the custom ALE effects the list is practically endless.
Surely the elitism has died off a bit now with Freelancer on it’s last legs about to be put in Star Citizens shadow? I for one would love to play through a few times as a salute to the games long life and quality, with the sum of all our knowledge poured into it.
Nobody has done this yet?
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There are too many definitions of whats “good” or “best”.
Some people like realism others like actions. Some like fighter gameplay others like capital ships.
The development of the top mods out there went in very different directions and each one has its justification. Diversity is something good. -
I’m also not sure there are that many people who see the game as just the base, vanilla game. Most mods see it as a platform to build on top of, unlike other long-lasting games. We’re more like Freespace 2, less like Deus Ex.
Sure, it’d be cool to have revamped graphics and bug fixing while keeping everything else purely vanilla, and it’d probably even give some good publicity for the community. It’s just that it would be a significant amount of work when most people who could do it already have their own mod project(s) and just can’t do that on top.
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No, and I have no idea when and how that will happen. At this point it’s so complex I doubt many people would want it anyway.
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No.
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@Zyos but you may do it by own - ex. Adoxa plugins plus KP Lol plugin plus Swag Pack
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Zyos wrote:
That’s pretty succinct
Just off the top of my head:
- I rebuilt stars completely, they all need to be redone.
- I rebuilt planets completely, they all need to be redone.
- I rebuilt nebulae completely, they all need to be redone.
- I rebuilt beam effects completely, they all need to be redone.
- All running lights are interpreted in a completely different way, so they need to be redone.
- All models need to be converted to the new model format.
- All models need specular and normal maps to actually benefit from most of the improvements.
- Starspheres don’t work. We use a custom starsphere generator which is specifically designed for Freeworlds.
- Nomads don’t render properly. We don’t have anything like them, so we never fixed them.
- There may well be random effects that don’t properly work since we only have a very limited subset of them.
I probably also am missing stuff because again this has never been run on vanilla. Oh, and the kicker: actually separating the graphics upgrades from all Freeworlds-specific stuff would be extremely time consuming, and I am not convinced that it would be time well spent.
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FriendlyFire wrote:
Zyos wrote:
That’s pretty succinctJust off the top of my head:
- I rebuilt stars completely, they all need to be redone.
- I rebuilt planets completely, they all need to be redone.
- I rebuilt nebulae completely, they all need to be redone.
- I rebuilt beam effects completely, they all need to be redone.
- All running lights are interpreted in a completely different way, so they need to be redone.
- All models need to be converted to the new model format.
- All models need specular and normal maps to actually benefit from most of the improvements.
- Starspheres don’t work. We use a custom starsphere generator which is specifically designed for Freeworlds.
- Nomads don’t render properly. We don’t have anything like them, so we never fixed them.
- There may well be random effects that don’t properly work since we only have a very limited subset of them.
I probably also am missing stuff because again this has never been run on vanilla. Oh, and the kicker: actually separating the graphics upgrades from all Freeworlds-specific stuff would be extremely time consuming, and I am not convinced that it would be time well spent.
Thanks for the explaination dude. Fair enough.
@HeIIoween,
I did not know about the LUA console plugin, thanks for that, I knew about swag however.
Can’t seem to find any decent tutorials to add sweetfx into the game, they usually just say extract everything, but there are a lot of files. I barely remember toying with it a long time ago and afaik it didn’t need a buttload of files. Can anyone be of assistance there?
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FriendlyFire wrote:
how about just shadows and dynamic lights with singleplayer enabled?
I’ve tried it on mp and it works okay-ish
[d]except if I start the cruise engines which crashes the flserver probably because some differences on freeworlds cruise engine stuff.[/d]
EDIT : installing flhook makes cruise works fine.@Zyos use ENB dx8 to dx9 first before inserting sweetfx, or you can also try http://reshade.me/ as it already has dx8 built in and has quite alot more features and shaderpacks than sweetfx. also theres no depth access so don’t expect dof and ao to work correctly.
also about your topic up there, I think nowadays as long as theres shadows and shiny dynamic lighting when firing weapons and/or on every lights then graphics is good. -
Shadows are one of the most complicated pieces of the code. It would be anything but trivial to extract them and turn them into their own thing. Dynamic lights also require a lot of work.
Don’t be fooled by SweetFX, ENB or whatever else, these hooks are far more complex.
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ReShade crashes Freelancer.exe
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HeIIoween wrote:
ReShade crashes Freelancer.exetry use reshade from this link http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=126542
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Thx, emmm… Lybxlpsv. Works well now
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I’ve almost finished with getting the OS and everything tweaked on this new rig, work takes some time away from that right now.
I have been working on a self contained way to create a portable freelancer.
Basically means that you can drag and drop a Freelancer folder anywhere, the saved games get created within that folder, also FLMM works correctly for JUST that installation.
Other programs that look at the apppath for Freelancer will also work and stay modular/independant. I want to retrofit a FLMM copy just for the installation of mod tools but I need Adoxa’s help with that one wink wink, nudge nudge lol. Could even go one step further and have it pull a list of mod files from a URL if he would be so kind.
I think it would be good to be able to just download a toolpack/tools individually and just install them by double clicking the .modtool extension it would have and work with the file structure.
I’m not ready to release that just yet though, couple of bugs, shortcuts are a pain in the ass, may need to look into a custom installer, then it can be setup by just copying the existing FL game files into the new folder layout via a script.
After I’ve finished that then I will start looking at updating the client to make it a bit more respectable in these modern times lol.
