Mod Idea - Against the Grain
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Admittedly, I am unfamiliar with all the mods produced for Freelancer to date though ones I am aware off have focused either on total conversion or massive expansion in regards to ships and systems.
Considering what has become a small community, my idea goes very much against these prior ideas and is a massive shrinking off the game in exchange or something a bit more high octane.
One System
One Star
2 planets
2 Factions - Blue Team & Red Team
2 Ships for each faction - Fighter Class and Freighter Class.2 Mineable asteroid fields, one local to each factions planet.
Though for each faction, mining the opposing sides asteroid fields net’s greater income.The only way to make money is to successfully return ore back to your factions planet, can the revenue be evenly distributed across current online players?
So the only way for anyone to advance any, is to make sure their factions freighters get home safe and sound, while making sure the opposing side’s freighters fail to return home.
Simple as that.
However, because the mod is so small, it also means we can make it all HD by re-doing the ships, planets, skybox and asteroid fields while condensing all available players into a single sector for frequent contact and fighting.
That was simply the idea’s that sprung to mind.
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My team started to get something like that done on a bit larger scale. Factions which can gain control over territory based on their economic power. But thats still in development and pretty complicated to create.
Dunno if something like that would work in small scale. There were arena mods in the early years of this game but for a very long time I havent seen people being interested in such.
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It is really great that you have ideas and the motivation to bring Freelancer back to the light of day, but I am sceptical about your arena-like mod idea.
While it for sure is very small and absolutely no problem to do, I am sure Freelancer wouldn’t be Freelancer if you take away all the role-playing aspect and small factions of the game. Reducing it to something like that might reduce it to some simple, non Freelancer-feeling game.
However, that is just my theory about that. A practical test would need to prove it though. It sounds like Capture the Flag, and there are a lot of arcarde-like space games out there by now. -
Ioncross total war was quite successful once upon a time, condensed freelancer to only a few systems and 2 factions at war, rheinland and liberty. You’d have the same problem as any new mod now though, no community, where a mod such as discovery, crossfire whatever could set aside a single system for duels, combat etc and schedule events.
Asylum51 back in the day had all kinds of kick only systems, red team vs blue team with only 2 bases and a special purpose loadout starflier with big glowing red or blue lights and lasers to indicate team. Race systems, maze systems, capture flag systems. Come to think there wasn’t much it didn’t have, but we were perhaps all a bit too twisted and mental for most peoples tastes, and if you weren’t you would be kicked to a system with disturbing lights, sounds and giant clown face until you either were mental enough and took your meds or quit.
You can have a lot of fun modding this game so go for it if you want to try something, just be prepared to do it on your own and be the only person that ever plays it
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Shame really, I’ve played some the more recent space games, didn’t like any of them lol. Freelancer is about as good as it gets for me, It should have been remade in HD either by Microsoft or a group of enthusiasts, maybe then a community would still exist for it.
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Graphics is just a short term motivation. If you really want to fix things in Freelancer to make it attractive again, you must first rebuild it from scratch. Most useful things for multiplayer can only be achieved by hacking the game itself. Don’t forget that Freelancer was made for single player in the first place.
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Tell me this, how difficult a task would it be to rip out say… the Manhatten city scape along with the textures for it? I really enjoy 3D Modelling, perhaps to a lesser extent, the UVW Mapping. I can do the mapping, i’m just not as good as an artist would be
I would still love to at least try to redo it, but not if it’s a technical nightmare to put it back into the game, I don’t have the knowledge or skills for that end of things.
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There is a working CMP importer for Milkshape, so importing is no problem. But getting it out of Milkshape to some other program might give a few problems.
I’ve sent you a private message. -
making use of it actually isnt that hard
http://swat-portal.com/portal/continuum/webplayertest.html
its more complicated to get it back into FL
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Able to extract most models and stuff, which is fab though cant seem to find the textures for planets, I gather these are hidden within libraries or something.
Gosh the potential’s so amazing, though I doubt I’ll get much done by myself because most of it goes over my head but I might at least be able to start creating some decent stuff but most importantly in the spirit of the original game.
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Mobius1NI wrote:
…but most importantly in the spirit of the original game.AMEN BRO… think you´re one of my kind to see the awesome potential of the original game-data/structure…
Wish you all the best and many thanks in advance for all your efforts. Hope you successfully master this HUGE task.
Regarding Planets-Textures:
afaik they are stored in the corresponding mat-files…
Or am I totally wrong folks?Greetings
J.R.
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Tonight i’m going through each asteroid in the game with the intent on increasing the poly count on each by a small fraction and re-doing the textures at a higher res. I could much more easily just knock together a bunch of all new asteroids but don’t wanna risk it for fear of it not looking original.
I’m just gonna take them one at a time, there’s quite a few to do though so might take me a while.
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Sounds great! Can you also create nice height and normal maps for them?
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Asteroids are a little tricky because they have to match with some bases which you’ll want to apply that new texture to, dynamic asteroids, weapon platforms and the band that acts as the visual backdrop to the field itself, so you might want to try and stay as close to the vanilla texture as possible.
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Admittedly, i’m not using the original textures but am trying to make it as close to original as possible. The rock based platforms and stations I’ll get too eventually, worrying though it might be.
Anyway, so the left shows my new asteroids and the right shows the original, I think it’s a reasonably good recreation.
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Let me know if you actually manage to replace asteroid models, because for some reason I never managed to make the game accept the new 3db files.
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Shattered worlds has replacement asteroids, ripped from X3 I think, you worked on that mod I thought FF.
