Anyone still around?

It’s an old game that was never that very well known. You should be surprised there’s still servers and players in 2017, 14 years after release.

There definitely still are mod projects going, and in fact you can attribute most of the drop in global player base to Discovery doing its best to commit suicide repeatedly. Other servers stayed more or less where they were, they just didn’t have much to begin with.

Don’t expect a “revival” or something, whatever people think. A new suite of shaders won’t do much to revitalize the game, otherwise Freeworlds would literally be drowning in players right now.

Freelancer is still around, and people still love this age old game. The bulk of players are around Discovery, Crossfire, and Freeworlds.

I do know there are multiple on going mod projects, and I know of three/four potential new mods that are currently in the works, don’t know if they’ll ever get released or if they will be good, however.

Most new FL developments happen with Discovery and Freeworlds to my knowledge.

@ FF : I have recently gone into Discovery GC and I actually don’t know what is really happening except the change of Dev team. So I dunno why you refer to a repeated suicide or… Is it constant Discovery GC server migration, FL server changes or any other things?

That’s why my plan could work. Every boost in gameplay could brought FL to life. Push FL gameplay to his limits with more weap, shield types and so on! Creating weapon variety for capital ships could be also nice, not only making new generic weaps like Basic, Cerberus, Solaris turrets. Creating Cruise Interdictor capital ships can improve the gameplay just like in Star Wars. There is so much way to keep FL alive.

It’s best not to derail this place with talk about Discovery. The place has its issues, as does anywhere else. As someone who has played there since 2010, I’ve seen most sides of it.

I see where FF comes from with that statement, but it’s also true that most of the global count also comes from them as well. So that’s why it’s always in a constant flux.

So. Even dunno. Everything in this world cycles. So need to wait when FL will be as contemporary art / hipster thing

There is still movement in terms of mod development.

FlyByU is still doing development of his mod, the RIP team is still working on new updates and features, Discovery announced an update not long ago and I keep updating and introducing new content to Crossfire every few months.

People are still around and people still care.

Well…Freelancer is old, soon it will be considered pre-abandonware I think. We should be glad that there is still a noticeable community, considering Freelancer’s age.

As for me. It will be 10 years soon for me that I play this game. Wonderful 10 years. I met so many great people, joined a great and old clan, established some important connections. Fl made me start doing ships and stuff in 3D, and I released a few ships to be used, and had an amazing and unforgettable time playing on different servers. I am not as active as I used to be, but I will continue to play on, probably until the last server goes offline.

When it comes to making new ships for use in mods, I am not certain. I have less free time now, and investing it into creating ships for Fl is maybe futile now. Don’t know. If they will be used in some mod then I will make now ones, if now then there is no point.

In my opinion, creating new mods from scratch is pointless now. Improving and further developing the existing and still somehow active ones yes. The golden years are over and will never come back. . .

The golden age is over? Or should we wait until the end of the Eclipse? (CF Berserk manga )

I think if this is the end, we should find another game to keep this community alive. The candidates are :

• Darkstar One (modable but only one ship can be flown by the player -_-)
• Star Citizen (Freelancer TC?)
• …

But FL has the best gameplay ever for a Space Simulator, and no other games can achieve this level. Weapon types that have different damage versus different shield, ship repair during a fight, weapons can be directed where you want, turret view (nice for capital ships), open space univers, breakable ship parts, various weapon types such as torpedoes, cruise distruptors, mine launchers, etc… That’s why I prefer to play this game than playing another one, the feeling is so great, you can control what you want to control, the campaign is so great, the characters are enjoyable, the mysteries are nice.

As Kuze, this game has also allowed to me to enter in 3D modeling and texturing world. Without FL, I surely wasn’t able to enter in these worlds.

Freestalker.fr wrote:
The golden age is over? Or should we wait until the end of the Eclipse? (CF Berserk manga )

I think if this is the end, we should find another game to keep this community alive.

The end is nigh, but not here yet. Like the winter in Westeros, it took it 7 seasons to arrive hehe.

This is a Freelancer community, and I hope it will stay that way. Transforming The Starport into a Darkstar One ie. sounds like a nightmare hehe.

I can tell you for a fact: The Starport will die with Freelancer. I personally have no interest in any other space sim out there to the extent required to maintain and develop a fansite, not that there’s any that would give us the flexibility required. I think the other admins would agree, were they even active here still.

People are free to move on, but I think you’ll find it very difficult to recapture the spirit in those modding unfriendly games you list.

All the discussion about “the end” is somewhat overrated and pointless.
Ive seen the end of Starlancer, then there was FL which the players could enjoy. And since FL I have seen the end of a bunch of other games and always there was something new, something different the players could enjoy.
Every end is an opportunity for something new.
And while people claimed the end of FL in 2007 when MS stopped its support and the original GLS was shut down we are still here.
I believe FL will continue be around for a good while.

However, my main focus is and always will be the players, the members of my community but not a specific game. That somehow turned out to be future proof.

Look at the bright side.
FL surpassed its expiration date by an entire decade. Thats remarkable.

Freelancer, in it’s core, is about people, players interacting, bonding ingame and online, creating bonds, friendships and such. Whether FL lives of fades into oblivion depends only on us. I believe that, even in reduced numbers, the Freelancer community is still strong and kicking. I hope it will stay this way for a while.

Darkstar One gameplay isn’t fantastic, it’s a kind of copy past of FL gameplay which is simplified. We cannot improve the gameplay due to 1 playable ship… I would so much fly another ship in this game. And why are you worried about DSO? Kuze?

DSO is not modding friendly, it’s really hard to make a mod. It’s easier to make a FL mod (now but at the beginning, it was difficult).

I like FL so much, the game has really improved my creativity. I have a most ambitious and “realistic” game in my head, where it mixes FPS, arcade, simulation and strategy, and where weapon system is like FLs weap system but overdosed, for example selectable laser color between primaries, secondary colors, Infrared, UVs and so, the player must analyse the enemy ship hull and shield. That’s how I see Freelancer 2, something highly tactical when you use a capship and nervous when you use a snubcraft.

The game has some month or years before he died, so while the community stay, the game will live.

Bolte wrote:
I keep coming back to this game, if I’m honest I made a lot of friends there that I wish I had kept in touch with. But started to get burned out of playing, and burned out on modding.

To me the community is what keeps the game going, but I feel that if only more people could access a version of FL where they don’t have to tinker and apply patches to get started, that we’d actually have some player growth.

Golden years over? Pah. We are in charge of that I think…

FL modding is very limited and very annoying to do.

That’s why the Discovery mod is in the process of being ported to Unreal Engine 4 by a secondary development team made of a few current developers in order not to affect the ongoing FL mod development cycle.

Same base game and behavior (as closely as possible), improved models and visuals while still compatible (hopefully) with toasters and later on new features once all the existing stuff is ported over.

We are very quiet about this project in general though, so don’t expect to hear much about it until we feel confident we have a playable beta.

FL modding is very limited and very annoying to do.

I highly disagree with that.
I have modded many games in the past +20 years and FL was by far more open to modding than most of the others.
Almost everything can be modded with ease. There are tools for everything, tutorials on pretty much every major FL site and lots of mods showing what is possible with this game.

Im sorry but for me it sounds strange to question the modding capabilities of a game that in the past 11 years always managed to reach a top100 position on the annual mod awards (often with multiple mods).
For a game that doesnt even belong to a mainstream genre this is remarkable (and probably only beaten by halflife mods).

I also have my doubts that UE4 would improve the modding abilities in any way. The engine can implement mods via plugins which clearly wouldnt be as easy as modding currently is.
I got to work with the Unreal Engine a few years back, before it went free for non-profit use and I clearly see the benefits of the engine but I also see its limitations and how much work is needed to get FL ported.
If possible, cool…. but I am sceptical.

What I clearly dont see is a general support of FL mods under UE4.

What I meant by limitation is that you are limited by what the engine allows you to do. In Freelancer, that’s really not much.

We’ve gone really far (and probably still can) with FLHook plugins, passionate starport devs tearing the game apart, various hacks and so on, but down the road we are always constrained by the engine in one way or another.

As a member of the SvenCoop team for several years now, I can assure you getting engine access changed our lives. This is what I want for Discovery. I want to be able to say something else than “No we can’t do that” whenever a community member asks about a feature that should be simple to implement, and instead be able to say “It’s possible but we’ll have to consider if it’s worth it”.

It will take a while to get somewhere, but we will.

Also, bear in mind we are working on it as a game of its own. We are not creating this as a modding platform. While mods may be possible, this is not a priority in our roadmap and it might never be if it ends up being a huge undertaking. There would be a higher chance of seeing the framework (without assets) opensourced.

Well, I can understand your point about UE4 being a way to move away from the limitations of the FL engine.
But it is also a way moving away from FL in general and from 99% of all modding work that ever has been done for FL. Yep, more than 99% of the modding work done in the past 14 years will be incompatible.

I am working on a similar project on a different game engine and that is one of the first issues I had to realize. Even if I use FL assets and if I get the gameplay halfway right…. it still wont be FL because FL is more than that.
FL is storyline with cutscenes, voice overs, missions,etc.
FL is multiplayer on various servers, supporting various mods.
FL is easy access modding support.
FL is so much more than anything any other game engine could provide (unless you have a full staff of working willing to work on it for multiple years).

No matter what game engine you (we) use, you (we) will never get all the stuff done that we already have today.
It simply isnt more modding friendly if nearly all the modding stuff, that defines FL and its community, isnt working with it.

However, its good that people care about their players and I wish you all the best with that project.
I just have one little advice. Read the engines licence agreement and the terms of use.

@Bolte
looking forward to see it in action

+1 for Discovery’s repeated bungled suicides being a major detriment to the global player base. If the admins and devs there didn’t have such obsessed hard-ons for finding ways to use FLHook to rules lawyer their RP environment to death and had actually listened to long-time players, maybe things would have gone differently.

I dunno. It was interesting being on that team but more in a “watching a mid-air collision recorded in 240 fps slow motion” kind of way.

Freelancer’s pretty much dead at this point, and nothing’s going to fix that short of someone doing a full recreation in an engine that doesn’t rely on a fixed function DX8 pipeline and DirectPlay for networking.