New Multiplayer Character - Faction Selection

Schneider

I remember playing mods where you could select your faction upon creating a new character. Does anybody have any information on how this is done? I thought maybe you needed multiple [Faction] entries in newcharacter.ini, but appearantly the game just looks for the one with nickname = new_player.

SWAT_OP-R8R

It was first done with a server tool called FLshell that allowed such alternate start conditions in its settings.
I think there are FLhook plugins which can do the same.

Schneider

Do you mean the /restart command? I remember there being an proper picker UI on the “New Character” Screen (see image). Freeworlds: Tides of War had this and I could have sworn disco did as well at some point, though it doesn’t seem to anymore.

Alex.

FLHook can indeed do /restart but not this.
I don’t think Disco ever did this, I recall we discussed it at some point but it’d required some client hooking skill we no longer have.
Procyon had it I think.

Schneider

Thanks for the pointer!

I was able to find ProcyonHook 1.45, and saw the modified page_charactercreate.page, but I guess that function integrated too heavily with their server software to be able to be easily reused. I guess I’ll have to make due with restarts or rephacks for now

Laz

I spent weeks taking apart ProcyonHook to the best of my ability. I managed to figure out how their client side packaging system worked, how their UI hooked into the multiplayer menu, and how it connected to the server. They mostly used vanilla features that were just disabled, but with excessive amount of assembly in order to get it working - or at least as far as I could tell.