If you can figure this out please post it here - I am doing some experiments getting Freelancer to run on an Android ARM tablet via QEMU, and one approach I tested runs into what I suspect is a similar timeout issue.

The really peculiar part is my “timeout” happens before it reaches the Main Menu - before selecting either single or multiplayer. I suspect this reveals something about the architecture of the game as a whole in that it may treat single player as a sort of in-process “server”.

To be more precise, I get the same error you normally get when the FL Account ID in the registry is missing or corrupt when you try to connect to a multiplayer server - except I get it before the main menu loads. It takes ~30 minutes to get to the error from the full-screen “Freelancer” splash image. The amount of time it takes is why I suspect its some kind of internal timeout. Clicking OK just exits the game…

Yes, I know 30 minutes to start FL is unacceptable but this is a research project.

I won’t even pretend to take credit for most of this mod, since this is a mod of a mod, but I feel like some other people might enjoy it.

Ok, as you may have noticed, I’m not on the servers much. Mainly because I don’t like some of the restrictive rules, but thats not the point. Vanilla FL openSP is a bit boring, and disco open sp was a bit less boring. Since I knew I was going to spend a lot of time in opensp in disco, I decided to adapt it a bit.

To be clear, this adds no new “content”, only changes to the feel of the game and the spawn mechanics. Disco has plenty of content.

Download

This is the disco 4.85 mod, update 3 with some hacks that make it a bit more interesting and varied in opensp (at least in my opinion). The main weakness of opensp was that it always felt empty, lifeless, and artificial. I feel like I’ve fixed that.

List of Big Changes:

Adoxa’s Single Player Console - As you may know you can own more than one ship, shorten travel times, etc
Freelancer now completely ignores population density limits - This makes the universe lively biggrin.gif
NPCs can spawn at much further ranges, and persist at much further ranges - Like in multiplayer, you can see someone’s ship in the distance and go for it. More importantly, it makes me feel like I’m not trapped in a 4km spawn bubble.

In addition, you can now initiate dock at 99km instead of 20km. It minimizes me having to babysit autopilot when docking at range (I never understood the reason for the dock button to have a range limit). And the mouse flight text is finally gone.

Oh, and the disco auto update system is disabled to prevent issues if there’s ever a disco 4.85 update 4.

Trust me, the ability to own more than one ship alone is enough to bring new life into single player! Thanks to adoxa you don’t have to pick the one size fits all craft, because you can have a ship for ever occasion.

Finally, opening the spawn floodgates creates some pretty cool, emergently dynamic, encounters. Battles can last for 5 minutes and the victor was never for certain, and let’s not even talk about being caught completely alone without countermeasures in Omicron Delta….

Since Disco 4.86 isn’t going to be out for a while, I figure some people might get a kick out of this.

So this is in C# probably.

I might be able to help, it depends on what kind of work you need done.

Last I checked it works pretty much fine with 1.3.14 and up.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=2504&iTestingId=63035

(I’m actually a maintainer for this app)

There are two downsides.

1. Multiplayer is still a no-go.
2. Rendering is slower than running natively, you will notice that the entire screen is not being redrawn in a single pass at resolution like 1680x1050.

Would it be possible for someone to make a model of the apollo 11 (with lunar excursion module attatched) for use as a ship in this game?

It would really speed up what I’m working on.

Gibbon wrote:
Downloaded everything just in case

way ahead of you gibbon!

Actually, Adoxa’s console tool is helping me learn assembly for a mod I am working on.

Dude…norton is a piece of #$%% (There’s no nice way to say it)!

It uses more CPU time and memory than most and doesn’t even offer good protection. Not to mention how relatively expensive it is.

Try ClamAV, Avast!, AVG, anything else.

Or just use linux

Edit:

From my own experience norton messes a lot of windows updates up, especially service packs distributed over windows update. Back in vista, norton made changes that often required Vista SP1 to be installed on a fresh copy of vista.

its back up!

Chips wrote:
I’ll reserve judgement until I know more

Been with X since X2 release. Won’t be buying this unless the changes are significant enough to feel like a different game…eye candy and a few new aspects but the same underlying game mechanics are insufficient for me.

If it feels like the same game with a facelift, then I’ll miss it. X Games are great, but playing them in succession you get bored in the new games very quickly as there isn’t enough change to make it worthwhile.

I played X2 for hundreds of hours (maybe 300-500 hours plus).
I played X3 Reunion for perhaps 50 hours.
I played X3 Terran Conflict for about 5 hours…I didn’t even finish the storyline.

Definitely need more info before my expectations start to move beyond “I’ll be bored within 10 hours”.

Having said that - front page news?

even though this isn’t freelancer I think it could use some front page news time. X Universe sandbox gameplay and economic freedom are something that we as modders should aspire to achieve within Freelancer.

This should be good

I’ve finally completed my quest of getting Freelancer working on Linux.
Although it wasn’t totally pure. Wine doesn’t solve the problem so I
had to turn to a more extreme solution. Everything works!

In fact you can do this on more than just linux……

pic 1
pic 2
pic 3

Howto
0 - Set up VirtualBox with an installation of windows xp
1 - Configure the VM to Have 128mb of VRAM and up to 4096mb of RAM
2 - Launch the VM WinXP in safe mode and install the guest additions

• Remembering to install Direct3D support when asked
  3 - Reboot into normal mode
  4 - Install Freelancer as normal
  5 - Go online and get a no-cd crack for Freelancer

6a- Set up the environment (For normal resolutions)

• Disable Mouse Integration
• Disable auto-size guest display
• Fullscreen the VM
• Set the screen resolution to your liking
• Launch Freelancer

6b- Set up the environment (For Widescreen/Custom)

• Disable Mouse Integration
• Pre configure FL for your resolution
• Failure to do so caused wonky things to happen
• Fullscreen the VM
• Launch Freelancer

7 - Play Freelancer!

Having Issues? Here’s what I’ve seen:
a. “My FL won’t install, it can’t copy files” - Bad install
of XP on the VM seems to have been the problem.
b. “Laggy” - VMs add some lag, but on cutting edge PCs we have
today it isn’t bad. You can get 256mb of VRAM vs the 128mb
discussed earlier by manually editing the VM config file.
c. “No Video in Fullscreen” - The intro cutscenes won’t play
properly. You’ll hear them though. Use ESC to skip them.
d. “My mouse is jumpy and out of control!” - You forgot to
disable mouse integration. Do so under Machine.
FAQ:

a. Can I haz multiplayer? - Yes.
b. Can I host multiplayer? - Theoretically yes.
c. Can’t you do this on wine? -
Yes, but its so hard to get FL working on wine, and even then
you won’t have multiplayer support. FL and wine do not play
well together.
d. Do I really need a no-cd crack? -
Yes. Otherwise VirtualBox will be properly detected as a debugger
and FL won’t launch.
Footnote on AMD Hardware Acceleration:
Some people with AMD cpus can actually get a massive performance booth
by using hardware level VM support. However, not all AMD cpus support
this and the VM will not start if it does not.

If your VM will not start, go to settings, system, acceleration, and
disable the acceleration. I get great performance even with it disabled.

GPL or gtfo lol

FriendlyFire wrote:
And 1.7 TeV is the kinetic energy of a fly…

Just to get this into perspective.

Per matter-antimatter pair. So a single annihilation between a proton and antiproton produces the KE of a fly.

I’m going to assume you have more antimatter than that

In space your best weapons will be missiles and railguns (mass drivers). Weapon-grade lasers take up far too much space because of all the generators OR chemicals (some of them use chemical reactions to generate the beam) needed to fire them.

The flight model of a missile is a bit different in space since there are no aerodynamics to help it fly, but it’s still completely doable.

Missiles are probably the best space combat weapon imaginable because they can seek a target and engage at long range. Not to mention you can fill them up with goodies like nuclear ordinance or antimatter if it were to become cheap enough.

Antimatter explosions are powerful, antimatter reactions are measured in terra electron volts (i believe most fission reactions are it mega and most fusion are in giga), however it won’t blow up the entire planet let alone anything within 3ly

Idea
http://www.moddb.com/games/infinity-the-quest-for-earth/#1940020

It looks sick, lets just leave it at that. It’s a good example of procedurally generated content, which can automate the creation of vast universes.

Freelancer has what I like to call the edge issue. Basically, you explore into the edge of the game and that’s that, since jumpholes are the only way of getting to a nearby edge world.

Edge worlds, across most mods, are fairly similar. They typically contain deadly radiation, some uninhabited planets, the occasional space station, and (most importantly) a metric ton of high level hostile NPCs.

It should be fairly easy to write a server side script that can generate additional edge worlds procedurally, and integrate them into the existing universe. Potentially hundreds of additional worlds could be added to the network with minimal effort by a modding team, and modders can fine tune the generated universe before release.
Challenges:
The solar system generator will need to be able to:

-> Generate error-free system files.
-> Prevent planets/stars/stations from being inside each other.
-> Position these systems so that they sprawl away from the center of the map, but uniformly distributed.
-> Link these to adjacent systems on the map to create logical layouts.
-> Use the quadrant of the map to choose what kind of NPCs to put there (this would be mod/server specific).

any takers?
If no one wants to do it, i’ll give it a shot.

love the skyboxes, hate the new star effects.

All in all looks cool.

Gisteron wrote:
an alternative could be using the new mission tool. hopefully it allows more customization than elder tools like faction or weapon creator…

My tool edits existing missions, theres no empty mission template (its really easy to make one out of m01.init or m02.ini and the next version will have the template built in).

And DVDMan, not building on the work of others is irrational and self defeating. You can get a lot more done by using existing knowledge and expanding upon that than by doing everything yourself. Of course you could be the kind of person who codes in assembly to avoid using the work of others (APIs, Operating Systems) to make their life easier.

TheDvDMan wrote:

Gisteron wrote:
you have not had the OpenSP hack applied previously?

Which hack? I don’t know any hack like this… I just use Reballance method for Open SP.

**EDIT:**I give up… The game is just teasing me! Without the FP7 scene it just won’t load the mission in any system! Its like when I make a mission I can’t succeed and if anybody ealse does it, a great success! Maby starting from Mission1b will work…?

you’re grossly overcomplicating this problem dvdman.
Download my wings of the federation mod and look at what I did to m01.ini .

Its build for building traditional campaigns, perhaps multiplayer support could be a new feature.

khayman wrote:
Because im making missions for freelancer in single and multiplayer, im very interested in this….

The only problem is my knowledge of this tool… i cant seem to find a readme or info on how to actually get it running.

I have downloaded it and extracted the rar. and placed the folders in a “temp” folder on my desk top.

From the screenshots you made, it looks like a great tool.

its not an archive its an executable jarfile XD
in most cases java will run it if you double click it, otherwise java -jar is the command to launch it.