Well, I found the offender in why it wouldn’t work: for some reason, FLMM refuses to put the thing in the DLL/BIN folder, so it couldn’t find it. Any idea on how to fix this particular problem?

That may be very true, but unfortunately I don’t have 3DS Max because it’s insanely expensive. It also doesn’t do anything for the second problem, unfortunately.

Also, hey FF, hey ST.

So, apparently I’ve returned yet again to Freelancer, and I’ve decided to do something I’ve intended on doing for a very long time: fixing some of my ships. Unfortunately, my modeling and texturing skills are not up to spec, and I’m hoping some here on TSP will be willing to lend their skills. There are a couple of things that I’d like done, and I’ll share some pictures to illustrate:

The first thing is highlighted somewhat by the red areas circled above. There are places in which the specular reflections off the textures don’t match up despite being on a smooth curve. I’ve traced this to the fact that the UV coordinates aren’t properly aligned (at least I think that’s the issue), and I don’t have the know-how to fix this. More generally, I’d like the textures to be updated somewhat; thanks to SWAT_OP-R8R’s work and my own tweaking, it’s gotten to this stage, but it just seems… off a little. It doesn’t mesh quite right with the vanilla textured ships, and that irks me.

The second, less pressing matter is highlighted in green. On the light fighter series of ships shown in the last two pictures, there is a grating that, in my opinion, feels very “Freelancer-ish.” This was the work of PantherX (I’m pretty sure), as this is a retextured version of a ship he made for Evolutions a long time ago. When I kitbashed together the HF and VHF ships, however, I couldn’t get that grating to fit it. I was hoping that someone with some skills could do that nicely, as I think it adds a lot to the ship.

So, is anybody interested in doing this for me? All of the model files are in Milkshape format or in CMP format, and I can send along the freighter of this series of ships (which I’m quite pleased with) as a guide to what I’m hoping to get.

That is correct: the original settings are read from the old save file. You must start a new game after deleting restart.fl for the changes to take effect.

Uh, nope, you can very easily make factions, old and new, hostile (or allied) to one another. Everything you need is located in InitialWorld.ini. The only reason I can think of why people would say that you can’t is because you have to both delete restart.fl from your saved games folder and start a new game for any changes you make to take effect. The reason for this is that a faction’s reputation with respect to another faction is stored in the save file itself, as well as restart.fl, and when you start a new game Freelancer reads restart.fl (if it exists) for the reputation data. The only time it reads InitialWorlds.ini is if restart.fl doesn’t exist.

Perhaps, but this is innocuous enough, and thanks to adoxa takes all of 5 seconds to do. Plus it cuts down on file size, which helps any poor souls who still have 56k internet.

Now FF, there’s no need to be snarky. Just chill - it ain’t that big of a deal.

Once I release my mod (date TBD), I think (hope?) that it’ll become somewhat popular.

It helps that I’m writing a ~80,000 word fan fic to go along with it.

Heh. I knew exactly what this topic was going to be about before I even opened it.

In my experience (and contrary to adoxa’s statement), the trailing zeroes are 100% meaningless, and I’ve stripped them from most of my files with no ill effect except to decrease the files size. All told, I’ve probably shaved a megabyte of data from that alone.

Pascal, deleting the zeroes line by line is the long, tedious, and time-wasting way to do it. Just compress your files using adoxa’s BINI program and uncompress it with his TINI program. Takes two seconds and you’re done.

As for Freelancer Explorer, I have a second copy of my mod under a different name in the mods folder, and I only work with FLE on that copy. When I’m done, I just copy and paste the things that I want to the main mod folder and edit it accordingly.

Wow, guys are including LODs in their models now… That’s about the only vanilla thing that I don’t do.

I’ll take a look at your model, Skotty.

(pokes his head in)

Well, this is a development. It seems like everything decides to happen while I am taking a break.

I trawled through the files, hoping to find something interesting that I could use, but came up disappointed. The music files, which is what I was really interested in, are of inferior quality in my opinion. The closest I found to something that I may want to use is the new (old?) Nomad Elite, but it would be a pain to wireframe that thing for little benefit. The original has a wireframe already, but it appears to not work in-game, and the new model provided by Thaddeus has changed sufficiently that said wireframe won’t work. So I came up disappointed…

Until I found something.

The gas miner.

It’s roughly the same (and is obviously a precursor) as the secondary gas miner model found in the Hokkaido system in vanilla, but unlike the vanilla model, it has working docking ports. It also features a large interior area that you can fly into, as well as a fully working SUR and wireframe. Quite a find, and I’ll probably implement it into my mod.

I’ll keep looking, but I’m not sure I’ll find anything else.

Well, this is exactly what I was looking for, so I installed it just as instructed, then fired up Freelancer. My computer said, “Objection!” and Spat out the following errors:

WARNING: failed to load mission DLL 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\dlls\bin\FactionScan.dll'

ERROR: failed create DLL instance 'FactionScan.dll' (make sure file exists)

before crashing to the desktop. My setup in Freelancer.ini is thus:

[Initial MP DLLs]
path = ..\dlls\bin
DLL = Content.dll, GameSupport, HIGHEST
; required to operate gates and docks
; required to create ships in space
DLL = Content.dll, SpaceSupport, NORMAL 
DLL = Content.dll, BaseSupport, NORMAL

DLL = Content.dll, SpacePop, LOWEST ;populator
DLL = Content.dll, AISandbox, BELOW_NORMAL
DLL = Content.dll, TestAutomation, BELOW_NORMAL
DLL = Content.dll, BasePop, LOWEST

DLL = FactionScan.dll

[Initial SP DLLs]
path = ..\dlls\bin
DLL = Content.dll, GameSupport, HIGHEST
; required to operate gates and docks
; required to create ships in space
DLL = Content.dll, SpaceSupport, NORMAL 
DLL = Content.dll, BaseSupport, NORMAL

DLL = Content.dll, StoryLauncher, BELOW_NORMAL ;story/static missions
DLL = Content.dll, SpacePop, LOWEST ;populator
DLL = Content.dll, AISandbox, BELOW_NORMAL
DLL = Content.dll, TestAutomation, BELOW_NORMAL
DLL = Content.dll, BasePop, LOWEST

DLL = FactionScan.dll

Deleting the relevant lines caused Freelancer to start up normally, so the DLL is definitely the offender.

I should note that I found the installation instructions odd. Every other DLL I’ve installed from you has gone in the EXE folder, not DLLS/BIN, and has been added to dacom.ini, not Freelancer.ini.

Furthermore, I found the wording in the source code file to be awkward. For instance, you mention that multiple factions can be used in one [FactionScan] block, but you don’t mention if that means the scanning faction or the scanned faction. Also, does having a “scan =” overwrite normal behavior, i.e. if it’s not listed after “scan =,” will that faction not be scanned even if it normally would by the indicated faction, or does it just add factions that otherwise wouldn’t be scanned to the list of those that would?

At any rate, thanks for getting this out to me. I’ve already come up with one idea I hadn’t even thought of when I first asked for something like this (namely, a faction scanning other ships of that same faction).

So I’ve added music to planetary rings… because. The problem is, it doesn’t always play, and the reason is… well, if I knew, I’d tell you. But I can’t seem to find one. It’s most vexing, because there’s one place where it does play (Ross Planetoid in the Cambridge system) and one where it doesn’t (Tallahassee in the Florida system), yet the code is essentially the same:

[zone]
nickname = Zone_Br03_Ross_ring
pos = 38469, 0, 9334
rotate = -29, 16, 3
shape = ring
size = 3000, 700, 200
sort = 99.5
Music = zone_field_asteroid_ice

[zone]
nickname = Zone_Li06_Tallahassee_ring
pos = 707, 0, 42533
rotate = 0, 0, 67
shape = ring
size = 18000, 10000, 250
sort = 99.5
Music = zone_field_asteroid_ice

Anybody know why it might work in one and not the other? And more importantly, how to fix it?

Friendly neighborhood bump.

I’m pretty sure this can be done by setting factions to be allied, but I’d rather not do that, as that has the added side effect of ships of one faction coming to the aid of another. I’m looking to make a faction that is generally neutral, so none of them coming to the aid of others, while at the same time not being scanned, for… reasons.

template_name=“li_manhattan_commtrader”

You’ll probably want to change that to a female character.

actor=“li_commtrader”

Couldn’t find any direct references to that, but there are four numbered versions, so perhaps you should add female equivalents of those, too. You’ll find both in CHARACTERS\costumes.ini.

I think that these are just internal names used in the THN file itself, and as such are unimportant.

You might like to look at the spew to see if those ML animations do have FM equivalents. The spew will also tell you if there are timing conflicts (Deform::start_aim); use jflp.dll to find out when.

Do I have to set up jflp.dll a certain way? It’s installed by default in the mod, but I didn’t see any of this information. I’ll take another look here shortly.

As for the formatting, you could try luafmt (included with my patched FLEd_Thorn) or dethorn, both on my tools page.

No, the file itself is formatted correctly, it’s the fact that the forum messes up the formatting that I was referring to.

Sorry to dredge up such an old topic, but was this ever sorted? I’m in the same boat as Moonhead: I want to make a ring-shaped zone, and I need to have something that essentially looks like an exclusion zone on the map, except it completely removes the asteroid icons instead of just making them appear fainter.

I’ve been gone for months, and now I post two new topics in as many days.

I’ve added female vendors to several of my bases, and up until now I’ve just used a generic female character animation THN, specifically fidget_stand_female_05.thn.

I’ve decided, however, to make versions of the various vendor animations for females, and so far I’ve had difficulty. For one thing, the timing of the animations (which, if you don’t know, are located in ANM files, such as bodygenericfemale.anm, which are located… somewhere) differ between the male and female versions, and while the number at the end of the animation (say, for example, Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05) give an idea for the length of the animation, it isn’t exact. Even if I get the timing right, strange things seem to happen, such as the character rotating in place and jumping up and down.

So far, I’ve been working on the commtrader THN, and here’s what I’ve got so far (apologizes for the formatting):

duration=95.711

entities={
	{
		entity_name="Layer_li_commtrader_fidget_female",
		type=SCENE,
		template_name="",
		lt_grp=0,
		srt_grp=0,
		usr_flg=0,
		spatialprops={
			pos={
				0,
				0,
				0
			},
			orient={
				{
					1,
					0,
					0
				},
				{
					0,
					1,
					0
				},
				{
					0,
					0,
					1
				}
			}
		},
		up=Y_AXIS,
		front=Z_AXIS,
		ambient={
			128,
			128,
			128
		}
	},
	{
		entity_name="Char_li_commtrader_female",
		type=DEFORMABLE,
		template_name="li_manhattan_commtrader",
		lt_grp=0,
		srt_grp=0,
		usr_flg=0,
		flags=LIT_DYNAMIC,
		spatialprops={
			pos={
				0,
				0,
				0
			},
			orient={
				{
					1,
					0,
					0
				},
				{
					0,
					1,
					0
				},
				{
					0,
					0,
					1
				}
			}
		},
		compoundprops={
			floor_height=0
		},
		userprops={
			actor="li_commtrader",
			category="Character"
		}
	},
	{
		entity_name="Special/A",
		type=MARKER,
		template_name="",
		lt_grp=0,
		srt_grp=0,
		usr_flg=0,
		spatialprops={
			pos={
				0,
				0.972928,
				0
			},
			orient={
				{
					1,
					0,
					0
				},
				{
					0,
					1,
					0
				},
				{
					0,
					0,
					1
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

events={
	{
		0,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMHAND_WALK_TALK_LEFT_CASL_000LV_XA_%",
			duration=98.011,
			time_scale=0.6,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1,
			event_flags=2
		}
	},
	{
		0,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMHAND_WALK_TALK_RGHT_CASL_000LV_XA_%",
			duration=98.011,
			time_scale=0.6,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1,
			event_flags=2
		}
	},
	{
		0,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			trans_time=1,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1,
			event_flags=2
		}
	},
	{
		5.033,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_SHRG_SHLDRS_BIG_000LV_XA_02",
			duration=3.333,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		5.033,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMHEAD_MOTION_SHAKHEAD_NO_000LV_XA_%",
			duration=3,
			trans_time=0.5,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1,
			event_flags=128
		}
	},
	{
		8.366,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_LOOK_AROU_000LV_XA_06",
			duration=13.809,
			time_scale=0.7,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		22.175,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		27.208,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			trans_time=4,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		32.241,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_GEST_COME_000LV_A_02",
			duration=2.266,
			time_scale=0.8,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		34.507,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_GESTR_180LV_XA_02",
			duration=4.333,
			trans_time=1,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		38.84,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		39.373,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_LOOK_WATC_IMPA_315DN_XA_05",
			duration=23.5,
			trans_time=4,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		61.123,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			trans_time=2,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		66.15600000000001,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_TILT_HEAD_QUZZCLLY_000LV_XA_04",
			duration=3.791,
			time_scale=0.8,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		69.947,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_SHRG_SHLDRS_SMALL_000LV_XA_02",
			duration=2,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		71.947,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		76.979,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_LOOK_AROU_CASL_000LV_XA_14",
			duration=8.666,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		84.59999999999999,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMHAND_WALK_TALK_LEFT_CASL_000LV_XA_%",
			duration=11.111,
			trans_time=1,
			time_scale=0.6,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		84.59999999999999,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMHAND_WALK_TALK_RGHT_CASL_000LV_XA_%",
			duration=11.111,
			trans_time=1,
			time_scale=0.6,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		85.646,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.033,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		90.678,
		START_MOTION,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female"
		},
		{
			animation="Sc_FMBODY_STND_IDLE_BIG_000LV_xa_05",
			duration=5.032,
			time_scale=1,
			weight=1,
			heading=-1
		}
	},
	{
		91.70999999999999,
		START_SPATIAL_PROP_ANIM,
		{
			"Char_li_commtrader_female",
			"Special/A"
		},
		{
			duration=4,
			target_part="",
			target_type=ROOT,
			spatialprops={
				pos={
					0,
					0.972928,
					0
				},
				q_orient={
					1,
					0,
					0,
					0
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

I’d like any knowledge on these sorts of THN files, and if anyone has worked on these before.

Okay, here’s what I want to do (hi again, by the way):

I want a faction (say, Liberty Police) to only scan some other factions while leaving some alone. Is there a way to do this?

Delete restart.ini too. And don’t do anything regarding m13.ini, it’s just messy. Use my method outlined in this thread.

Actually, it just reduces speed in general. You need a hack for it to work correctly on cruise engines (otherwise it interacts… strangely), and this hack makes it so you don’t need a damage or interference value in the zone for the drag_modifier to work.

The drag_modifier is actually present in Vanilla FL, in Tau-23 (though the SDK removed it for… some reason); it’s why your speed is reduced in that system. It even has it’s own warning message, although it doesn’t seem to play if you have a damage or interference value taking effect in that zone (which is why you don’t hear it in Tau-23).