Yep, I’ll call

busy RL == work (commercial app, too ) + University (learning for exams)

But anyway, feel free to use the current Starchart and FL API release.

NeXoSE wrote:
So……Where is the download link?

The render engine is better than FL itself by the way LOL.

Thanks
Though there is still much room for improvement

It’s the same as in my Starchart project (see here)

You can download Starchart here

@JWalker: I’d like to help (again), but I’ve got a lot going on real life, so maybe in 2-3 weeks

Sorry for the double-post, but it’s been a while…

I’ve had much going on in real life but also managed to do some massive changes to Starchart, and I felt it was time for a new pre-release.

So here it is, on Sourceforge as usual, release 0.0.7.169

The new build number scheme is explained in the all new readme

New features:

Starchart is now embedden in a WindowsForms Application, offering a better interface
Zones are listed, can be selected and their bounding box rendered
Rendering of Hardpoint Lights as real lightsources (up to 40 lights per object, unfortunately at a HUGE performance hit)
Improved display of ids-info
Greatly reduced memory usage
…

Have fun and please give feedback

Edit: Zooming doesn’t work with the mouse wheel at the moment, press middle button or x1 button and move mouse instead

And here’s some pictures:

I’ve developed and tested it under Windows 7 64bit, so it shouldn’t be a problem with the OS.

~3K memor seems to be OK, this is the point when the launcher window should appear, and it means it’s found your Freelancer installation and started loading files.

Maybe try using the complete .NET Framework (not only client profile) and the complete XNA Game Studio (not only the redistributable). If that works I know I have to change that in the readme

So, I finally uplaoded binaries for 0.0.0.6, hope they work as well as 0.0.0.5 or better.

As usual, dowload here

I did some internal reorganisation so now there’s no more flickering when hovering above systems on the sector map.
You can now turn trade lane rendering on and off by pressing t as well as jumphole and - gate routes with g and h respectively.
The names of objects are no longer displayed in the scene but the name and infocard of a hovered object is shown beneath the sector map

@J.Walker:
Looks good, nice to see selection and lighting works. I did some changes but I’m not so sure it’s better now. What you referred to as Revision 06 was actually revision 129 on svn, I updated to 130 just after I built release 0.0.0.6. Just FYI.

I’m sorry it doesn’t work for you TheDvDMan, unfortunately I do not know Hebrew but if it is a generic vista error message it doen’t seem helpful anyway. Vista must be worse than I’d thought if it can’t even run normal .NET applications properly.

edit:
Hmm, I just thought of something: Of course this could be a language or font problem (and wouldn’t be the first one, why didn’t I think of that before :-? ).

@=Alex=:
Why almost? Seems to be working fine on your screenshot.

I would have said that it works on all Windows platforms for which .NET and XNA are available but it seems now that I was too optimistic.

ehm, I would be helpful if you posted the exact error message (if there was any). I would have thought if it works on 7 it would work on vista, if you have the .net and xna frameworks installed (see my previous posts)

FriendlyFire wrote:
Seems like XNA 4 is what you need

You definitely do.

And it looks like you are using mono, I have no idea if that works, I only tested it on windows 7 professional 64bit with both .NET and XNA frameworks installed (both in the development, not the client / redistributable versions)

Ezekiel wrote:
i have a probleme with a custom FL :
“mat count 11!=12” or something similar.

I think I found where this comes from. Happens if a “material library” node contains more materials than its “material count” value would suggest. But it will still work, this is one of my many exceptions that are thrown on principle if there’s an error in the file though the program would still work. Will remove it in the next release (which will come tonight or tomorrow ;-), its already gone in the code on svn, if you want to build it yourself )

Ezekiel wrote:
…anyway to ignore it and continue ?

If that works (see above) why not

TheDvDMan wrote:
Wait… Does it read costum models? Or I’ll have to wait for the Beta for that?

It might/should. Please, try it and give me some feedback if and how well it worked

@J.Walker
OK, that sounds much more complicated / time consuming than I hab hoped, so I can’t promise I’ll really try it…
But considering that so much has to be changed, of course there open up hundreds of possible sources for the planet rendering problem as well as the lighting problem (they aren’t really connected).
Rendering of models and planets isn’t much different except that the vertices for planets don’t come from a file but are generated by a sphere formula (I didn’t come up with that, copied it ). So the problem must lie there somewhere (PlanetRendere.generateSphere).
Lighting is another thing, it’s all done in the shader (StarchartContent/effects/Models.fx and Planets.fx) so maybe there is a problem with the content pipeline (thats an XNA feature usually used to load all models, textures and effects. But as everything except these effects is loaded from the Freelancer game files it could be).
Well, as of now I can only speculate

About game development:
I know that it is usually done in C++ but I hate that language
Well seems I’m simply spoiled by garbage collection and large, well documentet libraries combined with welll working auto-complete, in other words by Java and .NET
And as .NET is much more performant than Java (and with VisualStudio has the best IDE ever) my choice was natural. As for C#, I really like the syntax and language features.
When I found out there was the XNA framework as wrapper for the DirectX API it was clear to me that my first serious game / 3D graphics project would be done in C# using XNA

Well, so much about my motives…

Your windows forms intergation looks really nice. I’m really glad my work seems already fit for use in other projects.

I finally worked out how to select objects in 3D space (your approach was exactly the right thing, except that for some strange reason it doesn’t work when you set the z values of nearSource and farSource to 0 and 1, it must be larger than 1 so setting it to 2 and 3 works great. To find out what objects lie beneath the cursor I added BoundingBoxes to all objects so we can simply use Ray.Intersects)

I will update the SVN shortly and, as stated above, upload release 0.0.0.6 some time tonight or tomorrow.

How do you convert between C# and VB.NET? Is it a VisualStudio function?
I’d like to try it so I can see what it does to my planet creation code.

I didn’t want to start a religious war about programming languages here (well thankfully it didn’t really start^^). Of course you should use VB if you have good reasons to do so.

Hopefully I’ll find some time at the weekend to experiment with object selection (I had something similar working in another project, but it might be a bit harder here)

Don’t worry about XNA, I’m a newbie, too. I actually did Starchart to learn a bit more about XNA than what you do in tutorials.

I am wondering though, if you have any ideas on how to go about using the left mouse button to select scene objects and have them highlighted like in FL when you select something. I tried a few ideas but nothing has really worked yet.

You need to project the mouse position into 3D space. I was going to include it but didn’t have the timne yet.

Because of the project i am using these in i had to convert the Starchart project into VB.NET, but somewhere along the lines of the conversion process something went wrong and now Planets are not being physically rendered in the scene, which also has a side effect of messing up the scene lighting.

In theory it should work as C# and VB.NET are essentially the same, but I’ve never tried this (why would anyone want to use VB when they can have C# )

Good luck with your project, I will continue to update Starchart as soon as I have time.

Pre Alpha Release 0.0.0.5 is available, as always, on Sourceforge: click

Includes Adoxas 2nd patch (this time I actually applied it, so it should all work)

@Adoxa:
Thanks so much for your system selection improvement, somehow I didn’t get the math right. I continued your work and added differently coloured stars.
Your memory improvements are working graet, too. Is’t so simple, really, but somehow I always rely too much on the garbage collector^^

I removed a restriction that prevented models without names from being drawn, resulting in much mor “stuff” in the systems.

Added some experimental lighting.

Added a simple launcher that allows you to select the Freelancer install to use and change the window size or make it fullscreen.

AND: This time I visited all (vanilla) systems and they all worked (at least on my pc) so hopefully there aren’t so many errors as in my previous releases.

build 0.0.0.4 online: https://sourceforge.net/projects/flapi/files/

Includes the changes by Adoxa (thanks man^^) except for the Tradelane Names workaroud (I want to do it right, might take time though)

Now includes a FolderBrowserDialog at startup so you can select a custom Freelancer install

Edit: Turns out I made more new errors than I fixed old ones in 0.0.0.3, so here is number 4.
Just realised the EN-Dash problem was is Jumpgate names, not Tradelannes, silly me…
Anyway, fixed now.

@Ezekiel:
OK, thank you for testing. I’m glad performance is good, and it should be considering almost all data is loaded at startup (resuting in the immense memory usage). That some systems don’t react when clicking on them is because the click detection is done really “quick-and-dirty”.
And the CastException, yeah well…. ^^

@Adoxa:
My “solution” yesterday, well two days ago, was only a quick fix. I hoped it would solve some problems with JFLP, maybe it did but of course not all. I’ll need some time looking over the code, testing with various installations and trying out your suggestions. Especially the casting issues… ^^

So, I dont know how long it’ll take, how much time I can make in the week(s) to come. This post was, after all, only meant to be a preview. But suggestions are always appeciated of course, so thanks to everyone.

No not an editor really, more a system viewer, well, a star chart

But Starchart really is just a frontend for FLApi, a library im working on to access Freelancer data. The api could be eqipped with editing functions (I plan to, some time in the distant future), so then it can be used to build editors. Starchart itself could evolve into a new engine for Freelancer, but that is far far off. I’m just scratching at the surface.

No problem at all. But I just “released” version 0002, should work with JFLP

I didn’t plan on such a quick release plan, so don’t get used to it

I will include more user choices in future releases

yep, I just installed JFLP after adoxa pointed out that “I don’t like it”
Starchart, or rather my FLApi library are very strongly typed. The invalid cast is because in JFLP many values that are floats in vanilla are integers, and the parser handles this correctly but the api assumes other types.

Will try to fix that soon

Did you get an error message? if yes, what did it say?

Theoretically, text inis shouldn’t be a problem. On startup, Starchart looks for the freelancer registry entry, then parses freelancer.ini to get the data path and the name of universe.ini and solararch.ini, then parses these and all inis and utfs refrenced there. Of course I could have made some mistakes (better: I know I did, adoxa already pointed out) so any further info could halp me fix that.

Nice to know it works with vanilla on other machines, though. Could you post some data about your pc and how you experienced the performance of Starchart? Thanks for testing!

I uploaded a built version to sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/flapi/files/

You will need the .NET Framework 4 and the XNA Redistributables 4

It can take quite some time to start and will use ca. 600mb ram at startup and much more if you switch between several systems until it will crash due to low memory. Well, it’s pre pre pre alpha

Controls:
press the right mouse button and move the mouse to look around
change position with arrow keys
left-klick on a system on the sector map to go there (does not work too well)
press h or j to show/hide jumphole/jumpgate connections on the sector map

So, finally, I managed to include models in Starchart. I know it’s nothing new and I admit that without access to the sources of the UTF editor I couldn’t have done it but I hope that this combination of system, planets and models is at least something.

And, as promised, it’s all open source.
Get the code here