It’s a very simple program to use once you get used to it. Here are the links to the classic tutorials for this utility which will explain a lot more than i can in a few sentences

https://www.mediafire.com/file/d349gieelmm613m/System_tutorial_PART_1.zip/file

https://www.mediafire.com/file/8vsqgzg4io46jky/System_tutorial_PART_2.zip/file

https://www.mediafire.com/file/xd26bqusa697vxb/System_tutorial_PART_3.zip/file

In the vanilla unmodded game you cant. The only way you can do it is by doing missions, getting a bribe or shooting people they dont like. None of these options are available in the standard game. In the single player game empathy levels are set by scripting. You can of course mod your mbases.ini and add fc_or_grp missions to the vendor or floor npcs server side.

Plenty of ways to create Nomad like factions, with different names and ships, as you never see them. If you want talkative ones then you’d have to create those, plus do the animation etc. Bit of a task tbh.

I made talking monkeys in my mod, pilots etc, not really new as the items were already in game but unused. Made a custom faction for them with custom ships, all good to go. Only thing i added was the ships really, and dug around in the code.

Totally new stuff takes time and effort, on the scale you’re talking about, time is your enemy and the will to complete it. Plus the game engine is ancient now

Do you have the same issue?

This is single player? Did you beat some missions in bar before? FL have strange “feature” - you can’t get mission when you never beat one of them before.

Yes, is the short answer

Just my 2 cents:

1. If unmodded Freelancer runs fine, then everything went to hell once modded, it’s the mod.

2. The XML parser is there to parse the internal XML format that Freelancer uses to display formatted text. It effects unmodded Freelancer as well, and a mod cannot change how Freelancer program handles text display.

3. Based on my experience (which came from activate and deactivating my own (abandoned) mod for no less than 5,000 times), the error “Error: problem deactivating …” often means that you need to reinstall the game from fresh (Make sure Freelancer is deleted from the “Program Files” without a single file left). Normally, I backup the fully installed&patched game before open FLMM so I can restore it quickly.

4. In my memory, FLMM is kind messy. You should only install one on your computer, not multiple, and you don’t want to active multiple mods at same time. Also, you have to manually deactivate everything on it before you uninstall FLMM.