If you want a pre-fixed EXE, there’s one here: https://r.je/freelancer/Freelancer.exe it just increases draw distance for tradelanes and other objects which are not configurable in ini files.

I maintain the Linux installer for lutris and the installer has an option to apply increased draw distance.

Along with the following replacements for draw distances:

                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/SHIPS/shiparch.ini" -i
                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/SHIPS/rtc_shiparch.ini" -i
                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/SOLAR/solararch.ini" -i
                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/EQUIPMENT/select_equip.ini" -i
                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/EQUIPMENT/weapon_equip.ini" -i
                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/EQUIPMENT/misc_equip.ini" -i
                sed "s/LODranges.*/LODranges = 0, 99999/" "$GAMEDIR/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Freelancer/DATA/EQUIPMENT/st_equip.ini" -i

You can read the files and the fine/replaces there. You’ll need a regex find/replace as the original LODRanges value differs depending on what you’re editing.

Moonhead wrote:
The “Installer provided by Ra7en” version is, very likely, the first version I had of this game! I only bought the official version later, when I had fallen in love with the game and decided that it warranted an official purchase (I still maintain this ‘ethics’, or lack of them, with audio cds).

Ditto. I remember the game was leaked several months before it was officially released and I pre-ordered the game based on playing the pirated version.

As for abandonware, it’s surprising how many people outside this small community want to play it still. Take a look at the GOG requests page: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/freelancer There are people adding to the wishlist every couple of days.

Alternatively, rip the iso ( https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-create-an-iso-image-file-from-a-dvd-bd-or-cd-2625180 ) and upload that. Then others can just mount the ISO and get the full experience

There are some very minor differences when you lower the font sizes to 0.02. The text doesn’t quite appear vertically centred in the boxes but it’s so minor I never bothered to see if I could tweak it further. I also never tested multiplayer so you may need to adjust some fonts for the in-game server browser as well.

I can confirm that this completely fixes it. In fact, trying a fresh install in a new wineprefix, the only thing that’s needed is msacm32 and the stutter is gone. On my new install even without WMFDIST everything works perfectly.

Wow thank you! A quick test and that seems to have worked!

winetricks msacm32 does the job! Thanks! I’ve been trying to fix this for a while and that seems to have solved it! Will report back after a longer test.

I thought that was only required if the DLLs are also provided by wine. Regardless, I tried adding each DLL to the override list and it didn’t help unfortunately. I did the same for WMPCDCS8.EXE just in case that contained some required DLLs, it didn’t help either.

Thanks for the suggestion, the installer WMFDIST from the CD looks like it works fine, but did display some errors on some files.

I manually installed by

wine WMFDIST.EXE /T:C:/temp/ /C

Then copied the files from c:\temp to c:\windows\system32

Unfortunately, it didn’t fix the stutter

For anyone who’s interested on playing on Linux (likely nobody ), I’ve created a Lutris installer for Freelancer here: https://lutris.net/games/freelancer/

It works surprisingly well under WINE but there’s one bug I can’t seem to fix. It’s the same issue as described here which seems to get magnified under WINE. When NPC ships spawn a stutter occurs:

https://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6083

If I try it on Windows on the same machine it’s fine, no stutter. Has anyone been able to work out how to fix this?

I’ve done some experiments and worked out that it’s audio related.

• It’s not a disk I/O issue, I’m running the game from an NVME drive

• Disabling audio entirely fixes the problem

• Commenting out engine_sounds.ini in Freelancer.ini (so not to load the engine sounds) fixes the problem. It’s definitely audio related and definitely related to engine sound audio

• Using the same wav file for all engine sounds makes no difference

• Making all engine sounds range = 1, 2 has no effect. I thought this might mostly disable them. My thought was to let the ships appear on screen and not have the engine sounds load until they get close with a view to tweaking the distances it if worked. It didn’t.

• Setting attenuation=0 for all engine sounds to reduce processing

• Removing pitch_bendable for all engine sounds

• Removing is_2d for all engine sounds

• In-game 3d sound enabled/disabled makes no difference

• Playing with the sound options in dacom.ini has no effect (e.g. massively increasing sound channels or decreasing it to 1, setting all falses to true and visa versa). No noticeable change audible in game. I’m not convinced these options are even used in the game

Anyone got any other suggestions of how to fix it? It’s annoying because playing with engine sounds commented out in freelancer.ini works perfectly but it does somewhat ruin the atmosphere.