UPDATED

I’m going to have another project taking up some time for the next week or two. I’ve confirmed that six vanilla extended weapons work, and have basic infocards done. There are no bases selling at the moment.

Added appropriate bases for weapons, with rep and level consistent with standard Freelancer. Since no level 10 weapons are sold in-game, I set those to 0.7 rep and level 34.
The one thing I have misgivings about is that the level 10 Corsair weapons wind up being a bit uberish for unmodded enemies - damage is in code weapon range, but with 4 refire and high efficiency.

Zipped script.xml version

I’m a fan of Creative Commons type licenses, but rather than add a license that’s longer than the mod:
Feel free to reuse, modify, fold, spindle, or mutilate the data to your heart’s content. It’s pretty basic. If anyone wants to do a vanilla feel overhaul, what’s most useful is the information it’s based on.

Automating weapons generation was overkill for this. When I’m free again, per IrateRedKite’s suggestion, I may put together some code to automate creating complete vanilla-based weapons lines (and in Python, yes - I’ll leave my preferred PowerShell toys at home, even if they do work great for blowing through data streams :} ).

A major caveat is that as-is, it may not be useful for many people since using the level-based hardpoints isn’t as much of a thing. Other issues:

• major overlap in weapons families means the effect is minor.
• there are max about 4 levels of effect for each family of weapon, which means, depending on weapon, 3-4 levels will share the same effect. (This could be mitigated by rearranging the weapon effects a bit, so every faction’s neutron weapon effects look alike, for example?).
• and the biggest impediment: the weapons should get reasonable in-game presence: names, infocards, possible rumors and wreck distribution, etc. That’s the real significant issue. Creating the weapons lines is pretty mechanical, but making them into interesting game elements is where the real effort is.

EDIT EDIT: I’ve changed naming scheme to make names more rational for what may be a somewhat sparse matrix of new weapons: the names are simply family-name_ level_ nn where nn is 2-digit level number.

I wanted to post a thank you to everyone who has been providing love and care to Freelancer over the last few years.

I’ve been away from the community since the mid 2000s, and replayed in HD a couple of weeks back. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and it gave me an itch to customize again, which led me over here.

I’m seriously impressed with what people have done. I know online users have dwindled, and a lot of the growth and change in knowledge has been incremental, but looking at it from a late 2008 perspective, the growth in capabilities is spectacular.

It’s not just the development work that I’m talking about, either. People have quite obviously put a lot of time, effort, and no doubt money into preserving the old TLR material - as iffy as some of the material is, it still represents a treasure trove of knowledge and history. And the mods themselves are incredibly polished compared to their state 15 years ago.

I know all of this has been done because people want to do it, not really looking for thanks - but thanks again, anyway!

Piggybacking - what’s a current reliable download link?

@adoxa said in Vanilla Freelancer weapon stats patterns:

Use sqlite3 to generate the database

That made it easy.

I’ve finished most of the gun-only analysis, and most of it is on the Freelancer Vanilla Weapon Analysis worksheets.

It does turn out that with a couple of minor exceptions, there’s at least one gun of each technology for levels 3-9. With the limited time people spend at lower levels even in SP, that makes extending the guns much less useful. Some possibilities:

Level 3 neutron/4 pulse Corsair weapons via loot drops if someone wants to dawdle in Bretonia early on (I do, it’s where I had the most fun initially playing FL).

Other possibles would be higher level. A level 9 Liberty Laser since the Reaver MK II is an energy hog; a level 9 Netterturn for Rheinland RP; possibly level 10 versions of a few of the standard guns. Here’s a few I came up with . The nicknames are family name they are based on, followed by _wxNN : wx for Weapon Extension and NN is the hp_gun level.

• fc_c_gun01_wx03, “Nina”
• fc_c_gun02_wx04, “Cochillito”
• li_gun01_wx09 “Retribution”
• li_gun01_wx10 “Redemption”
• fc_rh_gun01_wx09 Feuerlanze
• fc_rh_gun01_wx10 Drachenfeuer
• gd_gm_gun01_wx10 Kami no Ikari (神の怒り)
• fc_c_gun01_wx10 Durandal
• fc_ou_gun02_wx10 Kraken IV, Cthulhu
• rh_gun02_wx10 Liebesglut
• fc_c_gun02_wx10 El Cid Campeador
• gd_im_gun01_wx10 Neutralizer

Level 10 damage will only increase by about 20%, but it might be worth messing around with toughness/explosion resistance, and damage per fire to keep them from being uber.

That leaves turrets, missiles, and mines still. It may be a few days before I hit those.

EDIT: I’m going to try to get some closure on the basics for guns. Since it’s only a handful and they’re all closely related to existing vanilla weapons, I can punt on effects and reuse what’s there, while refamiliarizing myself with FLMM. To make it fully usable without a lot of initial headaches, I’ll try doing a mini-mod with availability on specific wrecks, and at least a couple of rumors.

Python Code to Generate SQL table from Freelancer INI

Here’s a rough Python script to generate SQL from an INI . I tried alternatives to get the data, but have trouble running Data Storm. DB Browser for SQL Lite breaks data from the FLStat (the one written by Dan Tascau and “hacked” by Jason Hood).

Script has NO guard rails and is all hard-coded at this point. For simple specific reuse, what you need to change is at top.
The root of the Freelancer install you want to query is specified in FlDataRoot, and the relative path to the INI of interest should be in CurrentDataFile. (With single quotes ’ ’ around the paths, Python won’t choke if you do forget to change ‘’ to ‘/’).

I’ve only used it on weapon_equip and weapon_good, but parsing is OK there.

Note that the script will create the SQL export file in the same location as the INI, just changing the suffix to SQL. Also, it WILL overwrite an existing “.SQL” file without prompting.

# Hardcoded Configuration variables/constants for testing

FlDataRoot = 'c:/Apps/Freelancer-0/DATA/'
CurrentDataFile = 'EQUIPMENT/weapon_equip.ini'


# Generate SQLOutputFile by replacing the extension with ".sql"
SQLOutputFile = os.path.splitext(CurrentDataFile)[0] + ".sql"



import os, re

def infer_data_type(value):
    """Infer SQL data type from a string value."""
    if re.match(r'^\d+$', value):
        return 'INT'
    elif re.match(r'^\d+\.\d+$', value):
        return 'FLOAT'
    else:
        return 'VARCHAR(255)'

def parse_file(file_contents):
    tables = {}
    current_table = None
    new_record = True  # Flag to indicate when to start a new record

    for line in file_contents:
        if line.startswith('['):
            current_table = line.strip().strip('[]')
            if current_table not in tables:
                tables[current_table] = {'fields': {}, 'records': []}
            new_record = True  # New table, so start a new record
        elif '=' in line and current_table:
            field, value = line.strip().split(' = ')
            if field not in tables[current_table]['fields']:
                tables[current_table]['fields'][field] = infer_data_type(value)
            if not new_record and field in tables[current_table]['records'][-1]:
                new_record = True
            if new_record:
                tables[current_table]['records'].append({})
                new_record = False
            tables[current_table]['records'][-1][field] = value
    
    return tables


def generate_sql(tables):
    """Generate SQL CREATE TABLE and INSERT INTO statements."""
    create_statements = []
    insert_statements = []

    for table, data in tables.items():
        field_defs = [f'"{name}" {type}' for name, type in data['fields'].items()]
        create_statement = 'CREATE TABLE "{}" (\n    {}\n);'.format(table, ",\n    ".join(field_defs))
        create_statements.append(create_statement)

        for record in data['records']:
            if record:  # Ensure the record is not empty
                fields = ', '.join([f'"{f}"' for f in record])
                values = ', '.join(['\'{}\''.format(v) for v in record.values()])
                insert_statement = 'INSERT INTO "{}" ({}) VALUES ({});'.format(table, fields, values)
                insert_statements.append(insert_statement)

    return create_statements, insert_statements

# Usage example:
# file_contents = <read the file contents into a list of lines>
# tables = parse_file(file_contents)
# create_statements, insert_statements = generate_sql(tables)
# combined_sql_statements = '\n\n'.join(create_statements + insert_statements)
# Write combined_sql_statements to an output file

# Construct full paths
input_file_path = os.path.join(FlDataRoot, CurrentDataFile)
output_file_path = os.path.join(FlDataRoot, SQLOutputFile)

# Read the input file
with open(input_file_path, 'r') as file:
    file_contents = file.readlines()

# Process the file contents
tables = parse_file(file_contents)
create_statements, insert_statements = generate_sql(tables)

# Combine all CREATE TABLE and INSERT INTO statements
combined_sql_statements = '\n\n'.join(create_statements + insert_statements)

# Write the SQL statements to the output file
with open(output_file_path, 'w') as output_file:
    output_file.write(combined_sql_statements)

print(f"SQL statements have been written to {output_file_path}")

Rough notes on this. In-progress spreadsheets are shared from my Google Drive; the tables below are space-justified for display purposes.

I’d like to know about potentials issues/errors anyone finds. I’m disclaiming intellectual property rights; if anyone finds it useful (or any code or generated weapons I may post related to this) feel free to reuse. I’m also curious about whether anyone has gone through this material before; I find it hard to believe I’m the first to try systematizing the vanilla weaponry.

==================

I’ve found this to be consistent across guns in weapon_equip, as long as we’re comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges - e.g., comparing li_gun01 marks to each other rh_gun02 marks to each other, etc.
Data is rounded to 3 decimal places.
Headings are abbreviated so I can make it viewable in fixed width here.

UNIVERSAL TABLE - applies to every player weapon family in vanilla FL.

Level        Gun HP        HP Ratio     Tough		  Dmg Ratio     Dmg rel 1      Damage rel 5  Shield Ratio Shield rel 1

1            400           N/A           N/A                 N/A        1.000          0.404         N/A          1.000 
2            548           1.370         1.252               1.252      1.252          0.506         1.369        1.369 
3            750           1.369         1.219               1.219      1.526          0.617         1.369        1.874 
4            1026          1.368         1.269               1.269      1.937          0.783         1.369        2.566 
5            1405          1.369         1.278               1.278      2.475          1.000         1.369        3.512 
6            1923          1.369         1.305               1.305      3.230          1.305         1.369        4.809 
7            2632          1.369         1.322               1.322      4.270          1.725         1.369        6.583 
8            4215          1.601         1.521               1.521      6.495          2.624         1.369        9.012 
9            6752          1.602         1.538               1.538      9.989          4.036         1.369        12.338
10           6752          1.000         1.2                 1.2        11.987         4.843         1.369        16.890

Level - this is the weapon mount level, of course.
Gun HP - hit points of the gun itself, meaning the damage it can take before being destroyed if someone targets it on an unshielded ship. ALL user weapons in vanilla Freelancer use these HP values (including minedroppers, CDs, and torpedoes, allowing us to neatly assign “levels” to them).
HP ratio - Gun HP ratio compared to the preceding level.
Tough - weapon toughness ratio compared to preceding level toughness.
Dmg ratio - same growth as toughness, this is the way damage increases within a weapon family for increases in level.
Dmg rel 1 - scaled damage compared to level 1. For example, a theoretical level 10 version of liberty gun 1 would cause 11.987 times as much damage as the level 1 version.
Dmg rel 5 - Same thing as rel 1, but with everything scaled to a level 5 version.
Shield ratio - level to level shield strength increase.
Shield rel 1 - shield strength compared to level 1. If a level 1 Nerf shield has a strength of 1000, level 10 would be 16,980.

OTHER FACTORS
Energy use: damage caused per unit of energy expended varies across family, but within each family is a constant ratio. Here’s the table for that. The data did not precisely match this, but it was within 1% and appeared to be due to rounding in weapon_equip.ini values, and yields a difference of less than 1 point of damage everywhere I spot checked.
The shield killer cases are at bottom, and show hull/shield damage efficiency.

Family        D/E  
br_gun01      3.333
br_gun02      4.00 
co_gun01      3.20 
fc_b_gun01    4.00
fc_bd_gun01   3.20 
fc_c_gun01    5.00 
fc_fa_gun01   6.00 
fc_g_gun01    4.167
fc_gc_gun01   3.333
fc_h_gun01    4.80 
fc_j_gun01    3.333
fc_lh_gun01   3.333
fc_lr_gun01   3.20 
fc_lwb_gun01  4.167
fc_m_gun01    5.00 
fc_or_gun01   3.20 
fc_or_gun02   5.00 
fc_ou_gun01   4.00 
fc_ou_gun02   4.80 
fc_rh_gun01   3.20 
fc_u_gun01    5.00 
fc_x_gun01    4.80 
gd_bh_gun01   2.667
gd_bh_gun02   3.20 
gd_gm_gun01   4.00 
gd_im_gun01   3.33 
gd_z_gun01    3.33 
ku_gun01      5.00 
ku_gun02      3.33 
li_gun01      3.20 
li_gun02      4.80 
rh_gun01      2.67 
rh_gun02      4.80 
co_gun02      0.5/16.91
fc_c_gun02    0.417/12.71

NOT DONE/CHECKED AT THIS POINT

• I haven’t checked any turret families.
• For torpedos/CDs, I haven’t tried to come up with ratios for things like range yet - harder to do with only 2 data points each.
• Likewise code weapons, they’re supposed to be unique.
• muzzle velocity and lifetime are the same within each family, but I have’t bothered tabulating.
• haven’t touched effects.

Is there a more appropriate place to post questions and results? I’m finding old community knowledge in the archived posts and FL data (thanks to everyone who made that possible!) from TLR, but I’m not seeing a lot of general FL mod discussions here. Likely it will be boring commentary and code snippets.

@IrateRedKite said in Vanilla Freelancer weapon stats patterns:

If you’re looking at generating INI files to do this, might I recommend using Python for it?

Yes, you may. Last time I used PowerShell for parsing the files since I could use stream processing cmdlets. I’m lazy and this time around I’ve been using ChatGPT to handle parsing; since it defaults to using Python for processing, I’ve already got some basic INI processing. It will need guardrails and error handling to be good Python, but it’s a start.

, creating hundreds of weapon ini entries by hand is pretty miserable

Oh, yes.

I just replayed Freelancer for the first time in years (I am seriously impressed with the HD Edition). It inspired me and I’m looking back over work that I did back in 2008 on weapons stats . My goal was/is to make it easy to generate an arbitrary new weapon that is completely consistent with the original framework.

Example: using what is clear about stats progression within weapon_equip.ini, the Starkiller is a level 5 torpedo. Using the stats progression, a level 1 baby torpedo launcher that is “consistent” with vanilla Freelancer torpedoes (I’ll call it the Cometkiller) would have 400 hit points for the launcher. The torpedoes would cause 936 damage and have a range (this bit is still a guess) of 980 meters.

Has anyone else posted details on progressions before? I thought I might have posted what I found on TLR, but didn’t. I also seem to recall emailing some details to Tooth for possible use in Asgard 3, but don’t have any of my email archived from that long ago.

If someone else HAS done this kind of thing, I’d love to know; it will save me a lot of time tearing out my hair (which is already much thinner than it was in 2004-2008 ).

If someone hasn’t, I can post what I have as a framework for other people to use and to get feedback. With the possible exception of the theoretical Level 10 cruise disruptor, I don’t think any of it would excessively alter vanilla game balance.

yep. I found one more page of mlootprops info - research you did yourself back in 2003 - but it focuses a bit more on commodities side drops:

http://www.the-starport.net/archive/viewtopic.php?t=24790&start=120

I’ve ripped out the lootprops.ini file and will see what really happens when I begin monkeying with various values.

Thanks, Chips. I’ve been going through the archived material here, but it’s awfully slow work since I need to go through each page of each thread that uses a keyword. I think I may have found the post you were thinking of:

http://www.the-starport.net/archive/viewtopic.php?t=41120

but that’s not conclusive. I’m trying to work through the tutorial thread pages now, but I don’t think I’m going to find much. The mlootprops word appears in two old stickied threads totalling 136 pages, but in the first 40 pages I’ve only found one mention, and it was merely the header to a posted lootprops.ini chunk. :-[

@StarTrader:

As far as I recall, the 2nd is the player’s minimum worth (you will see your worth in the player info screen, and it equates to rank as you saw in ptough.ini) and the 3rd is the player’s maximum worth for that item to be dropped by NPCs which are destroyed.

So you can use e.g. drop_properties = 8, 211397, 37831, 0, 2, 1 to have that item dropped by the NPCs only for players at rank 20-23.

You can be quite selective in this way, by dropping more powerful weapons only when players have reached a minimum worth (rank).

Did you mean that the 2nd number is maximum and 3rd number is minimum? In all of the standard FL drops, the 3rd number is either the same as the 2nd (guns and launchers) or less than the 2nd (munitions and other consumables). For example:

[mLootProps]
nickname = missile01_mark04
drop_properties = 4, 211397, 211397, 0, 2, 1

[mLootProps]
nickname = missile01_mark04_ammo
drop_properties = 5, 211397, 21140, 0, 40, 15

What you’re saying does make sense to me about the minimum drop levels for items; I’ve noticed that some items in there seem to suddenly “switch on” at a particular level for non-mission kills. But I’m not certain about anything beyond that number still.

Update: I did some further cross-checking just to confirm that the pattern was consistent in the vanilla game, and it is (although I’m sure this is no news to some people). The table below shows what gets used for the 2nd mLootProp number for every weapon and munition in the game. The player level and ptough numeric columns are from ptough.ini. Every vanilla level 5 gun drop uses 52183,52183 for the drop properties (and ammo for level 5 missile launchers always uses 52183, 5218).

Player Ptough Gun
Level Numeric Level
n/a 5000 1
n/a 8000 2
1 11000 3
5 25396 4
9 52183 5
14 105206 6
20 211397 7
24 378331 8
28 646965 9

Other values seem to work fine, but if you’re experimenting with implementing ‘new vanilla’ weapons (ones that are properly level-scaled from existing weapons) this does provide a useful guideline for weapons drops. For level 10 guns, it seems that values corresponding to level 32 in ptough.ini would be appropriate; in other words, a standard gun drop would be

drop_properties = 8, 1096101, 1096101, 0, 2, 1

A standard level 10 missile weapon drop would then be

drop_properties = 4, 1096101, 1096101, 0, 2, 1

and for ammunition, it would be something like

drop_properties = 5, 1096101, 109610, 0, 40, 15

This is flawed reasoning in some ways. Technically, there are two level 10 drops in lootprops already, and they use level 9 stats: the Sunslayer and the Ripper are technically level 10 weapons based on their damage stats. However, using the higher values for drops should work fine and would appear to make the weapons drops more rare. For mods that work in SP, it should add some fun to the post-SP game since it delays access to the most powerful weapons until later in the post-story game.

I’m working on integrating some extensions of standard FL weapons into the game completely, and I’m not certain about the details of mLootProps entries.

For example, looking at the following weapon drop entry:
[mLootProps]
nickname = fc_lr_gun01_mark05
drop_properties = 8, 211397, 211397, 0, 2, 1

I understand that the first value is supposed to be the weighting for the drop (8 in this case); the 2nd and 3rd values I typically see people substitute in a value roughly proportional to the weapon price. The final 3 values I assume are magic numbers from our perspective; in standard Freelancer they are always 0, 2, 1 for guns and 0, 40, 15 for munitions. It’s the 2nd and 3rd values that puzzle me.

I know that drops usually ‘just work’, but for weapons and ammo that 2nd and 3rd number always follow a specific pattern. Considering weapons drops alone, other than the 2 lowest values for the 2nd and 3rd numbers, the number used is always one of the following:
11000
25396
52183
105206
211397
378331
646965
These are identical to level breaks over in ptough.ini.

Ammunition follows the same pattern, but the second number is always 1/10th of the first one.

Anyone know the real story behind what these numbers do in MP play?