A high velocity projectile with lots of splash/EMP damage. I don't think there was another way you could have done this Stormprooter, good work!

Definitely looks like an improvement.  I look forward to updating the server.

I'm currently trying to engineer the impossible - that is trying to find a workaround which removes the auto-aim for guns.

The NPCs don't have auto-aim, and removing auto-aim would potentially make any PvP action much more engaging.

Well, I did find a way to remove auto-aim, but it meant implementing guns as dumbfire missiles - good, but when hit the fire button (rmb) they only fire once and do not repeat (bad), you can get them to repeat by using the fire missile button (Q), but they fire once, delay for half a second, then repeat fire - clunky and basically not fit for purpose.

So, the other approach was to make the guns randomly inaccurate - this can be done by setting a dispersal angle against the gun's projectile - this is the only path left open to me.

Here is a short video showing WIP multicannons which use this dispersal angle - which I will need to tweak more to get balances right. Also, I've fixed the lighting in the docking bay so you can actually see your ship, rather than the dark murky place it used to be.

Love the multicannons!

New intro/menu screen - just gives the mod more of it's own identity.

Spotted this earlier when you posted it on Facebook.  Looks good, but I kinda feel it would be more "true" to the older Elite if it didn't have all the ships down the bottom.

Now if only people could work out a way to prevent the basic Freelancer ships from appearing to fly past while docked on planets...  (not too likely since no mod I know of sorts that out)

Spotted this earlier when you posted it on Facebook.  Looks good, but I kinda feel it would be more "true" to the older Elite if it didn't have all the ships down the bottom.

Now if only people could work out a way to prevent the basic Freelancer ships from appearing to fly past while docked on planets...  (not too likely since no mod I know of sorts that out)

I will have a go at moving the ships off screen.

Also, expect to see the Elite ships on the planet side animations. That's my next job.

Nice work once again Stormprooter! Fires up all the old memories of the original games.

There will be a good chance though that (shock, horror ) some people might not know the names of all the ships being displayed there. Perhaps adding a little text underneath each ship on that screen as it comes into focus could help these people tell them apart more easily in the game. Otherwise, a damn fine intro, even love the Kusari music. One of the best tracks in the vanilla game in my view. Perfect for exploring systems and gas clouds.

Nice work once again Stormprooter! Fires up all the old memories of the original games.

There will be a good chance though that (shock, horror ) some people might not know the names of all the ships being displayed there. Perhaps adding a little text underneath each ship on that screen as it comes into focus could help these people tell them apart more easily in the game. Otherwise, a damn fine intro, even love the Kusari music. One of the best tracks in the vanilla game in my view. Perfect for exploring systems and gas clouds.

This is something I'd like to do. I spent about 10 hours early last week trying to find information on how to add captions or subtitles to the animations - no joy :(. Unfortunately the animation (& mission) scripting is a bit of a mystery, very little in the way of documentation and folks who know how to do it. I had to spend many hours studying the existing scripts, and getting it wrong most of the time (which ends up with just a black screen and no error message). But I will continue to look, as I know there is a mod out there that has added text to the intro screen - I just cannot remember which one it is. All I do remember is the intro screen being extremely busy and had the back ground music of "Into the Danger Zone" - from the film "Top Gun". It may be the 88 Flak mod, but I cannot remember. I guess I'll just have to methodically download every mod and try each one (that will take quite some time :D)

Now if I can find that mod again, I can study the intro script and hopefully discover how to do it.

Spotted this earlier when you posted it on Facebook.  Looks good, but I kinda feel it would be more "true" to the older Elite if it didn't have all the ships down the bottom.

Now if only people could work out a way to prevent the basic Freelancer ships from appearing to fly past while docked on planets...  (not too likely since no mod I know of sorts that out)

I've not got an updated video, but tried out moving the ships off-screen when they are not the one in focus. It does look better.

My other alternative is to create a separate intro animation for each ship - apparently the game supports up to 24, and there are 21 distinct ships - so . . .

But my only issue with that is that I'd also like to do some other animations - like ships flying past a coriolis station - if I have 21 ship-only animations, we'd only see the others very rarely.

Swings and roundabouts.......

You could try dropping by Gibbon's forum. If anyone knows how to go about adding txt it could be him. Even if not I'd bet he could point you in the right direction. Alternatively there is also The Starport or the SWAT Portal forums too. Lots of very knowledgeable people on these who have modded Freelancer in the past. Perhaps someone there could offer advice too? In anycase really great progress Stormprooter.

You could try dropping by Gibbon's forum. If anyone knows how to go about adding txt it could be him. Even if not I'd bet he could point you in the right direction. Alternatively there is also The Starport or the SWAT Portal forums too. Lots of very knowledgeable people on these who have modded Freelancer in the past. Perhaps someone there could offer advice too? In anycase really great progress Stormprooter.

Gibbon doesn't know - just checked his forum.

As for the starport and swat portal - no disco.

Been searching all of them, and google for a while now.

I've manually been reading through almost every thread on the starport modding forum 🙁

Regardless, you've done a lot of very impressive work with it.

On a side-note, I did find a server account management program that works with the mod (although it is designed for Discovery & flhook, it's possible to make changes server-side on the fly) and set up an admin character in a Thargoid warship.  Looks rather good if I do say so myself.  I did notice it had zero cargo space though - not that it matters for an alien / admin ship.

Well good luck with your search. But if you cannot find out how to do it maybe you could add a texture to the ship model that says what it is. Could that work?

Regardless, you've done a lot of very impressive work with it.

 

On a side-note, I did find a server account management program that works with the mod (although it is designed for Discovery & flhook, it's possible to make changes server-side on the fly) and set up an admin character in a Thargoid warship.  Looks rather good if I do say so myself.  I did notice it had zero cargo space though - not that it matters for an alien / admin ship.

FLHook and multiplayer side of things is not something I've looked at as yet - been concentrating on getting all the main content into the game.

But now you mention it, I will have to build you an 'admin' ship - yes it can be a Thargoid warship, with "infinite" shields, and one-shot-kill weapons so you can enforce things on the server.

One of the things I have had in the back of my mind for using FLHook was enabling NPC Thargoid warships to spawn the little Tharglets - that would only work in multiplayer though and is something I will consider once I am happy that the open singleplayer is as complete as I can get it.

Well good luck with your search. But if you cannot find out how to do it maybe you could add a texture to the ship model that says what it is. Could that work?

If only I had the modelling and texturing skills.... I am a programmer, and I can do pretty much everything else except modelling & texturing - I could learn, but it's having the time to do it....

Another option is to create simple new models (just boxes) with the text as a texture and display these. But there is one more option, I've seen it on "The Void" mod, and that's like a billboard in space, which displays welcome text for the mod when you first launch from Manhattan in that mod. I'll have a look at how that was done, and maybe it will do the job.

 

I already set up the admin ship using "DSAccountManager".  Freelancer has an infinite power shield generator hidden away in it (likely used for testing & server admins only as it's only accessable via editing the save file or other mods).  Add on the "NPC Only Infinite Power Supply" and some decent turrets (in this case the Thargoid ones do the job) and there you have an instant admin ship.

 

Until flhook gets implemented, I can work with the account manager to handle the server admin stuff.  Sadly the partner program to the account manager "DS Process Manager" relies heavily on flhook for various automated tasks such as daily server restarts & server load checks.

 

For getting the warships to spawn the "tharglets", I'm not too sure how that would be done - but I do know that the Discovery Mod implemented (via flhook) docking modules for players.  However, those do have their own share of issues - including the player being docked with must be perfectly motionless and upon launching from another player's ship, the ship seems to enter a "no clipping" mode - but can affect other ships by flying through them.  (I believe the way Discovery implemented this was by putting a "proxy" base in every system 200k below the centre of the system and when a player docks onto a docking module, they get placed there until they launch.  Once they launch, flhook gets the current location of the ship with the docking module they docked with and spawns the player beside it.  If the ship with the docking module is docked in a base, the launched player will appear outside the base, but if the ship with the module was destroyed, the launched player will appear 200k below the system they originally docked in.)

 

Yeah, from what I've seen of FLHook it is a tricky thing. I do think spawning NPCs will be a lot less problematic than player ships - the game engine already does it when doing missions, so it's not a case of trying to find a workaround for a feature not already natively present.

Now, making the tharglets go "dead" when their parent mothership is destroyed will probably be extremely difficult, if not impossible. (how to tell the game engine one NPC ship 'belongs' to another NPC ship is just not there, and telling the 'child' ship to do something when the parent gets destroyed is not something I can see a way to do, so once a tharglet is spawned, there is no way to link it to the mothership it came from) But I can live with that 😀

I'm guessing this probably won't work at all, but perhaps you could get them to become neutral if the "group leader" becomes neutralized.  It may be simpler setting up a kind of "self-destruct" on the tharglets if there's no warships within a fixed range - prompting a scripted drop of Alien items.

I don't think there is anything wrong with self-sufficient Tharglets, your building your on take on Elite after all Stormprooter so a couple of changes from the original games is totally fine in my view for your mod. In fact it gives it a flavour all of its own!

In this I'm inclined to agree with Geraldine regarding the tharglets.  You do have to work within the limitations of the Freelancer game engine after all.

I do have a random thought though - which may be a way around your rotating stations issue.  In Freelancer it's possible to enable the planets to rotate.  Perhaps you could get the corolis stations assigned as planets and essentially have an invisible docking ring in front of the bays.  The main downside to this is how Freelancer treats planets and ships "under" the surface (insanely high radiation to cause near-instant death)

In this I'm inclined to agree with Geraldine regarding the tharglets.  You do have to work within the limitations of the Freelancer game engine after all.

 

I do have a random thought though - which may be a way around your rotating stations issue.  In Freelancer it's possible to enable the planets to rotate.  Perhaps you could get the corolis stations assigned as planets and essentially have an invisible docking ring in front of the bays.  The main downside to this is how Freelancer treats planets and ships "under" the surface (insanely high radiation to cause near-instant death)

Yeah, the tharglets thing is a "nice to have".

That's a good idea about the stations though - but I doubt it will work, unless I can find a way to skip the docking sequence animation. I think Nightstalkers mod does it with shipyards where large ships can dock - so I'll have a look at that for some clues. It may work out 😀

I don't think there is anything wrong with self-sufficient Tharglets, your building your on take on Elite after all Stormprooter so a couple of changes from the original games is totally fine in my view for your mod. In fact it gives it a flavour all of its own!

It's just my OCD kicking in. Tharglets spawning from thargoid ships is one of the signature features of the original game, so I would be inclined to at least explore the possibility of replicating that feature. If it turns out to be impossible, or just too time consuming to get done, then I'll still be happy with what we have already.

On the issue with ship names in the intro animations - the way this is done in most mods is to have a basic 'sign' model, and then textures for the text. I have 'obtained' some sign models and applied my own textures and tested, and it's not overly time consuming to get them done - so this is now on the todo list 😀

Yaaay!   The intro will look fab! Well done Stormprooter!