Dunno. I ran into the same problem. I've ended up just going to forums like this *great collection* or specific mod sites forums.

For awhile it looked like the Reactor was becoming a hybrid site, then about 6 months later, *POOF*

Yeah I was just on it before my vacation in Aug and the forums were still up and pretty active. Wonder if they just gave up the FL life. I think there was some drama between other groups/websites that caused a lot of friction in the community. But that is all I know. Just a shame that a community that has been online for so long close the doors. They should have let me know I would have gladly hosted all the downloads and gave them some space here if they wanted it.

With everyone's help overtime SSC will develop into a great resource for everyone interested in space gaming. I'm actually looking forward to see what next year at this time SSC will be like? I will be extremely satisfied if I can get traffic to 100k hits per month. For a niche website like this I think that would be quite the feat. At roughly 30-40k monthly right now so we'll see....

It looks to me as though some of the old site moved to LancersReactor.org

However, most of the forum posts are missing and the downloads area is a HUGE mess of filenames without descriptions.

Yeah, it would have been terrific if you could have picked up the old content, in case the original site owners are no longer interested.

I miss LancersReactor... but I'm glad to see SpaceSimCentral.

B

Thanks Bullwinkle for the update I will update my links page with the change. And I agree sometimes its a shame sites die off but information should try to be preserved because there was a lot of files and informative posts on TLR a while back and its a shame some of the good stuff is gone.

But to the admins of TLR if you want I will gladly host the files if you need me to just give me a location with the dump of the files and I'll take care of the rest 🙂

LancersReactor was such a great place and so well-known that one would think that somebody on your board should know the owners.

From what I see at LancersReactor.org -- and I am completely guessing here -- it looks to me as though they have some of the old board but not all of it. Or trouble with re-installing the board, or some other technical difficulty. Somebody is running a board (and they know about Freelancer) but the downloads section lacks descriptions (and there are a LOT of files) and they appear to be re-building the forum from scratch rather than porting the old forum.

It looks almost as though somebody has taken over the old board -- somebody who is not the original webmaster. Heck, if Wing Commander is 20 years old, then it could even be the original webmaster's kid(s)!

I suppose the big question is whether the LancersReactor owners see you as a colleague or a competitor. I'm not sure what the etiquette is about board owners approaching each other, but you could probably email or PM the admin.

B

I know I don't look at anything as competition. I do this all for the fun of the space games and I want to try to bring a community of gamers together where it is ok to talk about all the games and not just a one game site. I know there has been some sites I have asked just to get a link on their site and I got a no but I still put a link to them. Some people are like that and some are not.

I have to do a bit more work on the download area, but I will contact the LR staff and see what they have to say about the whole situation. I just hate seeing valuable info/files lost forever.

Yeah, it would be great if you could help to recover some of what they had there.

But, wait... what other games are you talking about? Is there anything other than Freelancer?

😉

B

I know a few years ago TLR had StarLancer mods on there site as well and I cannot seem to find any SL mods any more.

Nowadays TLR is a shadow of its former glory . For a while it's been replaced by this website: http://the-starport.net/

The starport is a nice site. It has gone through a few site changes over the past year but getting better and better. Starport doesn't have nearly the files that TLR had in there download area and if anyone has access to these or has them archived I will glady download them and get them uploaded to the site.

It's a shame when any dataloss happens and people loose mods/files forever.

There are ppl on the Starport that have some of those files, that you mentioned, on their HDD. If you made a post somewhere there I believe they will be inclined to hand them over. Maybe you could rebuild the old files archive here 🙂 Just a thought

Looks like TLR has a bunch of downloads available, just there is no descriptions on them 🙁 Over time I will grab downloads that are very useful, mainly the tutorials and tools and some of the mods. I really wanted to concentrate on SP mods and gather them all up. Because MP mods even though they are fun finding people to play on the servers is getting harder unless you are running the latest mods.

Darkone, it would be incredible if you did that!

It is not a small task because you would have to download a couple of hundred files, open them up and read the ReadMe's to find out what they are, then upload, organize, and describe them on SSC. Maybe rename the files while you are at it to make the names more descriptive? I figure at least a couple of days effort... maybe more if you do a really nice job with the organization and descriptions.

But, man, it would be sweet!

I vote for emphasis on tutorials, reference information, and tools, because TRL was the place to go for that stuff. Most of the big mods -- that affect the entire game or universe -- seem to be hosted at ModDB, so they are less rare. But there were many small mods (a single ship or weapon) that were pretty cool.

I cautiously volunteer to give you a little help, if you want. 🙂 Emphasis on "little", but the effort is certainly worth making a contribution.

Or, better yet, if you find a way to get my hands on the source code for FLMM 1.31, I would take a stab at fixing it! If FLMM were more reliable without sacrificing backward compatibility, it would be a big help to everyone. I could even work in some of the mini-mods that I mentioned on the "So what mods do you recommend?" thread.

I was going to work on that little at a time, because I want to play the STO beta before it runs out 🙂 But your recommendations on files is noted and that was really what I was going for anyway. I think I gave registered users access to edit info in the files... I think. I would have to double check to see if users could edit descriptions of files they didn't upload.

But give me some time i'll get it done 🙂

I got some more information about TheLancersReactor (TLR) from the sysop for the Crossfire mod (Swat_OPR8R). Apparently:

Microsoft closed TLR (reasons not made public).

Old owners left (forced out? discouraged?).

New owners allegedly pissed off most of the Freelancer community. There was some commotion, some of which was apparently dirty, messy, and time consuming.

It seems that a couple of people have the files, including Swat_OPR8R, but nobody seems to want to restore them, for fear of restarting the war.

And nobody wants to talk about any more than the above.

So, it seems that, the best people to talk to would be the OLD owners of TLR. Unfortunately, I don't know who they were.

Microsoft closed TLR .... ? I just don't see how can that be. Microsoft is in no way related to TLR

All I know is what I reported, below, and that he also said that he did not want to discuss it further.

But, sure, Microsoft owns the content that TLR taught people to reverse-engineer (mod)... so they certainly have the right to get a court order to shut down a site if they can demonstrate that the site is involved in violating Microsoft's EULA (End User License Agreement).

I shocked me, too, because TLR was such a great site for so many years. I got the impression that it was not the owners of TLR who caused the trouble, but I don't know any more than that.

I am running lancersreactor.org as a holding place while i get back lancersreactor.com domain.

When lancersreactor.com comes back it will be with all the original content + expansion into some new scifi based games.

I will also have on board backedpotato one of the original Admins on the old lancersreactor.com I dont have an excat time frame but i am hoping to at least have the domain issue resolved by the end of next week. Nice to see spacesimcentral is still alive and kicking.

First of all, TLR was hosted by Microsoft. They did not shut it down, they simply no longer wanted to host it.

Second point: The old TLR files are available on The-Starport download section:

http://the-starport.net/freelancer/down ... .php?cid=5

Third point: The old TLR forum can be read on the following URL, also hosted by The-Starport:

http://www.the-starport.net/archive/

greets,

w0dk4

Thank you for that explanation, w0dk4! The part about Microsoft being the former host for TLR explains a LOT!

I have noticed that The-Starport.net has a lot of excellent content and that many of the heavy-hitters of the community post there. I did not realize that you have the complete TLR archives... Thank you for that!

I have seen your posts for many years, w0dk4. Do I understand correctly that you are now hosting The-Starport? Every time I look at The-Starport I see improvements. Thank you for your important contributions to the community!

Hello Folks

A long time ago Starlancer was one of my favorite games. It wasn't Wing Commander but then it sort of was......... so to speak. One good thing about Starlancer was that I discovered the Lancers Reactor and the many ships I could upload into the game. Two of my personal favorites were the Thunder Fighter from Buck Rogers and the Hammerhead from Space Above and Beyond. In fact I completed the game in a tricked out Hammerhead. One process that was promised by the folks on LR was a Starlancer Mission Editor (ala Freespace's FRED) and to that I would like to ask a question. Simply, does anyone know whether the "editor" was ever created???? I kept up with the progress for a while but other things popped up and I stopped looking.

I don't even know whether StarLancer would work on my current system, I still have the disks somewhere. But if would be nice to play it again if I could get it to run. Oh well, another game to put on the list.

DarKenK

The stolen archive will be back on lancersreactor soon along with original domain and some of the original admin ie bakedpotato + finalday and some others

The site will acctualy be returned to its original state with all original download descriptions in place the newer posts will then be imported.

"Stolen" .... i'm sensing a dispute coming this way.

(*Shrug*)... he's just trying to make noise, SolCommand. He already identified himself as one of the trouble-makers involved in destroying TLR.

If anything were actually stolen, you can bet that Microsoft would be on top of it in a heartbeat. Microsoft is clear that they own everything about their games. Here are two paragraphs from the Microsoft Game Content Usage Rules (addressed to modders):

Here’s the magic words from our lawyers: so long as you respect these rules, Microsoft grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use and display Game Content and to create derivative works based upon Game Content, strictly for noncommercial and personal use. We can revoke this limited use license at any time and for any reason. ...

... You can’t reverse engineer our games to access the assets or otherwise do things that the games don’t normally permit in order to create your Items.

Since all Freelancer mods are reverse-engineered, I read MS's rules as saying that Freelancer mods are already in a "grey" area: MS reserves the right to stop any or all of it at any time that they choose.

In other words, people who create conflict in the Freelancer community run the risk of destroying all of the fun... for everyone.