Mostly Harmless

[Gunbladelad]

Looking good.Due to my connection setup, I'll see about downloading from ModDB a week on Wednesday (when I top up the web allowance) and have a good poke through it I know that flstat - a program which reads the game files and shows a spreadsheet with all the item locations and best selling points - works with the older version, so I'm sure it'll work with the update. I'll check that Freelancer Server Process Manager and Server Account Managers (2 server admin tools) work with the new version once I've got it.

[Stormprooter]

Been looking at FLHook and plugin development and it is now starting to dawn on me that any hopes I had of having a 'life' are now shattered. FLHook is a pretty nifty bit of software, developing some of my own plugins will allow me to put some more features of the original 'Elite' game into my mod (at least for multiplayer), things like displaying the "Right On, Commander!" message every 25 kills, awarding bounties for killing NPC pirates and Thargoids, perhaps even scripting some 'Special missions' - Constrictor Hunt and the Cloaking Device ASP attack for starters Besides getting all excited about that, I still have much to do with this mod to make it a more immersive and coherent experience - re-doing all the voice stuff is one massive task in front of me (looking for a decent text-to-speech engine/api for this), re-modelling all the stations (may have to get some help on this as I have failed three times already to get anywhere with it) so I can get them to rotate and still work with the docking procedure is another, then there is all the extra content I want to add. One feature I really want to get to is a mission type (like in one of the Oolite OXPs) which is a massive battle against the Thargoids, which will include other 'freelance' npcs, Galactic Navy npcs and Battleships. With FLHook now in the mix it will also be possible to make the online game universe much more dynamic - I have so many ideas my head is going to explode! I just wish I had more time to work on this.

[Gunbladelad]

One thing I will suggest is including a copy of an adjusted version of flserver to run with the mod, as most people wont be aware on how to correctly edit their actual flserver program to match up with the mod version via resource hacker and similar programs.

[Stormprooter]

Good point. Will do.EDIT: Job Done, update posted to MODDB, may not be available for a few hours until the admins authorise it.

[Gunbladelad]

As of this moment it's up and available for download.I'm sure we can expect the odd Mostly Harmless server to appear within the next few days.

[Stormprooter]

As of this moment it's up and available for download.I'm sure we can expect the odd Mostly Harmless server to appear within the next few days. Cool, I will keep an eye out :crazypilot:

[Stormprooter]

Some police-themed screenshots - these are the sorts of scenes I used to spend hours drawing on paper when I was a teenager. One of things I loved about ELITE were the simple straight-edged ship designs, so even I could draw them so long as I kept the ruler steady

[Gunbladelad]

Just as a heads-up, your latest upload to moddb is downloading fine, but FLMM is coming up with a "Archive may be corrupted" message - a manual look through it using Winrar seems to show a lot of missing files too - including flserver. (3 different downloads, all identical results). Thankfully I've got my own copy of flserver modified to work correctly, but I don't think it'll show up online due to my connection being 3G based. I did get some screenshots myself of a mission where I had to go & wipe out some pesky Thargoids. I'll just share the one here, but the other 2 are on the Frontier forums. I know - the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed the human names by the thargoids. This may be tricky to remove for just the Thargoids alone - especially in regards to mission-spawned NPCs. As a result they also have human comm chatter too.

[Stormprooter]

Cheers for the heads-up Gun - re-uploading now. The archive on my local drive is fine - must have corrupted on upload (not the first time that's happened). And yes, at this stage the Thargoids have 'human' names, and speak english perfectly, this is what we game developers call 'white boxing' This is where you use place-holder assets for a game so you can make it work, while the real assets are still being developed. In the case of the Thargoids, I need to create some insect-like animations for when they communicate/taunt you, also I need to re-create all the voice stuff in the game (which is no small task), then I can do the Thargoid chatter as being like the Elite lore, where it is badly translated and makes no sense, like "Eat goats like sensual poet". Until I can get the voice stuff done, no real point in doing much else.

[Gunbladelad]

I know that in Discovery (and possibly vanilla Freelancer too - it's been a while since I played it without mods) they just have blank names for the Nomads, but the latest Discovery mod has its own (sizable) custom name database. I'm not too sure how you coded in the thargoids in this, but perhaps looking at the NPC setup for the Nomads in normal Freelancer could get you an idea on how to minimize the human names & chatter for the Thargoids until you've got something else arranged for them.

[Stormprooter]

The NPC names are all stored in string tables in the mod content dlls, I was lazy and generated them all from the top 100 male names, top 100 female names and top 100 surnames I got off some popular names website - from this I generate 20000 names. When creating the factions data for encounters, the list of possible names (one list for female, one list for male) is set as a range of addresses of these names, the game engine then picks one of the names in the range at random to assign to the specific NPC that has spawned. So, in simple terms, I can create empty or blank names, or insecty-type names specifically for the Thargoids. I will study the vanilla code to see how nomads are set up to eliminate the comms and chatter.

[Stormprooter]

Just added HD textures for everything except the stations and ships (as these were already high quality as provided by Gibbon), running on my development machine - and it is a marked improvement in eye candy Lave Station in Glorious HD 

[Pinback]

Stunning pics Stormprooter I must try and get Freelancer running.

[Gunbladelad]

Agreed - very nice looking, but I'm stuck with 1024x768 for the forseeable future.I'm not getting much chance to do much gaming at all due to a busy work life (11 hour shifts, 3 hours travel each way = very little time to do much apart from sleep...), but I'll get stuck in on my days off and once the job finishes up.

[Stormprooter]

Credit goes to RadiantGFX for the HD textures for planets & other objects, and to Hunon for the star backgrounds This will still improve the graphics on 1024x768 resolution. The original textures were limited so they could run smoothly on a 16MB graphics card, even on low-end modern graphics cards these new textures will run fine. I believe they can be taken even further in resolution which would yield a very high level of definition for objects close up. Anyway, links to the downloads below, I will be bundling these with the next release of the mod. HD Textures by radiantHD Starspheres by Hunon These will work with the vanilla game also.The Starspheres pack also includes some Nav Map mods.

[Gunbladelad]

I've been given a heads-up by a friend that the moddb download is still corrupt. He's tried to download 3 times today and it's given an error message in FLMM every time.This is just a suggestion, but why not upload here so that there's an alternate location for people to get it in case one of the download locations is broken?

[Stormprooter]

Just downloaded it from moddb and extracted it fine using WinRAR. Don't know about using FLMM. How do I upload it here?

[Gunbladelad]

Go here - [url]http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/files/[/url] - and just below your username you'll see a button saying "Upload file". Simply click that and follow the instructions. It might take a day or two to get approved by the sscadmin, but it should be good as long as it doesn't corrupt on upload. Most people tend to "drag & drop" Freelancer mods into FLMM, so it might just be that FLMM itself is having trouble understanding the exact compression you're using for some reason.

[Stormprooter]

Could be, I used 'normal' compression in WinRAR to make a zip ??? Anyway, I've uploaded the zip only to the downloads section - all anyone will need to do with this is unzip it to their FLMM mods folder, then run FLMM and it should be there. Ive tested it twice with FLMM 1.3 and it works for me. I think it may be an issue with the filename "MostlyHarmless0.2a.1.zip.flmod" having too many dots - but I'm not sure. I thought it may be a stray ampersand(&) in the script.xml - xml don't like ampersands you have to put in & - but that's all fine. 

[Gunbladelad]

OK, I'll let him know. Thanks for looking into it.