Hmm... admittedly Exoplasm, I've never run a server before, but I can look into how you'd change that value and report back! There's got to be some server tool or settings that you can tweak to (for example) give all new players an exorbitant amount of money.
At that point, players would just have to jump on during the week and make their way on their own to whatever world/base was selling the particular capital ship (or what not) they wanted to fight with. If they didn't take the time during the week to get the ship they wanted to fight with and proceed to the determined sector for the combat night, they'll have to make do with whatever they have on hand.
Let me know if you want me to look that up, and I'll try to find out how you can change that starting money value. From there, all we have to do is drum up support in this thread and set a specific sector and date for the biggest brawl space has ever seen. We'll do our own Freelancer version of Gratuitous Space Battles.
EDIT: How about this?
PA Forums' GRATUITOUS SPACE BATTLE NIGHT a'la' Freelancer
DATE: Saturday, March 6th, 2010
TIME: 6pm EST - whenever we get tired of the violence
WHERE: The official PA Freelancer Server (See OP), New York Sector, in the area around Planet Manhattan
WHAT:
Fight with the Capital Ship/Bomber/Fighter of your choice in a no-holds-barred festival of lasers, missiles, and destruction.
Once exoplasm activates it (wait here for the news... we're still not sure how!), create a new character. That new character will have a ludicrous amount of money. You'll have until 6pm on March 6th to use that money to buy whatever ship you want and equip it with whatever items you want: no limitations, no need to worry about factions, no whining, no refunds.
At 6pm, meet us in the skies above Planet Manhattan with your chosen machine of penultimate destruction for a fight that could only rival the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny in its sheer awesomeness.
*********** FAQ ***********
Q: How do I get my hands on Freelancer so I can join this epic slugfest?
You can get it legally from any of these (it'll take a while to reach you, since you can only get physical copies legally... hence the March 6th start date for these slugfests)
Aside from physical copies, I know of no other legal way to get the game (unfortunately) at the moment: but if you don't already own it, I encourage you to get it while you can. There hasn't been a better space flight sim made this generation, and with only physical distribution who knows how much longer it'll even be available to find legally at all. Get it. Get it now. Stop reading this and go buy it.
Q: I have the game, how do I get the Mods needed to join the Penny Arcade server?
Follow exoplasm's instructions in the OP. It will get you what you need. It takes some time to set up, but trust me when I say it's worth it.
Q: What ships are available, and where do I get them?
This link will take you to everything you need to know about ships. Read about the advantages and disadvantages of each ship. Click on a specific ship to learn more about it and to reach the "spoiler" tag that shows you the locations where it can be purchased.
Ignore the crap about "required licenses" and "roleplay restrictions/IDs" when you read the ship information: those are admin-imposed restrictions on the "official" roleplay servers, and PA doesn't roll like that. We roll dirty. And that means everyone will be rollin' with Capital Ships for this fight, licenses and IDs be damned.
Q: What weapons/equipment are available, and where do I get them?
This link will take you to everything you need to know about weapons. Read it carefully: there's a lot to learn about the types of weapons, missiles, mines and equipment. If you're going to spend time researching in preparation for this fight, spend it learning as much as you can about which weapons and equipment you should equip your ship with.
When you get over there, click on the various classes of weapons or types of equipment to see a list: clicking on those will give you more details, as well as a "spoiler" tag that you can click on to learn the locations you have to travel to in order to buy said items. Remember, it's your responsibility to fly out to wherever these things are being sold and buy them.
Again, ignore anything in the descriptions about roleplaying restrictions. If you can find it, you can use it: those restrictions they mention are just for roleplaying purposes on the official servers, and roleplaying is just about the last thing we're going to be doing on this epic night of twisted metal and bloated, charred corpses floating in the vast debris fields of battle.
Hmm... admittedly Exoplasm, I've never run a server before, but I can look into how you'd change that value and report back! There's got to be some server tool or settings that you can tweak to (for example) give all new players an exorbitant amount of money.
At that point, players would just have to jump on during the week and make their way on their own to whatever world/base was selling the particular capital ship (or what not) they wanted to fight with. If they didn't take the time during the week to get the ship they wanted to fight with and proceed to the determined sector for the combat night, they'll have to make do with whatever they have on hand.
Let me know if you want me to look that up, and I'll try to find out how you can change that starting money value. From there, all we have to do is drum up support in this thread and set a specific sector and date for the biggest brawl space has ever seen. We'll do our own Freelancer version of Gratuitous Space Battles.
the money thing is a setting when you activate the mod.
Ahh, aye. We must be able to change it in a file somewhere then.
Ooh, I'm finding very interesting things. Okay, check it out... for the easiest way to be able to freely purchase anything, you can do the following on the server:
* Open C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\mpnewcharacter.fl
For every "house =" entry, change the first number from whatever it is to 0 or higher. That means they'll be neutral, and won't attack new players: which means you'll be free to go buy whatever you want.
You can also see in there that the starting money is linked to "%%MONEY%%"... that must be getting defined somewhere. I checked Environment variables, no dice as far as I can tell, must be in a file somewhere.
EDIT: Ahhh... from what I can tell, it looks to be in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\newcharacter.fl Unless I'm mistaken, mpnewcharacter.fl gets its "%%MONEY%%" parameter from plain old newcharacter.fl. So if you open that and change it to, say, 1500000000 (1.5 billion), that should be enough to get everyone on the gravy train.
I can just deactivate the mod, then reactivate it with different settings on the server. It is not that difficult. It has a starting money setting and a setting to make everyone neutral at the start.
Alternatively I have a server manager tool that lets me edit characters as needed.
Edit: This has been done. It won't affect existing characters, though. We'll see how it goes I guess?
Sweet! Yeah, I think it could be fun potentially! It'd at least give the PA server something truly interesting and original to offer compared to the "official" servers.
Funny, I was just thinking about Freelancer the other day. It's one of those games that isn't superbly polished, but it is still does what it does well and is damn enjoyable to play.
Funny, I was just thinking about Freelancer the other day. It's one of those games that isn't superbly polished, but it is still does what it does well and is damn enjoyable to play.
How does the Discovery mod fare on old machines?
I would assume that if you can run vanilla Freelancer, you can also run Discovery. You can choose to not install the updated shaders (or whatever it is they include to increase the pretty).
Aye: there's some larger and more complex ships, but I can't imagine that they could've modded it to the point where they're actually doing anything which requires more intense computation than just having more polygons.
I was hoping to play this game solo and vanilla first, which is why I wanted to know about any (un)official patches and the like that fix bugs.
There was only one official patch for Freelancer, and all it had to do with was Multiplayer, and even then only if you had a specific problem or two. There's no need to use it and as far as I know there aren't any unofficial patches either.
As far as the game goes, I found it remarkably bug-free when I played it solo. Yeah, every now and again you'd run into a little oddity with a script trigger or something, but by and large it was A-OK.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
0
TrippyJingMoses supposes his toeses are roses.But Moses supposes erroneously.Registered Userregular
edited February 2010
Sweet. I was originally going to play solo with the Discovery mod, but that was until it dropped me off on Pennsylvania with no story.
I just realized you start on this server with, like, over a billion credits. Isn't that a bit... overkill?
I do not like this either, it ruins the progression.
I say we roll back and have everyone start with 20,000
Jaramr and Snowfield, what we were picturing for this was to give something you can't get on the official servers: basically, the ability to have a gigantic epic battleship battle royale, and other themed nights so we can have fun with the game in ways outside of the normal progression.
We could also play for example on the Discovery USA official server if we want normal progression: but this way, we can do something fun and unique with our own private server that they wouldn't allow on the official servers.
Our first try at this, a gigantic battle royale held in the skies above Planet Manhattan, will be taking place the weekend after next hopefully.
Personally, I'll be playing both on the official US server and the PA server for this reason. If the PA server just provided what the official US server did, there'd really be no reason to join the PA server.
If you're going to join an official server, join Discovery USA: I think geographically it'll likely be the closest for most of us and it'll have the lowest ping. We could create a player faction! And then when we want to blow some stuff up in ways that would get you kicked/banned from the official server, we can do that in the PA server. There's really no need to choose between them.
Some nifty commands;
-dx
Widescreen support, where the screen size is set to the current desktop resolution
-dWxH
Widescreen support, where W = screen width and H = screen height.
-noflighttext
Hide the "Mouse Flight" and associated text on the hud.
-nohud
Disable hud
-logchat
Log chat to My Documents\Freelancer\dsace.log
-logtime
Include the timestamp in chat log
-localtime
Show the timestamp in local time rather than UTC.
-newplayer
Enable new player messages. By default new player messages are disabled
-dptplayer
Enable departing player messages. By default departing player messages are disabled
-lag
Show the lag indicator icon. By default the lag indicator icon is disabled.
I always really wanted to enjoy the multiplayer on this game, but I found it to be brutally unforgiving of bad ping times. Even in the 100 range enemies would bounce all over the screen and be damn near impossible to hit.
Agreed Lork. Pretty much every space sim other than Freelancer that I've ever played made me want to bust out a joystick with 20+ buttons just to use the most basic controls... which can be fun, but requires special hardware and a different lengthy learning curve with every game.
Freelancer... just worked, and worked brilliantly. I never once have found myself wishing I was using a joystick playing Freelancer... and even if I didn't have a keyboard, I probably wouldn't miss that either. I'm surprised that their awesome control scheme is so infrequently emulated.
You can play x3 tc with just the mouse just fine. x3 reunion too I think.
It feels better with the mouse though. There's click menus for everything too, although for some of the menu commands it's faster to use the associated hotkeys.
You do need to accelerate and stuff with the keyboard and strafing is a big part of combat, but you had to do that in freelancer too as far as I can remember. I was always turning off my engine to turn faster in freelancer.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Awesome.. what about past that? Same sort of player-driven economy? I've never heard of this game, and I really love space games...
No, it's a static npc economy. A trade route stays a trade route. It's there for the player to use.
It's primarily a single player universe with a story, the multiplayer lets you transcend that but no where near the same level as eve. You don't make a ship you buy it, for example. You can mine but it's horribly implemented. The ship combat is much much much much more fun though. And very easy to play while still making you think a bit.
You wont fall asleep pew pewing in freelancer.
If I was you I'd get the game and play the singleplayer through once first. It's a pretty well done story and forces you to make a certain amount of money to progress so it makes you branch out and explore the universe a bit as you go.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Aye, I second the recommendation that people who've never played Freelancer before try the single player campaign. When you play through it, you'll have a better understanding of the universe in which the game takes place, which will help if you decide to join those "official" servers (which basically assume knowledge of the big players in Freelancer's universe)
Of course, for our grand melees on the PA server, no knowledge of that manner is required. Just big guns and big ships.
Posts
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
The OP has information on what you need to download in order to play with us.
SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream
At that point, players would just have to jump on during the week and make their way on their own to whatever world/base was selling the particular capital ship (or what not) they wanted to fight with. If they didn't take the time during the week to get the ship they wanted to fight with and proceed to the determined sector for the combat night, they'll have to make do with whatever they have on hand.
Let me know if you want me to look that up, and I'll try to find out how you can change that starting money value. From there, all we have to do is drum up support in this thread and set a specific sector and date for the biggest brawl space has ever seen. We'll do our own Freelancer version of Gratuitous Space Battles.
EDIT: How about this?
PA Forums' GRATUITOUS SPACE BATTLE NIGHT a'la' Freelancer
DATE: Saturday, March 6th, 2010
TIME: 6pm EST - whenever we get tired of the violence
WHERE: The official PA Freelancer Server (See OP), New York Sector, in the area around Planet Manhattan
WHAT:
Fight with the Capital Ship/Bomber/Fighter of your choice in a no-holds-barred festival of lasers, missiles, and destruction.
Once exoplasm activates it (wait here for the news... we're still not sure how!), create a new character. That new character will have a ludicrous amount of money. You'll have until 6pm on March 6th to use that money to buy whatever ship you want and equip it with whatever items you want: no limitations, no need to worry about factions, no whining, no refunds.
At 6pm, meet us in the skies above Planet Manhattan with your chosen machine of penultimate destruction for a fight that could only rival the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny in its sheer awesomeness.
*********** FAQ ***********
Q: How do I get my hands on Freelancer so I can join this epic slugfest?
You can get it legally from any of these (it'll take a while to reach you, since you can only get physical copies legally... hence the March 6th start date for these slugfests)
Buy it at Target for $9.99
Amazon (though it appears to be reselling through Target!)
Wal-Mart, again 9.99
Radio Shack... guess the price
Aside from physical copies, I know of no other legal way to get the game (unfortunately) at the moment: but if you don't already own it, I encourage you to get it while you can. There hasn't been a better space flight sim made this generation, and with only physical distribution who knows how much longer it'll even be available to find legally at all. Get it. Get it now. Stop reading this and go buy it.
Q: I have the game, how do I get the Mods needed to join the Penny Arcade server?
Follow exoplasm's instructions in the OP. It will get you what you need. It takes some time to set up, but trust me when I say it's worth it.
Q: What ships are available, and where do I get them?
This link will take you to everything you need to know about ships. Read about the advantages and disadvantages of each ship. Click on a specific ship to learn more about it and to reach the "spoiler" tag that shows you the locations where it can be purchased.
CLICK HERE FOR SHIP INFORMATION
Ignore the crap about "required licenses" and "roleplay restrictions/IDs" when you read the ship information: those are admin-imposed restrictions on the "official" roleplay servers, and PA doesn't roll like that. We roll dirty. And that means everyone will be rollin' with Capital Ships for this fight, licenses and IDs be damned.
Q: What weapons/equipment are available, and where do I get them?
This link will take you to everything you need to know about weapons. Read it carefully: there's a lot to learn about the types of weapons, missiles, mines and equipment. If you're going to spend time researching in preparation for this fight, spend it learning as much as you can about which weapons and equipment you should equip your ship with.
CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT
When you get over there, click on the various classes of weapons or types of equipment to see a list: clicking on those will give you more details, as well as a "spoiler" tag that you can click on to learn the locations you have to travel to in order to buy said items. Remember, it's your responsibility to fly out to wherever these things are being sold and buy them.
Again, ignore anything in the descriptions about roleplaying restrictions. If you can find it, you can use it: those restrictions they mention are just for roleplaying purposes on the official servers, and roleplaying is just about the last thing we're going to be doing on this epic night of twisted metal and bloated, charred corpses floating in the vast debris fields of battle.
the money thing is a setting when you activate the mod.
Ooh, I'm finding very interesting things. Okay, check it out... for the easiest way to be able to freely purchase anything, you can do the following on the server:
* Open C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\mpnewcharacter.fl
For every "house =" entry, change the first number from whatever it is to 0 or higher. That means they'll be neutral, and won't attack new players: which means you'll be free to go buy whatever you want.
You can also see in there that the starting money is linked to "%%MONEY%%"... that must be getting defined somewhere. I checked Environment variables, no dice as far as I can tell, must be in a file somewhere.
EDIT: Ahhh... from what I can tell, it looks to be in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\newcharacter.fl Unless I'm mistaken, mpnewcharacter.fl gets its "%%MONEY%%" parameter from plain old newcharacter.fl. So if you open that and change it to, say, 1500000000 (1.5 billion), that should be enough to get everyone on the gravy train.
Alternatively I have a server manager tool that lets me edit characters as needed.
Edit: This has been done. It won't affect existing characters, though. We'll see how it goes I guess?
SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream
How does the Discovery mod fare on old machines?
I would assume that if you can run vanilla Freelancer, you can also run Discovery. You can choose to not install the updated shaders (or whatever it is they include to increase the pretty).
SC2 NA: exoplasm.519 | PA SC2 Mumble Server | My Website | My Stream
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
There was only one official patch for Freelancer, and all it had to do with was Multiplayer, and even then only if you had a specific problem or two. There's no need to use it and as far as I know there aren't any unofficial patches either.
As far as the game goes, I found it remarkably bug-free when I played it solo. Yeah, every now and again you'd run into a little oddity with a script trigger or something, but by and large it was A-OK.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
We're en route from. The Manhattan system. We're taking a shipment of. Boron. To. The Manhattan System.
I do not like this either, it ruins the progression.
I say we roll back and have everyone start with 20,000
mutter friggin...
EDIT: Never mind, I just realized I had something in the Class 3 slot, which was why I couldn't mount it.
Jaramr and Snowfield, what we were picturing for this was to give something you can't get on the official servers: basically, the ability to have a gigantic epic battleship battle royale, and other themed nights so we can have fun with the game in ways outside of the normal progression.
We could also play for example on the Discovery USA official server if we want normal progression: but this way, we can do something fun and unique with our own private server that they wouldn't allow on the official servers.
Our first try at this, a gigantic battle royale held in the skies above Planet Manhattan, will be taking place the weekend after next hopefully.
Personally, I'll be playing both on the official US server and the PA server for this reason. If the PA server just provided what the official US server did, there'd really be no reason to join the PA server.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
-dx
Widescreen support, where the screen size is set to the current desktop resolution
-dWxH
Widescreen support, where W = screen width and H = screen height.
-noflighttext
Hide the "Mouse Flight" and associated text on the hud.
-nohud
Disable hud
-logchat
Log chat to My Documents\Freelancer\dsace.log
-logtime
Include the timestamp in chat log
-localtime
Show the timestamp in local time rather than UTC.
-newplayer
Enable new player messages. By default new player messages are disabled
-dptplayer
Enable departing player messages. By default departing player messages are disabled
-lag
Show the lag indicator icon. By default the lag indicator icon is disabled.
Erie: Mining Machinery -> Philadelphia Station: Hydrocarbons -> Houston: Basic Alloy -> Erie
Will net you 1,986,400 credits with 2200 cargo space. Is roughly 2 systems worth of travel, and no real threat aside from other players.
You can play x3 tc with just the mouse just fine. x3 reunion too I think.
It feels better with the mouse though. There's click menus for everything too, although for some of the menu commands it's faster to use the associated hotkeys.
You do need to accelerate and stuff with the keyboard and strafing is a big part of combat, but you had to do that in freelancer too as far as I can remember. I was always turning off my engine to turn faster in freelancer.
No. you actually need to fly the ships in this one.
No, it's a static npc economy. A trade route stays a trade route. It's there for the player to use.
It's primarily a single player universe with a story, the multiplayer lets you transcend that but no where near the same level as eve. You don't make a ship you buy it, for example. You can mine but it's horribly implemented. The ship combat is much much much much more fun though. And very easy to play while still making you think a bit.
You wont fall asleep pew pewing in freelancer.
If I was you I'd get the game and play the singleplayer through once first. It's a pretty well done story and forces you to make a certain amount of money to progress so it makes you branch out and explore the universe a bit as you go.
Oh yeah, I'm ready for some space battles and Nomad hunting.
Of course, for our grand melees on the PA server, no knowledge of that manner is required. Just big guns and big ships.