Engine rework

now, when I reinstalled freelancer last week I told myself I wasn't gonna get into it like I did before, but to no avail. After seeing that my all time favourite ship, the ragnarok gunship, was in cf but was impossible to get, I started delving into the ini's and the dll's again.

I'm working on my own little modifications to turn the game into what I always thought it should be. for one thing, I want all the components of the ships to be separate. when you buy a ship you should buy the hull, then the engine, the power plant, etc.

But, there are a few things I can't figure out.

1. After you buy an engine, you can't sell it back. Even if engines take up no space, I don't want a long list of engines on my ship. How do I make the game let me sell engines?

2. Is there any way to make cruise speed specific to an engine?

3. I see in CF you somehow added a "license" and a "shield upgrade" slot in the merchant window. How do you do that, and is it possible to make one for the engine, power plant, cloak device, etc?

4. I know this seems to be an area of contention, but I really want a working cloak device in sp. I get the impression that its been done, but its some kind of super secret. will anyone break the silence?

As a note, points 1 and 2 have been done. Someone named alcaster was working on something called the freelimits enhancement project that did just that plus a few other things... but it seems to be lost to the internet.

Can anyone help me with any of these problems?

are there tutorials for any of these things?

lol, ok then. off to the drawing board I guess.

sona1111

yeah, it seems to be possible, by editing something in the common.dll. I'm not sure what, because I have no idea how to edit it, a normal resource editor doesn't show anything. I was able to get a hold of some of Alcander's freelimits modifications, so I now have different cruise speeds for different engines. HOWEVER, having this edited common.dll will cause Freelancer to generate an error when you quit, and it makes flserver freeze up when you try to quit. I don't know why it does this or how to fix it. But it doesn't effect gameplay, so I still use it.

I'll gladly send the dll to anyone who wants to use it or work on it though.

one thing I would like to know is how to change hardpoint classes. I can't for the life of me find any entries in the dll's containing the names of the hardpoints.

Alright, I'll send you the dll straight away. The instructions are fairly simple.

1. Replace the common.dll (after backing it up of course), with the one I'm sending you
2. Remove the Cruise_Speed and cruise_accel_time lines from the constants.ini, for some reason having them in there will cause crashes.
3. Add Cruise_Speed and Cruise_accel_time lines to every engine in engine_equip.ini
4. Make sure none of your cruise speeds go over the ANOM_LIMITS_MAX_VELOCITY in the constants.ini, change one or the other so they don't conflict.
5. ????
6. Profit!

Well, unfortunately the freelimits only download seems to be lost to the ages. I did find one mod that uses it, so I took the exe and the common.dll out of it. But there are 2 problems

1. I don't know all the files the freelimits changed, so maybe I should have taken more from this other mod
2. I don't know if this other mod changed anything else in the exe or the dll, so these might be a little different from the freelimits.

But I'll gladly send the exe and common.dll to you if you want to take a look. Hopefully you can fix the errors the dll produces.

Here is the site where I first learned of freelimits. Hopefully you can get more from it then I did.
http://z14.invisionfree.com/Fr…rum/index.php?showforum=3