Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

Only a small patch today which updates a bunch of system text strings.

I am mostly busy still working on the launcher but I make good progress meanwhile.

The last two broken animations have been fixed and I have started to link the launcher content directly with the forum. This way content updates can easily be done on the Forum and are automatically pushed directly to the launcher. No need to do content updates twice and with that the launcher always is up to date.

e.g. content from the CF System Rent is fetched to display active clan systems.

Content from the Clan forum part here shows info about all the clans including leader and members.

Info from the wiki has find its way on the launcher info pages such as the starter guide or combat guide.

etc.

The implementation is a bit time consuming but certainly worth it.

Freelancer 2023-04-30 15-16-29.png

All the Dom'Kavash bases got an update to their interiors, including the cityscape.

Patch is out.

Additionally the further work on the launcher has been done and I think this is pretty much the final state now.

The menu structures got cleaned up to eliminate double entries.

The last bugged animations got fixed and all the content pages are working.

Where I think it made sense to redirect to the Forum, and other Portal pages a new browser window will open. In all other cases the launcher will in most cases dynamically fetch the info to display from the Portal or the CF server.

e.g. "Mod News" will show the last entries of the Dev Forum

"Patch Notes" will fetch its content from Product overview - SWAT Portal (I have the intention to post updates here for discussion and also on the change logs)

"Server News" will fetch its info from the Server News forum (which apparently has not seen much of an update for a long time)

"Clans" get synchronized with the Portal clan forums

"Clan Systems" gets its updates from the CF System Rent shop

"Events" will show upcoming CF events that are scheduled via the Portal Calendar... so if we get back to the point where we have Event Managers again, players can see upcoming events right on the launcher. Furthermore have I added a dropdown selector to display the rules of the upcoming events.

I probably will clean the code a bit next week and then update the CF server to provide real dynamic news for the ticker.

After ~7 months of almost weekly updates to the mod I finally decided to do a clean installation and get an overview of what has been patched and what still needs to be done.

For me that is a good way to see if the patches all worked and if I forgot something due to the sheer amount of stuff that was updated.

To my surprise there are few station interiors which have not been updated even though I am 1000% sure that I worked on them. Dunno yet if something with the update failed or if I simply forgot to upload that stuff... investigating on this issue.

I also found one station which had missing texture definitions. I fixed that already and will push out a fix asap.

And then there is the stuff that considered low priority or simply not worth to be updated (since players probably would not notice a difference).

I am currently reviewing these files and will provide a pretty large update for the low priority stuff by next weekend. With that the update of the stations should be finally done and we can move on with the stuff explained/announced at Crossfire Updates 2023

change of plans

an update to the assets used on Planet Lost Paradise has just been released

(I have plans to further refine the setting but later™)

The announced next patch is going to be a bit bigger with ~180 files and ~700mb size.

Due to the amount of stuff that needs to be patches I shift the release to tomorrow (Monday) since I still have to write the update instructions.

Content:

• animation fix for coalition shipdealer
• release of the last station interior improvements (11 in total)
• improvement of interior items such as chairs, consoles and tables
• improvement of cityscape backgrounds
• improvement of all cityscape skydomes
• improvement of all ocean scenes
• improvement of planetscapes used in storyline
• improvement of backdrop items
• improvements on cityscape buildings
• further improvements to all station exteriors and other structures
• complete overhaul of all asteroid types in the game with the goal to improve the general look but also to make the different types look more distinct
• update to several coalition stations/structures
• a bunch of minor bug fixes
• minor launcher improvements

update is out

It seems that after the asteroid update a memory or cache issue prevented some of the changes to be applied and as result caused a good bunch of graphic errors on some of the asteroid models. Truth been told... Ive spend this afternoon investigating but I have no idea why the game loads outdated texture information instead of the new ones and where it actually is getting those from.

It does not make that much sense actually since even deleting shader cache and the faulty textures does not prevent the game to actually loading the faulty textures.

In the end I published a temporary fix that disables some of the texture settings. That should at least for now fix the broken asteroids but at the cost of some of the settings being not correctly applied.

Once I have a better understanding or even a working solution I will release another update. For now... it at least in theory should look "ok" again.

Second part of todays update is part 1 of the voice samples used in the storyline aswell the required adjustments to the story scripts. Those are getting updated now step by step.

I just updated the launcher options and switched V2 with recommended.

The final part of the story voice lines also got released. There have been significant quality improvements in this area. Some voice lines also were slightly changed.

Several cut scenes also got some visual updates and updates to their animations.

I was thinking about if some procedure can and should be applied to NPC voices in open space.

It's certainly not an easy task since additionally to creating the voice sample the sample also has to be modulated to fit to the original voice.

Its possible but certainly time consuming.

Certainly not a task I can do alone. But probably still worth doing.

After the story line voice update I tried to dig a bit deeper into what is required to give CF a full update of custom voice samples including the dialogues in bars and space chatter.

Ive spend half the week with data mining and creating pretty detailed spreadsheets since so many different areas are connected and multiple other parts of the mod would need to get updated too. Some of that stuff was planned anyways.

Since I did not get much (or any) feedback on faction layout of the systems I decided to go with the current settings and made sure that the settings for station ownership of all bases is consistent. That means that docking permissions, local faction, used voice lines, etc fit together. Truth be told... I expected a total mess since I did not really care that much about such stuff during the early years of development (it simply did not have priority). In the end actually most of the stuff did fit perfectly together. Only a handful of stations require some minor updates (which will be released soon).

More work needs to be done when it comes to the voice lines used for ship identification. A pretty large amount of ships has wrong settings. This is going to change pretty soon. I already started to work on this issue but most certainly will need another few days to finally get it sorted out.

As a next step new voice samples need to be created and modulated. Since that is a process that involves many different samples for multiple voices it certainly will take weeks to complete. (so dont expect a fast release)

Another topic I was working on are the LOD updates for ships and solar objects. I did a pre-selection of ~600 objects that will need to be tested and if required will receive update to the lod settings. I can't really tell how long that will take. But it is relative high on the to-do list atm.

Just some info about next updates.

As already mentioned I got into working on lots of voice related stuff. This takes it's time.

I meanwhile analyzed all the settings and started updating config files triggering voice samples.

e.g. new ships when clearly being able to be assigned to a vanilla faction will correctly use the faction specific voice samples when being contacted in space.

For civilian ships (aka all ships that do not fit into the major factions) custom voice lines will be used but just like with the majority of vanilla ships only ship classes will serve as reference. -> "Station bla bla blub to heavy fighter...". Vanilla FL had exactly 3 ships which were individually named but I am not going to do that, especially since this is a rare exception that apparently was not even carried on in the original game.

Voice lines for new CF commodities do not exist yet. That is going to change.

"Shipping water to Fort Bush" -> "Shipping coffee to Fort Bush" etc.

Planned limitations:

Escape pods technically are commodities and all of them no matter the rank will be referred as "prisoners"

There also is a large variety of Black Market Goods which are not getting individual voice lines but instead are going to be referred as "BMGs"

Factions, Station names, Planet names and System names are going to be correctly used on Bars and in space (once I managed to create all the new voice samples).

Bartenders will correctly use the "Welcome to Planet Crossfire" line (in best case with a perfect recreation of the original voice... or at least a close estimate of it).

Other NPCs are going to use "I work for the Renaissance" or "The Coalition doesn't" ... well you all know what I mean.

Most of the NPCs in CF already do that but the voices do not match and I hope to get that changed.

The update process might take multiple weeks since we are talking about thousands of new voice samples to be created.

So far my PC has sucked the nearby power plant dry and I only have created ~2500 voice samples (of which 1/3 will used due to quality reasons). But in total that is just about 10% of what I need to generate. This is going to take some time. I will probably release a first update in the next 2-3 weeks.

In the meantime I still can do some other updates to the mod but will announce the stuff when it's done.

I have meanwhile created 7.000 new voice samples for the first 15 NPC voices.

In the end a total of ~45 voices would need updates so this is 1/3 of the total that needs to be done.

Why so many samples?

Because I have created 3 variations for every required voice line and I am currently in the process of listening to all the samples and decide which of the 3 variations sounds best. With other words 2/3 of these 7000 samples will be scrapped again.

Nonetheless its still a massive amount of stuff to deal with.

The 15 voices covered so far are NPCs at bars exclusively. I essentially hope that these samples do not require further remodulation but have not done final tests yet.

Probably firsts tests can be done this weekend eventhough my time this weekend is pretty limited.

If everything works as intended these voices will be released via launcher update somewhen next week together with the already discussed changes to ship identification, market commodities and a bunch of other fixes to factions. The update will require to patch the server so a small downtime will happen for sure (maybe 15mins).

The other ~30 voices are NPCs in space (pilots and stations).

I have my doubts that it is possible to create samples without remodulating them additionally for radio distortions. In the end I think that will take MUCH longer than the voices on bars.

The compilation of ~120 samples takes about 1 hour but since this fortunaly is done on my gpu I can still do work on other topics in the meantime. So I guess there will be serveral weeks where my gpu does some background work while I move on to work on something different. The final modulation worries me a bit since I don't know yet what settings I have to use to immitate the radio noise used by FL.

To sum it up... don't expect fast progress and a release of the other 2/3 of the NPC voices soon.

Most likely the announced redesign of the systems will happen first.

fun fact: the algorithm speaks better Kavash and Chinese than Russian

Took a bit longer since I had to recreate a good bunch of voice samples where spelling went wrong or the correct voice failed to be initialize.

I have the intention to do a test run this evening and if everything works well there is going to be a release tomorrow morning.

Download size will be around 600mb.

~3% of the samples are going to be a refresh of existing stuff. Everything else is completely new voice stuff that was previously not playing at all.

In total there are 2853 new voice samples in this update and roughly 8500 changes to the settings. This also includes the previously mentioned corrections to the ships, factions, bases and commodities.

A bunch of these changes will refer to voice samples which do not exist yet. This should in worst case only trigger a few minor warnings in the error logs. I don't expect bigger problems. The warnings will disappear again once the 2nd part of the voice files is ready to be released.

This patch will require some detailed work on the server since it the files that get updated require synchronization and also market files will be altered for this... so there will be a short downtime of the server tomorrow.

EDIT: update will delay.

There seems to be a problem with playing the audio. Need to do further tests to figure out what's wrong.

I went through all the settings and found 50 minor errors concerning naming of samples since there seems to be a difference between male and female voices.

It might fix part of the issues that I have found during last test... dunno yet... going to do another test run this evening.

No matter what, it can not explain all the irregularities experienced during the last test. I cross checked all references in the game but was not able to find further errors.

Dunno if I have missed something important but actually I pretty much cross-indexed all related values. Maybe part of it is hardcoded (seen something like that before).

Well, Ill push out the update this evening even if only a part of that stuff is working. That is better than nothing. Maybe I stumble over a solution later. It just does not make much sense to get stuck at this part forever.

Togehter with that update a bunch of fixes to clan stations will be done.

It also is intended rebalance the defense of the clan stations since that never really was viable.

IF I am able to find the time I will also add the rebalance of the MK10 weapons to this update. Unfortunately there has not been that much feedback when I asked for it so Ill just do a bunch of minor tweeks.

update is available now

It contains:

• a few thousand new voice samples
• changes to how ships are referred in space by NPCs
• minor changes to faction assignments on stations
• name fixes to clan bases
• rebalancing of MK10 weapons
• rebalancing of clan base defense turrets (hull and weapons)

minor fix to a bug with dom' faction short names just got released