Posts by YourConscience

Yeah, well, as soon as many different sources of intellectual property are involved, it gets messy and essentially not worthwhile pursuing. But I believe that there is a possible way out of this in this case here: If you only license the engine (which is very expencive to code otherwise), you could create your own game inventing your own intellectual property. It would mean throwing away all models, sounds and whatever else artwork there was in the game and replacing them with such that you have clear control of. But if I understand correctly, if you filter it that way, you'd still end up with a sizable amount of models, textures and sounds that would enable you to fill the gaps and sell an entirely own game. Licensing pure engines is something much, much easier than Licensing IPs. Also this wouldn't touch Microsofts current contracts with other publishers at all. Perhaps you could manage to pull up a deal with Microsoft allowing you to pay them a portion of what you get from selling the game. This way there's no risk in it for you, other than wasting lots of time. And perhaps some members of the community would be willing to give you some of their models for free. I'd certainly offer to give you some AI stuff for free (talk about dynamic economy, or NPS communication with the player and such stuff) or some more for a very modest involvement in the above-mentioned earnings, if it ever comes to such things.

Microsoft is just a business company which always has some middle-stage manager trying to profile himself. You only have to be lucky talking to the right guy using the right words. If the proposal be made by a company, or a publisher, stating clearly an intent to properly pay for the license of using the *engine* (not necessarily the Intellectual Property), then it'd be counter all common business logic to not succeed. The question is only how much payment would be necessary, and whether the owner of Crossfire would be able to muster that amount. This again could be done either privately (I doubt he'd like to do that), or writing a proper business plan and submitting it to the local bank that issues venture capital. Chances aren't that bad that this would succeed, especially if successful talks with Microsoft could be shown as proff of seriousness.
What's really problematic is that apparently lots of people contributed to CF and they all would need to either be taken into the boat, or agree in written form to not have any pretensions on any winnings whatsoever. Otherwise the bank would see the whole thing as too risky.

That is really impressive. Have there ever been any talks with some publisher to try to make a small company, license the engine officially from Microsoft and release it as a budget title on gamersgate or impulse, for example? With a budget of $100K I think this should be very well doable, depending of course whether Microsoft would be willing to sell a license for less than that... I'd certainly buy such a title immediately from gamersgate for 20, for example.

seriously? Or do you mean CF? (well, both options are nice, of course)

Thanks for the invitations. We will consider it. Once we get tired of co-oping through the Discovery 4.85 mod we just installed and are enjoying.
Given how many Freelancer communities there are still, it really makes me wonder why the hell no one is doing a Freelancer 2 or, for the lack of licence, a Freespacer II or something like that. What a wasted opportunity!

Ah, the client is hardwired to take everything from your one specific server. I see. Bad luck, then. Sorry for disturbing you guys.

Essentially all I want is to be able to experience what CF singleplayer can offer together with a friend. This can't be so difficult!

I really don't get it. My client connects to my server. The server never changes, so the client and the server are always up to date. The server doesn't know anything about the original CF server out there somewhere. Why would that not work exactly? Software is not a mystery after all.
If it is indeed just about technical limitations, would it be possible for me to somehow obtain a copy of the current serversetup and I'd figure out myself how to get it running?

Hmm. Is it technically not possible, or would I need a permission and those scripts sent, in order to get it to work? I am a software developer, so running scripts is not a problem technically. I would also sign an NDA and promise to not distribute it or whatever necessary to get permission.
Are there other encompassing mods such as the CF, especially with regards to dynamic economy, that allow to run an own server? Co-oping vanilla Freelancer would also be an option for us, but one we have already become tired of...

Hi there,
I am new here. Sorry if this question has already been asked somewhere, but my search didn't turn up anything useful.
What I am trying to do is to set up an own dedicated server of Freelancer with the Crossfire 1.81 mod to co-op it with a friend. Is this even supposed to be possible? Because the download explicitly said client editition, so that indicates that this is not intended to work. Anyway, after installing everything and it works in Single Player, whenever I try to run flserver.exe it immediately crashes. Running it before installing Crossfire it would still work.
Or am I doing sth wrong? Can I get permission to run an own server purely for LAN purposes?

(I believe I posted in the wrong forum initially, so reposting here)