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News

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Discovery Freelancer 4.86 Update 5 Released

Posted By: Cannon @ Apr 25 2012, 10:44 AM
Update 5 is on the update servers. This is a comparatively minor update from update 4. It focuses primarily on bug fixes to improve server and client stability.

I'm declaring this to be the end of the beta and the start of the full release phase. There are still bugs, both known and unknown. Mobile docking has still not made it into the mod as sadly anticheat work and base enhancements have used up a fair bit of this update cycle.

Importantly there's a new installer available that should help people with non-English Freelancer installs more easily install the mod. I will be publishing this on moddb shortly.

The development team's focus is moving fully to work on 4.87. We have a very aggressive schedule and this will limit the number of changes in the 4.86 updates. I expect one or two 4.86 bug fix updates before the release of 4.87. The updates will focus on the introduction of mobile docking and this should be server side only.

See the following post for the mostly complete change log.

---


If you are a server operator and are not in contact with other Discovery server operators, please post in the Other Servers section of this forum to obtain help or go to http://the-starport.net. There is a Discovery server admin skype chat and server operators are welcome to join this.

---


If you have NOT DOWNLOADED AND INSTALLED Discovery Freelancer 4.86 then
CLICK ME
Please read the instructions and download and install it. You can not upgrade an existing 4.85 installation.

If the automatic update does not work, the update can be downloaded manually from here. Unzip the contents of this directory inside your Freelancer installation.
Comments: 111 :: View Comments

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A little bit of an update - repairs and damage

Posted By: Cannon @ Apr 21 2012, 11:03 AM
Repairs and Damage
If the shield is up, bases take damage at 1% of the normal rate. The first hit before the shield is up will still be attenuated to 1% of the normal rate. Many ships are required to successfully attack and destroy a shielded base with a high level and sufficient repair commodities. Small bases are rather vulnerable and effort is required to upgrade the base as quickly as possible. Individual ships cannot kill any properly supplied base.

Every 16 seconds, bases repair the amount of damage equal to:
  • damage to repair = base level x number of types of repair commodities x 60000
Every 16 seconds, bases take 'wear-and-tear' damage equal to:
  • wear and tear = 300 + (base level x 300)
For example, if a level 1 base with 1 repair commodity and no shield is attacked by 5 ships each carrying two heavy mortars, the ships are capable of delivering the amount of damage equal to:
  • delivered damage/sec = 520000 hp/gun x 2 guns/ship x 5 ships x 0.1 shots/sec = 520000 hitpoints/sec
  • damage to repair = 1 x 1 x 60000 hp/repair x 0.0625 repair/sec = 3750 hitpoints/sec
  • the base is dead meat in very very little time
If the shield is active
  • delivered damage/sec = 520000 hp/gun x 2 guns/ship x 5 ships x 0.1 shots/sec x 1% = 5200 hitpoints/sec
  • damage to repair = 1 x 1 x 60000 hp/repair x 0.0625 repair/sec = 3750 hitpoints/sec
  • the base will die but it will take at least an hour to kill it
If the base has three repair commodities and the shield is active
  • delivered damage/sec = 520000 hp/gun x 2 guns/ship x 5 ships x 0.1 shots/sec x 1% = 5200 hitpoints/sec
  • damage to repair = 1 x 3 x 60000 hp/repair x 0.0625 repair/sec = 11250 hitpoints/sec
  • the base won't die
Repair Commodity Usage
To make the operation of the base a little easier, the order in which repair commodities are consumed has been changed. Basic alloy will be used before robotics and ship hull panels and so you can afford to stock all three on the base and the cheaper basic alloy will be used in preference of the others.

Shields and Docking
The shield docking situation remains the same although the shield will deactivate within 9 minutes now, reduced from 16 minutes.

A manually activated shield stays up for at least 8 hours although this serves no real purpose now.

Shop Management and Help
The shop management screen has been fixed. The number of items that can be displayed on a page is limited to 40 and you must now type /shop [page] to view anything but the first page.

Limited online help for base operation is available by typing /base when docked at a base.
Comments: 60 :: View Comments

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Story Line Event

Posted By: theonetruedel @ Apr 19 2012, 09:08 AM
Today our first story line event has gone live. With the intention of rewarding official factions for their roleplay these events will be made to drive the story forward. While this will effect relations and things with factions the overall metaplot will remain unchanged. The big story is for the devs to play with, but if all goes well official factions will be able to pave the way to it.

Enjoy this story event as it unfolds. IC| and the [RM] will be the deciding players in how it ends, but everyone is welcome to get involved.

Interspace Commerce and RHeinland have come to blows over the actions of Interspace Commerce's private contractor arm. This has caused Interspace to cry foul and pull all of its ships from Rheinland. This in turn has created doubt among Rheinland's economic pundits fueling speculation of a full IC pullout including all financial services Interspace offers. That would be disastrous for the Rheinland economy. The speculation has driven to panic buying and generally doing things that makes economies have a bit of a stumble. The situation just got very tense.

In Game Effects

5 New news reports centering on this conflict
26 commodity prices have been altered to reflect the economic uncertainty across Rheinland
Interspace Commerce ID is now hostile to RFP and RM stations
RFP and RM ID is now Hostile to Interspace Commerce (This one may cause issues with Bonn, one way or another that won't last too long)
Comments: 50 :: View Comments

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Base balance and other such matters

Posted By: Cannon @ Apr 16 2012, 10:18 AM
In preparation for the next update, changes to the base, jumpdrive and a number of miscellanous features are being tested.

Bases

The base commodities usage has been revised, in short the updated behaviour is:
  • Bases use more repair commodities like hull panels, robotics and basic alloys
  • Bases use less shield fuel commodities because the shield will turn off automatically.
  • Players cannot dock at bases if the shield is up
More commodities used per day for maintenance (from ~8 to 10k) but base takes damage more slowly (level 1 base can survive ~60 hours without repair). Base manufacturing and construction are slower by 1/3 but use the same quantities of goods.

The shield will automatically deactivate after a random period of time in the range 1-16 minutes and docking whilst the shield is up is blocked to all ships. A base administrator can manually activate or deactivate the shield using the /base shieldmod [on/off] command. A manually activated shield will remain up for one hour as long as there is sufficient fuel.

The fuel usage rates are:
Deuterium - 5 units per 16 seconds.
H-Fuel - 4 units per 16 seconds
MOX - 3 units per 16 seconds
Gallic Fuel - 3 units per 16 seconds.

This means ~15k/day to ~27k fuel used per 24 hours if base is being blockaded and constantly attacked.

Weapons platforms take damage when the base shield is up and are destroyable although they will be respawned automatically after 15 seconds.

Shop management changed to a better UI. The /shop newgoods command has been removed. Base administrators can buy and sell goods to their base without restriction and newgoods mode no longer needs to be enabled.
IPB Image

Minimum and maximum stock levels can now be specified and the base will not sell goods if the stock level falls below the minimum and will not buy goods if the stock level exceeds the maximum level. Goods can be removed and jettisoned to free up space or prevent any more of the particular good being sold to the base. [EDIT: For the record, the UI breaks after about 45 items..up from the previous broken limit of 30. This will be a job for tomorrow.]

The base status web page has been updated and now includes the base description. See here http://discoverygc.com/server/base_status.html

Hyperdrive

Fuel usage remains the same. The drive is not usable less it is mounted. In the previous version in could be used and this was a bug. Also now, a jump into any of the 3 restricted systems: New Anglia, New Cambria and Bastille will result in ship death. This is primarily to stop people complaining to admins to be let out.

Cloaking Devices and Mobile Docking

I'm still working on these and they both should be rebalanced and available in the next update.

Update 5

It's in progress and will be released before the end of this month.

That's all for now. Have fun.
Comments: 127 :: View Comments

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Discovery 4.86 - Update 4 Released

Posted By: Cannon @ Apr 4 2012, 12:23 AM
Today we release the 4th update for Discovery Freelancer 4.86. This release has taken somewhat longer than hoped largely due to my tardiness at completing aspects of the work.

As always, thank you to all of the development team, in particular Aeternus and Xoria for their work on fixing many bugs in models, systems and the economy. This update is massive and this update is double the size of the last update.

We expect to make one more minor update in the 4.86 series to fix any issues that show up but most of the development team's attention has now turned to 4.87. We have picked a release date and although I am not ready to share this publicly we will do everything possible to meet this date.

What's changed?

Many many model and system bugs have been fixed. Although we probably have not found all of the NPC bugs that result in crashes we think we've found and fixed most of them.

The ship equipment system has changed. All equipment including externally mounted guns uses cargo space. Some ships have been given slightly more cargo space to accommodate this. This change allows us to balance ships, guns and new equipment types in unique ways.

The shield system has been modified to support the mounting of hyperspace jumpdrives, hyperspace survey modules, docking modules in specialist shield slots. Cloaking devices are mountable in the countermeasure slots. Note that although various types of module can be mounted in these slots, your ship might not be able to use the equipment if its power plant is too small.

Player built and controlled bases are now available. These can be built anywhere by anybody and players can control their diplomacy based on ship names. A warning though, they require a lot of effort to maintain as they need crew, spare parts and fuel to survive. Space is dangerous. More info: here and here.

Cloaking devices, jumpdrives and survey modules are manufactured and buyable from player bases. These three modules need fuel to operate and in general the better the module the more fuel it requires. The largest jumpdrive requires fuel ships to supply the jumping ship as it is charging its drive. Also this equipment has a small but non-zero probability of being destroyed on ship death. It is important to maintain good a relationship with a faction who can supply your ship with replacement units.

The mobile docking module software has been disabled in this update as it is buggy. We expect to fix this within the next month. Docking modules can be manufactured but they can't be used for now.

Almost all planets have been given a slow spin and all suns now have a layered deathzone. There is 2km of low damage, then you die quite quickly.

The jump hole between Connecticut and New York has been removed. To get to Connecticut, dock at a base, remove all of your cargo, type /conn and undock. To return from Connecticut, dock, type /return and undock. Thanks to MadHunter for writing this plugin.

Faction reputations and empathy settings having been updated to better reflect the storyline and fix issues reported by players.

NPC-missions have been updated to make the NPC ships fly smarter and provide something of a more realistic challenge.

The installer has been updated to support non-English Freelancer copies and the Cyrillic patch for Windows 7 is included by default.

The full list of changes is in the post below and the readme when you install the game.

As always, these changes are tentative and if they don't work, are not balanced well or have other problems we will change the changes until we find a better balance.

How to install?

If you have NOT DOWNLOADED AND INSTALLED Discovery Freelancer 4.86 then
CLICK ME
Please read the instructions and download and install it. You can not upgrade an existing 4.85 installation.

If the automatic update does not work, the update can be downloaded manually from here. Unzip the contents of this directory inside your Discovery Freelancer installation.

If you are a server operator and are not in contact with other Discovery server operators, please post in the Other Servers section of this forum to obtain help or go to http://the-starport.net.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

We've had a little technical issue. If you had trouble upgrading in the last 10 minutes, wait for 5 minutes and try again. If you still have trouble, quit Freelancer and run the dsupdate.exe program in your Discovery Freelancer directory.
Comments: 165 :: View Comments

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