Discovery system editing tutorial

[Igiss]

This tutorial is meant to be a brief source of information for everyone willing to create their own systems for Discovery mod. You may also use this info for editing any other systems, but most information presented here is Discovery-specific.

Part I. Basics

Freelancer Explorer (FLE) is a free tool that allows to edit systems in Freelancer. Since it's free, it is far from ideal, but this program is effective in many ways and... well, it's the only one we can use.

I. Opening Discovery in FLE

If you try to open Discovery mod directly, you won't succeed since FLE will crash. This happens due to additional files that are present in Discovery package. Besides, I won't recommend to edit Discovery 'original' files since you'll need backup copy to review changes you've made.

So, what's needed to open Discovery in FLE?

1) Open FLMM mods folder (usually C:\Program Files\Freelancer Mod Manager\mods) and create a new folder with a name like 'EditDiscovery'.

2) Open Discovery mod folder in FLMM mods. You'll see 4 folders and 6 files (for 4.81). Copy only two folders:

\DATA
\EXE

into EditDiscovery.

3) Launch Freelancer Explorer. You will see a 'Do you want to continue editing an existing Mod?' dialog, choose Yes. Then you may see another dialog, 'The dll DSSYSTEMS.DLL has the explorer signature. Do you want to add names to it if necessary?'. Choose No.

4) Select DiscoveryEdit foder and open it.

You will see a huge universe map of Discovery. Ready to start?

II. Getting Around

There are 342 systems total (18x19) in Discovery, 289 of them are added by the mod. 53 systems are original.



When you point your mouse at one of the systems, you'll see its code (IW14 in our screenshot) at the top of the window, and its name (Cassini) near the system itself.

In the right of FLE window you will see system description infocard.

When you right-click any system, you will see a dropdown menu and several options in it. To edit Discovery systems, use only Edit, all other options are completely useless.

When you select Edit, a system editing screen will appear. On this screen, most of system creation and editing takes place, so you should be attentive to every element it has.

Here's what a typical empty Discovery system looks like:



We will return to this later, and now... how do you know what system to edit? For this, I will share a part of Discovery design document, part responsible for systems. You can get the file here:

http://discoverygc.com/files/DiscoveryDesign.xls

This file contains all systems, both original and Discovery, in one large list. There are several columns in the file, and I'll explain briefly what each one means.

Column A = Code of the system

Code is the main attribute of a system, it determines the name of system folder in \DATA\Universe\Systems. Code is also listed in system ini and in a number of other ini files.

There are several codes in Freelancer, and I did not add any new ones. In DiscoveryDesign.xls codes are listed alphabetically:

BR** - Bretonia
BW** - Border Worlds
EW** - Edge Worlds
FP7 - Freeport 7
HI** - Hispania (Outcasts and Corsairs)
IW** - Independent Worlds (worlds between Houses and Liberty)
KU** - Kusari
LI** - Liberty
RH** - Rheinland
ST** - Omicron (Nomand and Order worlds)

** is a number of system in each code group. First numbers belong to original systems, following numbers belong to Discovery systems. You will see the division clearly in system list.

Column B = Name of the system

Players don't see code, they see only the name. Name is an infocard string stored somewhere in Discovery.dll.

Column C = Infocard

This is the number of infocard where system name is stored. And also the beginning of infocard list for every new system. There are 100 infocards reserved per each system, more than enough for a basic layout.

For example, Huygens system with code IW13 (Liberty Rogue faction system) has its infocard at 465500. Next comes Cassini with code IW14, infocard number is 465600.

465600 is system name (Cassini).
465601 is system description.

All of the following numbers are free, unless there are other objects in the system. So you may add new names/descriptions with number 465602, 465603 etc., until you reach 465700 (Tau-111 infocards start here).

I will explain how to add names later, and now let's proceed with the xls file.

Columns D, E, F = Starspheres of existing systems

You needn't change the starspheres, but if you would like to, here's your reference.

Column G = Suns

Type of sun for each system. More information about suns is available from 'Suns' sheet in the xls document.

Column H = Factions

If the system belongs to some specific faction, this faction is listed here.

Next columns may contain some additional numbers that I used for technical purposes.

This is all for now, I'm locking this thread and will unlock/add/edit it later when I'll have time. If you find it necessary to comment or ask on this post, start another thread or PM me.

To be continued.