(( I am posting this here instead of the discussion about the discovery mod, as I firstly want to reassure some things I sat behind years ago are possible or not. So view this topic as kind of a preparation and gathering of opinions before I do anything else))
Years ago, back in 2003 when I was actively modding my brain out in Freelancer to please my local LAN community, my goal was to push the environment as far as I could. Boredom of being all alone and doing all the work myself caught up with me sooner or later, and on top of that in 2004 the hard disc crash wiped out about everything of my sophisticated work, except for the basic tutorials Ive written for myself. These were saved to a backup disc in my early stages of modding. Ever since I have not tried to get back into Freelancer modding because I saw no sense in it as the LAN community I had broke apart as well. So please forgive my foggy mind regarding several things Im posting now, as well as those still waiting to happen.
Would it be possible to make docking rings and jumpgates to work like tradelandes? That is, they can be deactivated by shooting certain areas and thus prevent docking and jumping for a certain period? I had that in mind in the past but never managed to try that out. Was anyone of you able to make this happen?
The Sirius Map should be made less static. These days its certainly common knowledge that the grid is not limited to pure integers, so it is possible to set a system at the coordinates of 8.4 , 3.1. I have not tested if this also applies beyond the first decimal place, just because it would be hardly recognizable on the screen itself, yet this is a very decent way to smooth out the map and also shove several systems into the place where they SHOULD be, according to their relative position from the ingame system sphere. The advantages of a nonstatic map are to make certain jump connections clear and to give a more genuine feel to it. For example, by slightly shifting a few systems, the connection between Kepler and Galileo could be made visible, instead of having a straight line that is drawn directly through Cassini. This would also help noticing, that Cassini is NOT connected to Kepler. (This example was taken from my look at the Sirius Map on the Discovery homepage, I have no idea if there is a secret jump passage from Cassini to Kepler, since I had no chance yet to load the discovery mod due to a lacking installation of Freelancer). What are your takes on that?
In the past I have tried to create new types of missions, for example; escort and special trade missions. Because honestly always moving to specific coordinates and flak a few ships is boring. From what I can remember, it went partly good and partly bad. I tried to decipher the singleplayer missions and searched for the script that would allow the transfer (or rather, the spawn) of a group of ships to the next system. I can remember that the agent I set, gave me the new mission type I created (planned escort first) but it did not proceed as planned. Several tries of my effort ended up with different outcomes like; did not spawn the ambushes, did not jump to the next system properly, did not appear in the next system at all, simply crashed, etc etc. Anyone has experience with creating new mission types?
I dont want to shoot all my bullets, and to encourage replies, I only give small portions and stop for moment to wait for some input.:)
To hunt the prey is life,
to lose the prey is death,
to hunt the loss is insane...
1) I'm pretty sure some other mod does that, Discovery chose not to (it was suggested a few times).
2) We know that it's possible, but we didn't apply it to old systems. The reason you gave here seems compelling though. It might be worth it to move a few systems slightly to make the connections visible. (btw, don't call it "less static", that's confusing because the suggestion doesn't include any activity of the map)
3) Treewyrm tried creating special mission types, I don't know about anybody else.
