Ah, that makes sense. I'll play around a bit with diffuse and see what I can get out of it.

Regarding the lights, I assume there isn't a fix for this. They were never intended to be loaded into the menu screens. I'm going to guess that getting the textures to load in correctly would probably involve an exe hack?

Also I noted in your document you suggested to use 3d modelling software to draw the paths and then import them. Which software were you using for this? Any recommendations?

I’ve been meaning to get around to document the Freelancer .thn files and what you can actually do with them for a while. I wrote some (fairly bad) tutorials about it back in the day with a lot of information that I’ve now figured out isn’t quite right and I’d like to clear things up a bit, and also share what I’ve worked out since then.

I’ll post to this thread as I work stuff out, along with an index in the OP if it gets cluttered to make referencing stuff easier. If anyone has any corrections or additions, please please post them here.

First off, some key things:

• .thn is lua. More specifically, it’s lua 3.2. I originally figured this out by pulling a strings list out of thorn.dll (Attached to this post for anyone who’s interested), but how the scripts behave and what works has only really confirmed this.



• lua written normally in scripts functions normally. For example, you can call things like system time, set global variables, and even read and write to your own files from outside the game (a working example of all three of these things can be found here)



• You can call any entity, effect or object defined in the following files:
  
  petaldb.ini
  CHARACTERS\bodyparts.ini
  EQUIPMENT\misc_equip.ini
  EQUIPMENT\prop_equip.ini
  EQUIPMENT\st_equip.ini
  EQUIPMENT\weapon_equip.ini
  FX\effects.ini
  FX\ENGINES\engines_ale.ini
  FX\EQUIPMENT\equipment_ale.ini
  FX\EXPLOSIONS\explosions_ale.ini
  FX\MISC\misc_ale.ini
  FX\SPACE\space_ale.ini
  FX\WEAPONS\weapons_ale.ini
  SHIPS\shiparch.ini
  SHIPS\rtc_shiparch.ini
  (You can actually attach loadouts from loadouts.ini, loadouts_special.ini and loadouts_utility.ini to ships with a line under userprops, but more on that later)
  SOLAR\solararch.ini
  
  If you want to call an effect, you will need to initiate it with a START_PSYS events entry (more on that later)



• I've been using this version of FLED-Thorn and the included .bat file to decompile and clean up the scripts when I need to get to the ingame ones. (Many thanks to Adoxa for this)

I’d like to start the thread off by dissecting a few basic entries from a really basic custom script from the alternate menu screen pack I made as a template for folks. The full pack can be found here, but I’ve attached the script in question to this post:



Things I don't yet understand the fuction of here are srt_grp and usr_flg.

*Valid options are UNDEFINED_EVENT, PSYS, DELETED, MOTION_PATH, SUB_SCENE, SCENE, HARDPOINT, MARKER, SOUND, LIGHT, MONITOR, CAMERA, DEFORMABLE, COMPOUND and UNKNOWN_ENTITY. Some of these are self-explanatory, but I’m not 100 percent on all of them just yet, notably MONITOR and SUB_SCENE.

Next I’d like to take a quick look at the cameraprops entity for Camera_0



I mostly understand these, but I wouldn't mind some confirmation on fovh and hvaspect regarding what exactly they alter as it's not entirely clear.

After this is a monitor entity. I’m still not 100% certain what these are for. There are events present in many scripts that set monitors as cameras, but changing or removing these entries doesn’t seem to have an effect. If anyone has worked these out, please let me know!

I’m going to break this initial breakdown into a couple of posts. Lighting needs an entire section to itself I think and I’d like to try and keep this relatively neat and avoid rambling if I can.

Attach file:

---

intro_seto.zip Size: 1.26 KB; Hits: 11
thorn.dll.str.zip Size: 6.34 KB; Hits: 11

We’re pleased to announce that there is now a General Freelancer Community Discord server!

We’re trying to set it up as a central point for all of the Freelancer communities to build around, with links out to other communities and sites, resources and a space to just chat about Freelancer!

Come along and say hello! The Discord can be found at https://discord.gg/tnrm4CB

That would be great! We've already got a small group of people together, any chance to grow it would be brilliant.

The FLCN bar doesn't seem to work on my install of Chrome though. It just appears to be static at the moment?

Yeah, Discovery does seem to be the largest active community left, but there's lots of (very) little ones and a tiny modding scene still going. I feel like if you have a central point to get people around, it gives these places a chance to grow.

I'll see what I can get together a bit later today then! Will post the link here when I can.

I did reply to your DM by the way, but I have no idea if it got through! Seems like there might be some technical issues going on with them at the moment.

Hoo boy it's been a long time. Nice to see people are still (occasionally) posting here!

I kinda feel like (assuming you've got the expertise) starting from scratch in something like unity if you've got that sort of thing in mind. While the limits of Freelancer have realllly been pushed by some incredibly clever people, there's still some limits and problems that you could get around by using something that's malleable by design.

That said there are some amazing TCs out there. I've not really been involved with the Freelancer community at all for the last decade or so, but it's been fantastic seeing some of the stuff that's come out of it when I popped in to take a look.

Wait what.