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:

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intro_seto.zip Size: 1.26 KB; Hits: 12
thorn.dll.str.zip Size: 6.34 KB; Hits: 12

This is an absolutely brilliant document that has demystified a whole bunch of stuff for me! Thank you so much for sharing it. Going to change the format of what I had planned a bit as you've covered pretty much everything I wanted to + the bits I didn't really understand.

A few questions I still have though:

What do the values in diffuse represent? is it just an RGB value, or is it a bit more complicated than that? (Sorry if this is more of a general 3d lighting question)

I'm still not entirely clear what MONITOR does. Is it actually required to switch cameras, or is it okay to use a marker entity for this?

I've run into an issue, particularly in menu screens, where using running_lights = true under userprops results in some odd visuals (boxes around the lights). Have you had any luck getting this particular line to work properly? (Screenshot attached.)

Attach file:

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  running_lights_cruiser_menu.jpg (32.34 KB)

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?

FYI I'm attempting (with mild success) to provide an implementation of thn with a player of sorts in Librelancer (https://github.com/Librelancer/Librelancer) but no arbitrary code execution there lol. When it's done I'll be able to publish some more thorough docs since I'll have code to base it off.

RE your lights problem, you could try and make a tiiiny model that references the textures in the txm which would get the game to load it. (e.g. a solar that references efx.txm , and DcDt mats that use "bulb" and "shine". I haven't tried this though so YMMV