Player Code of Conduct and Patch for the Open Beta Server news - Freeworlds: Tides of War mod for Freelancer

Greetings all and belated happy 2015.

The Tides of War team had been rather busy over the last 2 months so its time to share the fruits of their labors.

Firstly our community manager, Darkforce has put together a code of conduct which is to be followed when playing on the Open Beta server. This can be viewed here: Freeworldstidesofwar.com

The beta has also been updated with a few balance fixes and many fixes for bugs that our community has reported to us over time. This should lead to an overall more pleasant experience when on the server. the full list can be read below:

FriendlyFire wrote: -Tripled in-system hyperspace tunnel length.
-Eliminated YT-1300 "wreck", Z-95 Mark I and BTL-S3 Y-Wing from starter loadouts, replacing them with the standard YT-1300, the civilian Howlrunner and the Supa, respectively.
-Cleaned up old hyperjump buoys.
-Added mc90 normal map.
-Unified docking ability of freighters: transports can all use berths, freighters can only use large moors; corvettes and gunships may also use berths.
-Reduced collision elasticity.
-Removed Laseel from files as a base.
-Doubled baseline speed of mc90 and ISD.
-Fixed CC-7700 loadouts not having the gravity well projectors.
-Doubled interdiction range of Immobilizer-418 to 4x20k = 80k, tripled range of CC-7700 to 60k.
-Reduced capital weapon dispersion angles across the board, reduced muzzle velocity.
-Halved mag-pulse range.
-Decreased hull damage of mc90 super turbos.
-Increased damage of ISD turbos and energy damage of ISD ions.
-Increased explosion radius and damage of proton bombs, increased explosion radius of assault concussion missiles.
-Reduced max speed/range of proton bombs.
-Miscellaneous changes to effects.
-Player capital ships do not collide with NPCs, but collide with other players.
-Improved jump animation so the ship no longer "flips" around when docking; also removed the point where all objects in the system disappeared.
-Mag-pulses and ion-pulses properly cause the ship to drift.
-Reduced starsphere brightness to more sane levels and tweaked generation algorithm to look less pixellated.
-Moved many data files to My Games\Freeworlds, including all dump files, option files, logs, etc.
-Certain tips are now "blocking" tips and prevent other tips from popping over them, which makes it less overwhelming.
-Hyperspace tunnel is now of the correct radius.
-Removed "chance to drop" system from hyperspace: players now collide with the tunnel and take shield damage; when shields hit zero, the player is dropped off.
-Distinguish between a mag-pulse and an ion-pulse; ions are stronger and are the only ones that can affect larger freighters and capital ships. Successive disruptions stack in time.
-Proper, super shiny specular reflections on all ships.
-Changed lighting model a bit.
-A few more safety checks around hyperspace.
-Simplified and automated a lot of the background balance of hyperspace tunnel lengths and difficulty.
-Fixed numerous issues with hyperspace tunnel rendering, particularly at steep angles versus the +Z vector.
-Completely redesigned equipment regeneration on docking: should be more reliable, less likely to kick for cheating, less likely to replace valid equipment or double/triple equipment.
-If a player disconnects or F1's out while in hyperspace, the player is dropped as though their shields had failed.
-Staying idle or moving backwards in hyperspace deals shield damage.
-If a player fails to receive the exit packet for leaving hyperspace, they are moved to their destination before being kicked to preserve server stability.
-Characters are saved right before jumping in hyperspace.
-Completely overrode FLServer behavior for sending updates to the client about missiles. Missiles should move much more smoothly and should look like they connect with their target more reliably.
-Cargo is lost if player drops from hyperspace (whether through F1/disconnect or through losing shields).
-Shields are now dropped if the player logs in while in space. Docking/undocking will regenerate the shields. Log off docked to avoid this!
-Fully-fledged interdiction system is now in place. If a player crosses through an interdiction field, they will be dropped somewhere in the field. This is determined in real-time, not at buoy creation, so fields MUST be active at the moment of the drop to work. Players are guaranteed to drop at 75% of the interdiction radius or less.
-F1'ing in while in space causes a 5 seconds radar pulse that broadcasts the player's location to ALL other players in the system. Log off docked to avoid this!
-Dropping (as in, shield failure or F1/disconnect) from hyperspace causes a 10 seconds radar pulse.
-Increased hyperspace cooldowns slightly.
-Cooldowns do not regenerate while in hyperspace.
-Added lots of new UI elements, collectively named "Info". This includes detailed overlays on spawned gates showing time to stable/despawn and instability %, target tracking overlay, missile lock overlay, cruise delay info, hyperdrive cooldown info, hyperspace distance from tunnel edge, etc.
-Tradelanes are no longer dockable; instead, they indicate areas into which plotting a jump is free (no impact on cooldown, almost instantaneous stability). Attempting to dock with a tradelane will automatically plot a jump to the connected tradelane instead.
-As a result of this, interdictors affect precalculated hyperlanes as well.
-Hooked death cameras so they render properly!
-Hyperspace drop-out orients players correctly.
-Possible fix for phantom gate spawns.
-More leniency on hyperspace checks.
-Warning sounds for hyperspace.
-Decreased god rays sample count, increasing performance.
-More aggressive shadow rendering culling, resulting in significant performance gains.
-Smarter light equip culling, increasing performance.
-FPS may be as much as doubled or more depending on the circumstances!
-Sped up jump in/out animations
-Completely redesigned weapon linking, should now work for all ships on all configurations, even with weapons turned off
-Reset some reputations, Jedi and Sith are a lot more neutral now, Hutt may attack less (they will still attack an enemy's allies if the enemy shows up)
-Eliminated Jedi and Sith spawns from everywhere aside from their respective expected locations
-Hyperspace data now resets on undocking, which should help with the exploding on undocking bug
-As a stopgap measure, there should now always be missions across the Bastion system for Imperial players
-Removed all remaining fake atmosphere zones (producing the weird burning effect)
-Formos, Avon, Radnor now have a gravity well
-Resized Dathomir, Fresia, Garqi, Gamorr, Sleheyron, Teth gravity wells
-Corrected some infocard errors with many gates
-Removed containers from Sullust
-Unified all gravity wells to show up on navmap
-Eliminated gravity well for asteroid belt in Bespin
-Renamed Coruscant -> Borleias tradelane
-Golans deal 5x more damage and have infinite power
-New weapon linking works on K-Wing, YT-series
-Fixed YT-1300 guns having different rates of fire
-Moved Coruscant -> Kashyyyk jump to avoid jumping through a planet
-Added missing shipdealer to KDY base selling the Cloakshape, Toscan and Supa (KDY Military Research)
-Moved lane in Bastion to make it a bit easier to navigate
-Missile explosions against shields have been completely rebuilt, bypassing FL's standard setup; as such, missiles should now damage the shields of all capitals reliably (including mc90/Neb-B)
-Better wreck rendering
-Removed space dust
-Crashed sessions on the server should now get kicked when attempting to rejoin
-Fixed tradelanes requiring cooled down drive.
-Improved client-side stability in hyperspace.
-Corrected visual glitches in hyperspace tunnel.
-Cooldown notifier is properly updated when hyperspace plotting fails.
-Modified behavior of hyperspace plotting: will now attempt to jump towards the selected target, or the first waypoint if no selection.
-Improved weapon linking, now actually works when disabling weapons, attempts to keep using current fire mode if it can when switching weapons on or off.
-Removed erroneous jump to a dev system from Kuat.
-Fixed lighting error in hyperspace.
-Properly released hyperspace textures on device loss/game exit.
-Now using proper lock flags for hyperspace textures.
-Added additional check on Firemode loading.
-Permanently disabled 3D sounds. Do not try to reactivate them, please.
-Fixed conflict between mouse lag fix and star rendering.
-Rebalanced TIE Interceptor
-MC30c bombs and a few other ammo types are now available everywhere
-Possible fix for crash on dock, though we have been unable to replicate
-Fixed VSD energy drain

Also a reminder that both the New Republic and the Galactic Empire are still actively recruiting pilots to serve on the front lines. Anyone interested should register on our forums and contact the respective faction leaders for more information.

That's it for this update. If you like what you see, and have been playing, please don't forget to tell your friends, your communities you frequent and social sites like REDDIT/Twitter about this mod. Player word of mouth goes a long way and we'd appreciate any of the support we can get for this mod of ours! Thanks everyone!