Deus Ex: Decennial Edition 'What a game.'

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Deus Ex: Decennial Edition 'What a game.'

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

I seem to remember it worked wonders on the flamethrower. I'll have to check it out though.

# ¿ May 10, 2010 23:11

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:09

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

There's a laser sight in the flooded canal road tunnel in the rubble in the right end of the tunnel (as far from where the aug upgrade is as you can get) There's a silencer in the truck near where jock picks you up at the end of the gas station mission

# ¿ Jul 14, 2010 22:50

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

So I'm making a mod for Deus Ex.

It's got a bunch of changes to the mechanics. It started out as just trying to make melee weapon attack speed increase with skill level and it's kind of feature-crept into what it is today from there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELivsnEPvvk

Here's some of the features:

New aiming system (applies to player and pawns alike) to kind of fake the physics of swinging a heavy chunk of metal around. It means dodging is a thing.
Melee skill increases attack speed and throwing knife range
Guns don't do more damage with increased skill. Range mods increase damage (as well as range and projectile speed) instead.
Flare darts explode (not very original but it kind of makes sense)
The scope has range markings that adjust based on your projectile's speed. The laser acts as a range finder as well as an aimpoint indicator.
NPCs react faster and hear better
Your speed drawing/holstering a weapon depends on your skill with that weapon
PS20 is a mini-shotgun that you can re-use
Plasma rifle can shoot an entire clip of prod ammo as an alternate to electrocute a bunch of enemies
Sniper rifle is nerfed, but NPCs can randomly drop special "Magnum" rounds which are single-load only and can shoot through thin walls
Pick up darts and throwing knives from bodies

Anyway it's a work in progress but maybe some goons are interested. No clue if it plays nice with Shifter or Biomod or Revision or whatever else.

E: Repo link: https://github.com/butterwagon69/NerdMod

Butterwagon fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Oct 20, 2019

# ¿ Oct 15, 2019 05:21

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

JustJeff88 posted:

I'd really like to playtest this, but I'm working 7/7 these days so I'm not sure if I would be much help.

I added a link to the repo to my previous post. I just made it for fun but I thought it might be worth sharing. It's (probably) playable if you want to try it out!

# ¿ Oct 16, 2019 02:13

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Ugly In The Morning posted:

Yeah, the laser sight kind of breaks combat in unmodded DX and once I figured that out I kind of loved it. It wasn't like it was always the best approach, since it didn't do that on the silenced pistol {since that had a built in scope, I think?) but if you wanted to go loud and were good at clicking heads it was a lot of fun.

The scope is kind of broken in vanilla Deus Ex and causes a weird undocumented behavior where it reduces the accuracy of weapons it's attached to.

Here's the code where this happens:

Java code:

// if there is a scope, but the player isn't using it, decrease the accuracy
// so there is an advantage to using the scope
if (bHasScope && !bZoomed)
Accuracy += 0.2;
// if the laser sight is on, make this shot dead on
// also, if the scope is on, zero the accuracy so the shake makes the shot inaccurate
else if (bLasing || bZoomed)
Accuracy = 0.0;

For reference, most weapons have a base accuracy of around 0.7 (smaller is more accurate).

It also completely negates the laser sight because if a weapon has a scope it never gets to the "else if" part to check if there's a laser. If you attach a scope to a pistol, its base accuracy is 0.9 whether or not you put a laser on it.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2019 18:46

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Looks like someone managed to get a bunch of player models into the source engine and has way too much time on their hands:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQGcyHUVskU

# ¿ May 14, 2020 02:15

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Here's a project I'm working on to upscale all the textures in the game using ESRGAN. It's basically done except I don't know how the hell to release it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P6Nub1ycxU

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 22:52

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Diggus Bickus posted:

Here's a project I'm working on to upscale all the textures in the game using ESRGAN. It's basically done except I don't know how the hell to release it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P6Nub1ycxU

OK time to start ~~making excuses~~ providing development updates!

I will need to address a few problems before this can be released:

Mipmaps are not handled correctly yet
The process for correcting texture scaling in levels doesn't work
I don't want to release a bunch of game resources as-is

Mipmaps

How mipmaps are NOT supposed to look

Mipmaps are a way of limiting memory use of textures by loading lower-resolution versions of textures when they are far away. Deus Ex stores mipmapped textures scaled by a factor of 2 down from the initial resolution all the way to 1x1 - so a 64x64 texture would be stored as the original size, a 32x32 size, a 16x16 size, ... down to 1x1. These downsampled textures are swapped out for their large-resolution versions when the player is close enough to see the difference. However, for some reason I haven't discovered yet, mipmaps are getting displayed at the wrong scale so there is an obvious seam between the different versions. I'm able to work around it by simply turning mipmaps off, but that causes my low-spec laptop to chug at long draw distances. I don't think this is critical.

Correcting Texture Scaling

Textures don't "know" how physically large they are - all the know is their pixel size. If I don't do any correction, maps would look like this:

To correct this, I reduce the texture scaling of each surface in each level by the scaling factor for its texture so it looks right. However, this screws up lighting:

Lighting data baked into the level gets scaled down when texture scale is reduced creating these tiles of shadow

To fix the lighting, I have to open each level in the level editor and "Rebuild" it, which rebakes the lighting into the level. However, the level editor released with the Deus Ex sdk seems to run differently than the one originally used to build the game, because many levels have huge errors if they are rebuilt:

The engine is supposed to connect to the wing

So to fix this, I'm planning to upscale the light maps in each level as well as changing texture scaling. This isn't trivial, as light maps are stored as bitmap arrays and will have to be physically 4x as large. Any changes to game data that involve changing the size of entities on-disk is dangerous because many objects have pointer references that depend on actual position in the file. I've got a proof-of-concept working for a simple level but who knows how much will be broken if I try this for real (and I still don't know how lightmaps for non-square entities work). If I can get this working, I'll be able to rescale textures in a level and fix the lighting without opening the level editor at all, so the level geometry errors should be avoided altogether.

Releasing the Mod Without Releasing Game Resources

If I can fix the texture scaling and geometry errors as proposed, I will be able to release the mod as an executable script packed with upscaled textures that modifies game resources in-place, instead of releasing the resources themselves. As a side effect, this has a chance of playing nicely with other mods because I won't actually be replacing resources, just modifying them. It also has the side effect of being able to totally gently caress up the game if something goes wrong

I've done all this in python so I'm going to have to look into packaging python executables, but I'm planning on figuring out how to fix lighting first.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2020 21:11

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

aniviron posted:

The reason I say this though is that a lot of DX's shadow maps are probably very low resolution both for performance reasons and because the devs were unused to the engine at the time. You can adjust the shadow resolution on a per-face basis which can have a significant impact on how good the game looks, so if you can make rebuilding work, you can improve the lighting at the same time.

I noticed on the test playthrough that a lot of the lighting looked substantially better. Brushes seemed to be casting really sharp shadows (which often revealed that the light placement didn't make sense).

I don't remember railings casting shadows like this before...

I don't intend on proceeding with using UnrealEd for the release anyway, unless there's some way to automate the process on the client's computer. Releasing barely-altered maps doesn't seem like fair use.

MysticalMachineGun posted:

Posts like these rule and what you're doing is amazing

Thanks, that means a lot

Butterwagon fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Sep 8, 2020

# ¿ Sep 8, 2020 00:56

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Here's a different mod that I've been screwing around with for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELivsnEPvvk

I recently updated it to show the weapon aimpoint and I think it makes a big difference in how the system feels. Mileage with GEP gun may vary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5-sYCnW3cQ

Weapon Control System
quote:
Weapon aim point is controlled by modelling the weapon as a spring-mass-damper system.
This provides more realistic behavior of weapons both for the player and npcs:
- 360 No-Scoping causes the weapon to sway away from the center of the screen
- Running causes the weapon to sway in time with your steps
- Walking causes less weapon sway than running
- Dodging NPCs is viable because their aimpoint lags behind their desired aim exactly as yours does
- Weapons now have 3 stats that govern accuracy:
  - Base accuracy determines how close the bullet hits to where the weapon's actual aim point
  - "Aim Ability" determines how quickly a weapon can be brought on target after the aim point stops moving (analogous to damping ratio)
  - "Handle Ability" determines how closely the weapon will follow the point of aim while the aimpoint moves (analogous to natural frequency)
Other Weapon Enhancements
- Make weapon skill change bringup/putdown speed
- Make projectiles turn into ammo so you can pick up darts and throwing knives from bodies
- Adjust weapon fire rate based on skill so that you can fire faster at higher skill levels
- Scope mod provides actual range offset information for weapons with drop like the mini crossbow
- Laser sight shows distance to target (this plays well with the scope mod)
- Add special magnum ammo for sniper rifle - does extra damage, single load only, can't be silenced, and shoots through thin walls. Get this from lucky NPC drops
- The PS20 is now a reusable double-barrelled shotgun that's pretty fun to shoot!
- Sabot rounds are now a single slug instead of a spread
- Shotgun spread doesn't depend on your skill level or current accuracy
- Throwing knives travel faster the higher your skill (and even faster with the combat strength aug)
- Flare darts explode on impact
Other Tweaks
- Tweak ammo box sizes
- Allow special ammo types to drop on npcs
- Change stun timer based on damage
- Change skill costs and values
- Increase shell casing speed
- Change AugBallistic values
- Calculate skill based on pawn special skills
- Make items visible in vision aug (buggy)
- Make MIBs and Walton more accurate
- Make pickup ammo count from corpses depend on clip size
- Make plasma rifle buggy and fun
- Tweak weapon mods
- Make AssaultGun grenades require reload
- Tweak weapon parameters
- Modify pawn firing behavior

I'm still developing it whenever I think of something that sounds fun.

Get it here

# ¿ Sep 12, 2020 18:07

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

site posted:

For some reason the hardest thing to me has always been getting jojo before he kills whatshername. If you do it too early everyone gets mad, if you do it too late jojo kills her, if you don't peel him off before the dad kills him the girl gets pissed and ends up homeless at that gas station way later in the game, and if you're on realistic this all happens within seconds

Wait, there's an outcome where Gilbert lives, Jojo dies, and Sandra doesn't end up at the gas station? :aaaaa:

# ¿ Dec 13, 2020 19:27

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Ugly In The Morning posted:

Quote this to pick a level:

quote:
3.8 Hell's Kitchen, New York City

The goal is to always, always leave the next player in a terrible situation.

I'd love to participate. Down for this one

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 15:32

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

I finally got around to releasing part of the graphical enhancement project I worked on last year.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/crispy-deus-ex/

I never got around to fixing the problems with changing level textures so it's just character, item, and decoration enhancements for now.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2021 18:35

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Screwed around with pool and managed to get breaks to work. Originally balls couldn't bounce for 20 milliseconds after a previous bounce (probably to prevent the rack from exploding).

https://i.imgur.com/CrPM735.mp4

# ¿ Sep 11, 2021 20:55

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Just found out Paul yells at you if you go on a rampage in the hangar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sabxSXLtjJ0

# ¿ Sep 13, 2021 16:25

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxyhADYCIgI

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 17:42

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

I'm shilling my bullshit texture upscale pack since we're on the subject again:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/crispy-deus-ex

# ¿ Dec 29, 2021 19:25

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Finally finished a mod for upscaling all textures in Deus Ex. Turns out it was a lot easier than I thought with the Direct3D 10 Renderer. It also supports displacement maps!

To install, just unzip in your Deus Ex/Textures directory. You need to be using Kentie's Direct3D10 renderer or the Direct3D11 renderer that's floating around somewhere. This contains high-res versions of all textures as well as normal and displacement maps for most of them.

Get it here

# ¿ Jun 24, 2022 18:27

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

JustJeff88 posted:

Any chance that you could upload a demo to YouTube or Daily Motion?

No, but I can post some screenshots!

Right with high-res

Left with high-res

Before:

After:

Butterwagon fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jul 1, 2022

# ¿ Jul 1, 2022 04:09

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Vavrek posted:

I'll have you know this post is what got me out of bed today.

I couldn't make out any difference in details on a two inch wide phone screen.

(It looks great! The first two images do highlight that the inventory icons haven't been changed, since the dividing line goes down to the tool belt. Are those easily updated? Could they support a smoother or more detailed set of images, or were they designed with a cap of ... 32x32 or 64x64 or whatever they are?)

Are you the same Vavrek that used to post on the old Planet Deus Ex forums?

Anyway I am not sure about updating the inventory icons. It's been about a year since I messed with any of that and my memory is that there's no straightforward way to do it. It's probably possible but I have no idea how and no time at the moment to look into it. Maybe one of the wizards who worked on The Nameless Mod would know.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2022 21:38

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Vavrek posted:

It was my first online community. I didn't voice the character named after me in TNM, though, and, sadly/hilariously, have never actually played far enough to see that character. I was literally on the quest to find him and they released a patch which broke save compatibility. I assumed I'd just replay the first half of the game and ... never did. It's on my short list of games to get around to soonish, but "soonish" might mean the next five years at this rate ...

That's wild. That was my first online forum but I barely ever posted. I don't even remember my screenname from back then; I was like 12. Glad you're still around!

I also just uploaded an updated version of higher-res skins for all the items, decorations, and characters.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/crispy-deus-ex/addons/skin-pack3

Also, I just found out about the Helios texture overhaul which does the same thing I did but probably better because it looks like actual artists worked on it.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/helios-texture-overhaul

# ¿ Jul 2, 2022 04:33

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Helianthus Annuus posted:

how hows it going with NerdMod?

I haven't had much time to work on it these days. It's definitely playable but has a couple of visual bugs and melee weapons don't work for NPCs for some reason. It's neat to know someone has tried it though!

# ¿ Jul 2, 2022 16:12

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

The plasma rifle is so strange. It's a lot more dangerous to the player since it blinds you if you get hit by it, there's not much ammo, and you need at least advanced in heavy weapons to bother with it. I tried giving it an alternate ammo that uses an entire prod battery to shoot an area-of-effect stun and it's still not really very viable.

I think Deus Ex runs into the problem of having mundane weapons that are too effective to make fancier weapons viable: if everything goes down in one headshot, there's not much reason to use heavy weapons unless you're blowing up a robot or a door.

# ¿ May 11, 2023 13:54

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Tungsten posted:

doesn't the laser sight completely remove the assault rifle's spread?

Yep, unless you also add a scope mod

# ¿ Jun 2, 2023 14:12

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

JustJeff88 posted:

Does anyone know a graphics mod (widescreen, at least 720 res) that I can use without modifying the .exe? I am using Nano mod, which has its own .exe, and this game for all its merits is a bit hard on the eyes on modern hardware without some sweetening.

You could try this. It needs the DirectX10 or better to work. Unzip into the Textures folder in your install directory and it should work.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2023 03:15

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

I always thought it was weird that the melee weapons don't automatically repeat attacks as long as you hold the button down so I changed that. Combined with low-tech skill and combat strength both increasing your attack rate you are basically Gordon Freeman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Txyvo8WMes

# ¿ Aug 12, 2023 02:24

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

I messed around with the PS20 a bit last weekend. Making it into a tiny shotgun is fun, but I thought it would be more fun if adding clip mods to it added more barrels, increasing the recoil and reload time. It's a bit silly, but I feel like the PS20 is one of the oddest things left in the game: single use, slow projectile, and not even a one-hit kill sometimes. I'm pretty sure its original purpose was for the cut White House mission. In the source code it's called a "HideAGun" and I'm pretty sure it was intended to be snuck past metal detectors (there's a property called Concealability that isn't used for anything, and one of its variants is CONC_Metal, which makes me think metal detectors were a planned feature).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDtuP_4NpuI

# ¿ Aug 19, 2023 14:41

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

aniviron posted:

I can maybe provide a little context for the PS20 - it inherits the plasma rifle's projectile of course, but the plasma rifle projectile was incorrectly modified in the last official patch to use the multiplayer damage values, the check for whether the game is singleplayer or MP was incorrectly formatted. With a fix implemented for this, the PS20 reliably one-shots any human enemy except maybe MJ12 commandos, which makes it a nasty little pocket surprise.

I didn't realize this. Interesting. I'm still not sure there's a real use for it outside of as a gimmick if it's single-use only, unless it's powerful enough to one-shot MIBs and bosses. There aren't many of them in the game and that inventory slot could be used for almost anything else. I'd argue even fire extinguishers are probably more useful than the default PS20 because they can potentially incapacitate more than one enemy, they can extinguish you, and they can be used to bypass some laser alarms.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2023 05:22

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Interesting breakdown of Deus Ex's music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAkn2ed7mZQ

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 00:29

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

I don't know if GMDX changes it but adding a scope mod to your pistol adds a fixed penalty to your un-scoped accuracy, negating the laser sight and (iirc) skill benefit.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2023 17:48

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Cynic Jester posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpVB-52enLA

Going to be somewhat optimistic that it isn't just nostalgia bait.

Looks fun but without Sheldon Pacotti's writing it won't reach the same heights

# ¿ Oct 2, 2023 03:24

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBUPONpZQSM

# ¿ Jan 27, 2024 15:55

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:09

Butterwagon: Mar 21, 2010; Lookit that stupid ass-hole!

Finally got around to completing a playthrough of The Nameless Mod. I've tried to play through it before the 2.0 release and never managed to finish it. The 2.0 release improved the quality of the level design in a lot of areas (ABI, DXI, and downtown Forum City especially). A lot of the levels are genuinely great. Most of the major criticisms of the mod as a self-indulgent mess of in-jokes are still true, but the gameplay doesn't depend on understanding the lore. The size and complexity of some of the levels is a bit overwhelming; I didn't often find myself not knowing how to make progress, but I often felt that I had missed secrets or items because there was too much to explore and I wanted to move on.

A few levels stood out to me as big improvements. I remember in the 1.0 release the main hub area was a complete mess, it was way too big and empty and took forever to get anywhere. That has been mostly corrected by compacting everything down into a smaller level, but as a result I still found myself getting lost even after returning to the hub for the dozenth time. If you know where you're going, you never have to walk very far, but there are a lot of twists and turns and you'll end up going in circles. I don't think they changed the corporate district from the 1.0 release much; it's still way too big. Fortunately, it's easy to navigate the corporate district since there aren't many destinations there. I don't remember the ABI exterior too well from the 1.0 release except that it felt very out-of-place, with sparse boxy buildings in a big open area. The ABI exterior now feels much more Deus Ex, with fewer, larger buildings and more dense interconnections between them and ways to interact with them. This ended up being one of my favorite areas in the mod after the V2 release.

There were some weak levels in this release as well. The sewers in the corporate district were terrible. Ugly textures, confusing layout, areas that all looked the same, and the same type of enemy used over and over. The sewers aren't part of a main mission but you get plans for the quad rocket launcher there so you have to deal with them if you want a good heavy weapon that takes as many inventory slots as the sniper rifle. The exterior of DXI with the lava caverns also needed improvement. It's basically the same as I remembered, with gigantic columns that you have to jump between over lava. There were a lot of lighting bugs in this area, it was extremely ugly, and required jumping puzzles don't belong in Deus Ex. The ABI ruins were also weak: too much repetition, too big, no obvious progression. None of the areas in the ABI ruins were individually bad, but as a whole they made for a weak experience. The Goat City exterior also needed some improvement: too big and sparse to make for good Deus Ex gameplay. The DXO base was exactly as ugly and confusing as I remember.

Overall it was a much more polished experience than the first release, with some great gameplay moments and fewer weak levels. If you're wanting to sneak around some secret labs with a Dragon's Tooth Sword and don't mind skipping through some cringey dialog, it's worth trying out.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2024 21:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Deus Ex: Decennial Edition 'What a game.'