Deus Ex v2.0 - An unofficial fan patch for Deus Ex (HELP US)

[Theshadots]

Pistol Downgrade trick is not a bug it just you can pick with to do.

[chris the cynic]

Pistol Downgrade trick is not a bug it just you can pick with to do.

I have no idea what you just said.

I mean this not as an insult. It is a mere statement of fact. I seriously have no idea what you just said. It is my hope that you can somehow use this knowledge to make your posts easier to understand in the future, though I confess that I do not know how you would do that.

[Kee715]

Pistol Downgrade trick is not a bug

Yes it is.

it just you can pick with to do.

[What?]
[WTF!?]
[Say nothing] <=

"..."

[ggrotz]

Hah, shit: you're right. I guess I always just assumed it was only good vs poison since that's all they make you use it for in the training mission. Shows how much I read...

And all that is usually indicated by the placement of the item in the game. There is the one in Liberty Island that appears right before the broken power box and some by the Hong Kong UC, so maybe they might have intended it at one time? But then for some reason, I never even think of considering using it for fire, electric, and EMP anyway.

Never tried it myself to know the difference one way or the other, though.

[Jonas]

Is the Hazmat suit also worthless against radiation? Because if so: shit.

[DDL]

Code: Select all

if ((damageType == 'TearGas') || (damageType == 'PoisonGas') || (damageType == 'Radiation') ||
		(damageType == 'HalonGas')  || (damageType == 'PoisonEffect') || (damageType == 'Poison'))

Those are all the fuckers it helps against.

So you're ok.

[Jonas]

Oh thank God (or more accurately Chris Norden), then I don't have to be embarrassed about the radiated room with the power for the timed safe in DXI.

Carry on.

[Y|yukichigai]

Just a small bug to report: The description of the hazmat suit claims that it will protect you from fire, electric and EMP damage when it actually does no such thing. I think the fact that nobody else seems to have noticed this is a testament to how useless the hazmat is, but there you go

Wow, never actually red the description of that, but I only thought it protected you from radiation/poisoning or something.

Holy. Crap. I never noticed that either, and for a few months out of the year I LIVE in DX's code. Damn. I'll add that to the "maybes", though frankly it seems like something a proper hazmat suit SHOULD do.

Now I'm going to have to obsessively read item descriptions and make sure the descriptions are accurate. Yeesh.

Also, Pistol Downgrade IS a bug and has already been fixed. In case the guy saying otherwise isn't clear on what we're talking about, the bug is that you can downgrade your pistol skill before starting a new game but still wind up starting off at "trained" when you finally start playing. People use this to get a couple thousand extra skillpoints right off the bat with no cost.

[DDL]

My approach to that bug was to massively lampshade it.

When on the skillselection screen at the start of the game (and only then) the pistol description is as follows:

Code: Select all

The use of hand-held weapons, including the standard 10mm pistol, its stealth variant, and the mini-crossbow. Downgrade this: you'll get the skill points back, honest!

Because I think that bug is awesome.

[Y|yukichigai]

My approach to that bug was to massively lampshade it.

When on the skillselection screen at the start of the game (and only then) the pistol description is as follows:

Code: Select all

The use of hand-held weapons, including the standard 10mm pistol, its stealth variant, and the mini-crossbow. Downgrade this: you'll get the skill points back, honest!

Because I think that bug is awesome.

I viewed it as a challenge, a matter of honor even, to get it to behave as intended throughout all possible ways of starting a new game, AND in a way that applied that to mods as well.

It was about as annoyingly difficult as you'd expect.

[Jonas]

Thankfully I don't have to worry about the difficulty of fixing code bugs, I have programmers who worry about that for me

[ggrotz]

UPDATEx2: PLEASE, WEIGH IN ON THE "MAYBE" (marked with a ?) ITEMS IN THE BUG LIST. These are things which could be considered design flaws or design choices, depending. I really want community input on these things, lest I inadvertently turn this into a "lite" version of Shifter.

I already offered my thoughts on some of this, but I'll go down the whole list. If possible to find it, guidance on what the original game intended should be sought (even if it what it suggests). I don't understand all of these clearly, so I'll suggest based on what I think it means.

? Aggressive Defense can "detonate" throwing knives, darts, and flamethrower fire actually anything that is not a bullet (added by me)

You can already see the effect of this one in TNM. In essence, you would severely nerf the Aggressive Defense by doing this, since it would only be useful against rockets & LAMs at level 3 and 4 (it's suicide to have it on at level 1 and 2 against explosives).

There is no incentive to have it for the player unless you plan on upgrading it all the way if it doesn't block this other stuff. I'm no fan of the spy drone either (the other aug choice in this spot), but IMO you would be changing game mechanics on this one (and IMO this change in TNM makes the AD junk in that mod).

? Paul can be tricked into using lethal weapons against the NSF

Not a big change for the player, and would make sense.

? Ammo you haven't picked up is displayed in the weapon info screen

I would gather this is the description display in the inventory screen? If that's the case, I would vote no on this change. If the information indicates "no ammo" then it is fine, but the info does need relayed that "Weapon X will use Ammo Y".

? Bullet tracers move very slow

I guess this means that you can see your bullets if you strafe quickly after firing? Doesn't matter that much to me.

? Overlap inventory exploit

My inclination is to fix all game-changing and breaking bugs and this is one of them.

? bTriggerOnceOnly doesn't work right for triggers (various infinite skillpoint loops)

You mean like having full inventory and being able to frob Savage repeatedly for aug upgrades? If so, should be fixed.

? Patrol and teleport MissionScript functions do nothing

what?

? Silenced Assault Rifle doesn't make enough silenced shots

Again as per previous posts in this thread (regarding pepper spray), look at what the weapon is modeling. It's one of those silly movie cliches that a weapon is silenced by the presence of a suppressor or silencer. This comes out very clearly in Deus Ex, even. Weapons do not have their noise and flash silenced, but are suppressed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressor for a good discussion on the topic. The noise is lessened but not completely eliminated.

IMO, the suppressed assault rifle is fine, but I don't know how the noise is modeled so a NPC "hears" it. The presence of the "silencer" should reduce this radius, but it should not eliminate it. This means if a NPC could "hear" a non-suppressed assault-rifle throughout the whole building, it should still be able to "hear" the suppressed version in the next room. My vote is to be very wary on this one.

? Unarmed NPCs can plow through obstacles (A.K.A. "Nicolette the Tank")

My vote is to fix as per previous post.

? "Inventory Received" window doesn't show proper counts for ammo given

Not sure what this means in game, but I do know that it's very hard to tell the amounts of ammo received at several points in the game. If it's incorrect reporting, by all means fix.

? NPCs magically stop burning when they die

Probably a design decision to lessen the CPU cycles required by the game. If it causes a slowdown to do this with multiple NPCs, like TNM does, then don't, otherwise it doesn't matter.

? Bullet spread is weird and inconsistent

Not sure what this means, but again model real-life if possible. Bullet spread should be wierd and inconsistent in relationship to the skill of the user. In other words, bullet spread should be more wierd and inconsistent for an untrained or trained user than a master user.

? No price and product display on Vending Machines

I'm thinking this is a TNM change (like "you should put the TNM printers in Deus Ex") more than it is a necessary Deus Ex change. There is no confusion regarding what you will get out of the Deus Ex vending machines, given the pictures that are used.

? Carried items are forcibly thrown at the start of a conversation (e.g. TNT to Gunther's face)

Definite fix!

? NPCs know your exact position when you are cloaked

It's hard to avoid the NPCs knowing this from a game programming perspective. Given that, IMO, the AI is fine in this regard. The dialogue and descriptions from DX and several of the mods indicate this AI behavior when it comes to the visual cloak or thermoptic camo. It should basically work as long as the player doesn't give up his position (by firing or something else intrusive). And since the cloak is/should not be perfect, the NPCs should know the position of the player until the player does something to obscure himself.

? Extra Soda/Candy textures are not used
? Conversations with animal speakers attempt to invoke nonexistant animations
? There are two additional unused sounds for Rats

No particular opinion. If it would add richness to the game and would not change the mechanics, then go ahead.

? Paul's answering machine (and the message it comes with) is not in the game
? Unused VOIP conversation between Lebedev and the unknown party

If it doesn't break the story line, and adds something positive to it.

? Ammo pickup amounts from frobbed corpses is always 1-4, instead of based on the default pickup ammount

Okay.

? OMG I CANT GET ON TEH BOTE

I'll take this as a joke.

? Throwing Knives suck

Opinion already offered in this thread, which is that if a change is made, to increase the ammo pack count slightly. Per the weapon description, throwing knives should "suck" for all except the master user. Again model real-life, it should be a short-range weapon that is hard to use.

? Spawned AugmentationCannisters have no augs in them

I don't quite understand this, but I would presume that is why there are all the augs in the Kurokuma Hideouts of Redsun 2020 without any augs?

? Unconscious NPC description doesn't include the name

If it's a bug or add richness to the game, then my vote is to fix.

? Manderley's Safe is walled up

This one has been talked to death in the past on boards such as PDX. I would search and point you to the threads, but it's been blown up. As I recall for what the conversation content generally went, the safe only appeared in one iteration of UNATCO HQ and was walled up in that iteration. This generally indicates that the safe was not intended to be in the game. Furthermore, if it were, it would be silly to have the player be breaking into it with Manderley right there. My vote would be to just go ahead and remove it entirely, if you want to do something, but if you don't want to do anything, just leave it.

? Hazmat suit doesn't protect against fire/electricity/etc.

This definitely seems to be a possible intention of the game, but I would have to see/experience how it changes the game in order to see if it would make it too strong of a temporary buff.

Hope this helps...

EDIT: Quote added up top to make clear what I was responding to

[DDL]

The silencer issue is that the assault rifle (when silenced) goes "thwip", rather than "thwipipipipip" as would be expected from a 5-round burst: it uses the exact same sound as the stealth pistol.

The slow tracers is..well, I like this, actually: tracers themselves are a completely abstract representation of "general direction of fire": they have a travel time and do nothing if they hit something/someone, whereas the actual gun is tracing and hitting instantly and invisibly. They are simply there to allow you to actually see where shots are coming from, and where your shots are going. The faster they move, the harder this will be to judge (albeit this could also be based on me being fairly shit at spotting who's shootin' m'ass).


The missionscript functions (getpatrolpoint and getspawnpoint) are broken in that they essentially find the first tagged point, even if told to be random: essentially the code is set up that it says "if you're set to be random and the random number generator is less than 0.5, use this point. Otherwise, use this point anyway."

Which is hilarious, but stupid. Fixing it adds a little more random pedestrian movement to HongKong, I think.

Cloaking is a tricky issue to fix, actually: NPCs really really don't like responding to non-pawn threats, so the best way (in my experience at least) to get them to act on things is ...to hide tiny pawns in the target. For cloaking, this might mean spawning in invisible pawns where the NPCs 'think' the cloaked player might be, but it gets very messy fast. My solution for this was to simply halve the accuracy of anyone firing at a cloaked player.

[Hassat Hunter]

My total unexperienced input! Yay!

? bTriggerOnceOnly doesn't work right for triggers (various infinite skillpoint loops)

You mean like having full inventory and being able to frob Savage repeatedly for aug upgrades? If so, should be fixed.

Nah, that seemed like a ConEdit error, giving items before checking the player actually has room for it. Like most of those free item drop errors (I think) like Biocells in Paris etc.
This would be keypads giving INF XP, like in the NYC shipyard and Vandenburg Power activation. I would say fix it, but yeah, if other keypads use it and unintentially have it set to true, and no-one noticed it shouldn't be (since it worked fine)...

? Ammo pickup amounts from frobbed corpses is always 1-4, instead of based on the default pickup ammount

I would say; do not alter it. If you get 7 full bullets from each guy with a 10mm that you shoot, while only using 1 bullet (headshot) or get the full 30 bullets for making a kill on a SMG user it would lead to loads of ammo very quickly. They probably made it 1-4 to promote the use of stealth instead of just shooting everything, since you get the ammo back for it anyways.

? Spawned AugmentationCannisters have no augs in them

I don't quite understand this, but I would presume that is why there are all the augs in the Kurokuma Hideouts of Redsun 2020 without any augs?

It probably means a cannister spawned by the script is empty, so if you want them filled and hidden you have to hide them from the world, and then make them enter the world instead of spawning them. I see no problem with that, since it would be hard to determine which aug has to be in a cannister if you spawn one (unless you make up 10 new different aug canister classes like TNM did).
Or does this imply you spawn a pre-dertermined canister with 2 augs in it, and it's still empty?

? Unconscious NPC description doesn't include the name

If it's a bug or add richness to the game, then my vote is to fix.

This is probably caused by calling an incorrect corpse model. Atleast, that was the case in TNM with the WIB's, MIB's and WCID Agents, which I fixed in 1.0.4+ by modifiying their characters to use the correct corpse model.

[ggrotz]

The silencer issue is that the assault rifle (when silenced) goes "thwip", rather than "thwipipipipip" as would be expected from a 5-round burst: it uses the exact same sound as the stealth pistol.

Okay. I thought the "bug" was that it wasn't silenced ENOUGH (i.e. needed to be made less noisy), not that it wasn't making the RIGHT number of shots.

The slow tracers is..well, I like this, actually: tracers themselves are a completely abstract representation of "general direction of fire" ... They are simply there to allow you to actually see where shots are coming from, and where your shots are going.

Okay I see the value of this one now. They definitely need to be made visible and not too fast that it will "streak". As I've said before once upon a time, I hate it when I'm getting shot in a game and can't figure out where it's coming from.

The missionscript functions (getpatrolpoint and getspawnpoint) are broken ...

I see now, thanks for the explanation...

Cloaking is a tricky issue to fix, actually: NPCs really really don't like responding to non-pawn threats, ... My solution for this was to simply halve the accuracy of anyone firing at a cloaked player.

Makes enough sense for what I know of how Deus Ex works, though IMO half might be a little much.

Thanks for the clarifications. For whoever (Yuki, or someone else involved?), it might be useful to clarify the language of that "maybe" list as DDL somewhat did if you are looking for input, so everyone will know exactly what you are talking about.