Responses? Weird!
Right now I'm working on some more changes. I probably would have uploaded a new version by now, but I won't be able to get my laptop online for another 10 days or so.
Upcoming features already complete or near-complete in my working version:
- High Definition Texture Pack compatibility. I hope. I copied and pasted the stuff in the Shifter mod that allows for compatibility; I have no idea how well it works. The guys who do HDTP didn't implement it as a drop-and-replace sort of thing, for reasons I don't really like, meaning that it isn't mod-compatible unless you go through painstaking lengths in your mod to force items to load the new textures/meshes if they're present. Anyway, it should work.
- Some more little things from Shifter: The inventory-overlap glitch/exploit is disabled unless you have cheats turned on, the Enviro Resist aug affects the drug/poison swervy-vision timer, alarm panels and laser tripwires deactivated with EMP are deactivated for longer if they take more EMP damage, and Master skill in computers lets you get free goodies from vending machines (so there's incentive to have it).
- Athletics has less effect on jumping and default jump height is now the same as in regular DX (to fix some nagging issues where being untrained would result in inability to jump over some map bits you need to be able to).
- EMP Shield is now passive, not requiring any activation or power drain to use. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I'm trying to balance it to be less, er, utterly useless, and that's the first good idea that came up. Maybe I'll also have it provide a little bit of electricity-damage protection at higher levels, or change which canister it's in. Not sure yet, but ideas are appreciated.
- Spy drone is also altered to allow for better use as, well, a spy drone. Now the running cost is very low, so you can send it for long distances as a scout. This way, people might actually use it for that! However, to ensure that players don't just use it as a free reusable EMP grenade, it costs a significant amount of energy to generate the drone itself. Again, I'm not 100% sure on this one either, so feedback is appreciated.
- Field of View angle is adjusted based on the game resolution's aspect ratio, and should provide even better FoV matches than kentie's launcher (which you still want to use for its other fixes, mind you), and is automatically adjusted every time you load the game. Hassle-free! This also applies to things like scopes and binoculars, which kentie's launcher doesn't fix. So, no more widescreen woes, and theoretically this should work no matter what kind of crazy-ass aspect ratio you're using. This is probably the last "widescreen fix" that needed doing in Deus Ex... I hope. I didn't do whatever would be needed to adjust the FoV adjustment that being drunk/drugged/poisoned makes, but that's a small enough change in angle that I don't really care.
- Since Athletics is more useful now, it costs more (same as Demolitions and Medicine).
- I was bored, so I made a gun that shoots bullets in a spread pattern that looks like the outline of a heart shape. It's the Assault Heartgun. I might make it create glowing red/pink bulletholes and/or cause shooting an NPC to make that NPC friendly and follow you. This is just me being bored, so there's a chance I won't even compile it into the version I release. Either way, it wouldn't be available unless you cheat it in.
I feel like I should do something about Aqualung, since damn near nobody uses it, and "Swimming" now being a hopefully-useful skill probably won't help its case. I can't think of anything to add to its functionality. The best I can come up with is dramatically increasing its bonus at/near max level, so at max level you can basically stay underwater forever, but I doubt even that would be very useful.
Having played through DX with this a month or so ago, my only concern is the absurd speed you can pick up with athletics. The potential speed enchancement abuse in vanilla was bad enough already... not that it really detracts from the gameplay if you don't want it to, nor do I have a better suggestion as to what to do with swimming.
I think the enhancement you get from Master Athletics is similar to a level 2 speed aug, but I forget. Also, the default player run speed is lower in my mod to slightly adjust for it. I could decrease the boost you get from Athletics, but I want it to at least be noticeable/useful. I could also decrease the bonus from the speed aug by some amount. Overall, running speed is less problematic than jump height, because running speed being slightly too low is far, far less likely to screw up the character due to map design.
How did Athletics feel to you in general? Would it still feel useful with less of a speed bonus? I'm afraid of nerfing it too much, especially since I had to mess with jump height. I think the best approach at the moment would be a slight nerf to both the speed aug and athletics skill in terms of jump height(so neither alone is much less useful, but the combination at maximum provides you less of an advantage over the vanilla DX speed aug alone). The way that the two effects add up, both for running speed and jumping height, in my mod, is additive instead of multiplicative. That is to say, if your skill is giving you 140% normal jumping velocity, and the aug is giving you 180% normal jumping velocity, you get 220%, not the multiplied total of 252%. So they aren't ridiculously overpowered if you have both.
Athletics itself doesn't really increase run speed that much since your default run speed is lower than in regular DX. For instance, at max Athletics skill alone, your run speed is roughly equivalent to just the first-level speed aug in vanilla DX. However, I agree that the combination of skill and aug can get a little high, so I'll probably nerf the aug slightly in that regard too.
If any of that sounds bad, tell me! The effects should mostly be subtle.
Of course, faster running speed compounds with higher jump height when it comes to jump distance, since
both affect how far you can long-jump, so that's affected more than just plain running or jumping.
I did some drastic changes to how falling damage is calculated, so if any of that feels bad or weird to you with regard to Athletics or the Speed Aug, let me know about that too. The speed aug mostly provides a
percentage reduction to damage now instead of a flat one, so it should be much more useful for really long falls but probably less useful for short ones. The skill now takes the role of flat damage reduction. I figure this makes sense; having super parkour skills can definitely increase your safe landing distance, but after that, it seems reasonable for damage to scale as normal, like how the speed aug used to work but with a subtler effect.
I also had a couple of crashes on autosave but the game loaded said saves without any problems.
Interesting. The autosave feature isn't my implementation, so I'm not sure what problems exist there. Do you remember that map it occurred on, or any other info, like an error message? The game also saves a log file where it saves your config information (in My Documents\Deus Ex\System if using kentie's launcher), so if your game crashes again, you could peek in there and see if it says anything that would help.
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Topic: Deus Ex: Human Renovation (a mod/fan patch for the Deus Ex) (currently v1.23) (Read 37111 times)