Off Topic Productions

Okay, new version up on the SVN. Check the first post for details. I'll upload a compiled copy to my Savefile folder tomorrow sometime. Right now I need sleep.

Oh yeah, sorry. New Beta up in my Savefile folder. Some big important fixes, like compatibility with NPC Random Inventory.

Still working on the other fixes. My current WIP version has a working Augmentation Replace feature for medbots in addition to the existing Upgrade feature. I'm not sure what effect that will have on the game in terms of balance though, so it may not be in the final release.

Continued my old game(hadn't gotten far still getting 1k for a metro pass.) a few things of note:

1: I think I mentioned the whole throwing a gun and having someone else use it causes the bullet casings to still come from the player rather than the person actually shotting the gun.

2: Upon going to Sol's I noticed ketchup at Jackie's feet, ketchup on the floor in the main area(prolly from a board guest that was summoned there and walked away), and a Burn Soda at Zero's feet. I take it this is a glitch with the changes to random inventory?

3: The stealth pistol and pumpgun still seem to be silent, also the "embarrassed guy" is still sitting on a normal chair and not a toilet. Would these be fixed if I had started a new game?

4: You forgot about throwing foons with the melee cycling.

5: New game didn't help, the HDTP things are still screwing things up(easily seen in the intro), and most weapons are still silent.

6:in the intro1.0.2 has the bug where DD draws the firesword and an assault rifle in the intro; with this version of Shifter he drew nothing.

7: EDS doesn't seem to work in TNM, at least not when I used allaugs. The description was right though.

8: if you have more than one of the three Katanas it can snag the melee weapon cycling( I noticed this when summoning all TNM melee weapons to try to see which ones you missed)

I've run into a SERIOUS impediment to testing Shifter with TNM. For reasons I can't fully understand I get a "bad name index" error. I've tried reinstalling TNM completely to no effect. I've even reinstalled WINDOWS completely (coincidence, had to 'cause of Windows 7 expiring). Very odd. Next step is a new install of Deus Ex, but we'll see.

Okay, got it sorted out. Needed a fresh and clean install of Deus Ex to work, not sure why. Maybe I accidentally recompiled something I shouldn't have.

Anyway, got most of the fixes and features working. Biggest one I haven't gotten done yet is the intro f%$#up with the fire sword.

Also added a new feature that is WAY convenient: pressing fire when you don't have anything in-hand will bring up your fists.

Sounds like good news.

Some problems with TNM+shifter I've seen:

Electrostatic discharge has the effect of combat strength because TNM seems to have copy and pasted a large amount od Deus Ex weapon code. Only it's a somewhat overpowered combat strength because the levels are different.

Crystal Melk gives permanent bullet time for the level, at least until you restart the game. Have you seen the light?

The teleporting aliens don't teleport. Their copy-pasted attacking state script uses a pickdestination with the different return type. Replacing them with GetNewDestination works.

I get the problems in the Using HDTP with TNM thread. Yeah, those screenshots that Sergeant Kelly posted.


Now I can recompile the TNM packages, I've built them on top of shifter and tried to incorporate random shifter code into the copy and pasted stuff. Haven't tested much yet though so I'll see how it goes. But the only way to get everything working would be to fork TNM.

Chris Rosenkreutz wrote:Sounds like good news.

Some problems with TNM+shifter I've seen:

Electrostatic discharge has the effect of combat strength because TNM seems to have copy and pasted a large amount od Deus Ex weapon code. Only it's a somewhat overpowered combat strength because the levels are different.

Crystal Melk gives permanent bullet time for the level, at least until you restart the game. Have you seen the light?

The teleporting aliens don't teleport. Their copy-pasted attacking state script uses a pickdestination with the different return type. Replacing them with GetNewDestination works.

Thank you for these, the teleporting alien issue in particular. I've adjusted my code accordingly for that AND the Crystal Melk issue. The latter I accomplished by putting the Zyme "countdown" into a separate function entirely, and as a fringe benefit of that I've made it such that your "zyme time" doesn't count down during conversations. Not exactly realistic, but it can cause issues.

Not sure what, if anything, I can do about Electrostatic Discharge.

Anything we can do about it? Without breaking anything in vanilla TNM of course

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO AREN'T JONAS: Jonas and I talked via MSN and I may be getting access to TNM's source as it's updated (via their SVN), so as to better wiggle my code around to work with it. There is a slight chance I may even be given write permission so I can add in code to make TNM and Shifter play nice, but that would be contingent on the code not screwing with a non-Shifter install of TNM. As Chris said, some of this simply can't be done without forking TNM into two separate versions. However, I've thought things were impossible before only to discover some brilliant workaround later. We shall see.


Right now the current code "workaround" for Electrostatic Discharge is to simply make it back into the normal Combat Strength augmentation with the appropriate values. Again, Chris is dead-on with this: TNM had to duplicate large sections of Deus Ex code with minor adjustments to get their stuff to work right, and that code doesn't call my code at all. There's no way they can really NOT do it that way either. Because Electrostatic Discharge is so dependent on these functions there is (at this moment) no way to really get its effects working. Perhaps this will change, but I'm not counting on it.

Okay folks, got some more stuff working with TNM....

1) Weapon cycling now works for both Grenades and hand-to-hand weapons in TNM, and is all-inclusive. I fixed a bug in my code that was causing Sporks to not be included. My bad.

2) All weapons have sounds now. I took a look at what I was trying to do with my "sound fix" code, realized how cumbersome it was, then found a way to make it dead simple. The end result is that instead of a BUNCH of new code, the sound fix uses the existing DX stuff (in terms of playing firing sounds) and triggers the firing sound extra times for silenced, automatic weapons in a function that is only called by automatic weapons.

3) While I was there, I noticed that TNM implemented some code that was interfering with the new aim system and (seemingly random, but not) the splash effects you get when shooting through water. I got around this by moving a fairly major function - TraceFire - to a new function and making the old one simply call the new one. All my code calls the new one too, so everything works just like it used to, except TNM's weapons call MY code, not TNM's. Bottom line: the laser behaves like it does in Shifter and your shot goes where it points, just like in Shifter.

4) NEW STUFF: I was poking around at the scramble grenade code and did something sort of interesting. When you scramble a bot now it doesn't just reverse alliances, it completely adopts yours (for the most part). This clears up a lot of issues that people ran into sometimes, like scrambled bots in New York gunning down Stanton Dowd or something. It also means that if you scramble the spiderbot in the first level of TNM it WON'T go all crazy and kill the repair bot.


Sleep now. More later. Shifter is inches away from being releasable in terms of working with TNM.

Glad to hear it. I haven't been playing much Deus Ex recently, but when this gets released I'll probably go through TNM again to make sure everything works alright.

By the way, since you've had a look at TNM code.... Any chance of having actually auged: MIBs/WIBs, MJ12 commandos(?), Simmons, Anna, etc. in shifter?

Y|yukichigai wrote:It also means that if you scramble the spiderbot in the first level of TNM it WON'T go all crazy and kill the repair bot.

Aww you ruined my delicious catch-22

Seconded re: tnmpawnaugs in Shifter.

...I suspect that would require shifter to be subclassing stuff from TNM while TNM is simultaneously subclassing stuff from shifter.

If you see what I mean.

There are workarounds, for sure, but they're inelegant (and most would end up tying shifter to TNM irrevocably).

But yuki's much cleverer than I am, so I'll no doubt be proved wrong.

DDL wrote:...I suspect that would require shifter to be subclassing stuff from TNM while TNM is simultaneously subclassing stuff from shifter.

If you see what I mean.

There are workarounds, for sure, but they're inelegant (and most would end up tying shifter to TNM irrevocably).

But yuki's much cleverer than I am, so I'll no doubt be proved wrong.

Without checking TNM's code, I would do it by giving AugmentationManager class to choice Scripted Pawns along with a bioelectric variable. Then it could be as simple as adding simplistic set of if/else reactions to damage/etc. that are invoked when the class is damaged or whatnot. If I wanted to get really fancy I could specify additional AI routines for when to "activate" those augs based on, say, reacting to the presence of an enemy, along with support functions for using BioElectric cells to recharge if they have them. It would be similar to what was done with the MJ12 Commandos, just a bit keyed up. I've already been considering allowing NPCs to use medkits on the higher difficulty levels.

All in all, it's not impossible or exactly daunting from a code creation perspective. It's mostly time consuming. Possibly worth it for the difficulty bump though.

Oh, I have no doubt you could do that*, but I think the question was asking if TNM's NPC augmentation system (since it's already coded up and running) could be implemented back into DX via shifter, which short of C&Ping all the code and sticking it further up the hierarchy (or using incredibly obscure context-specific coding), wouldn't really work.



*Making augmentation use context-specific does get tremendously complicated though, trust me on this.