Small mods in vanilla DX

[Ebenezer Grymm]

There are a few small things I'd like to change in just regular old vanilla DX. Specifically off the top of my head I'd like to make the flashlight augmentation cost 0 energy. I'd also like to make the night vision goggles unlimited use, if possible (not quite sure how that would work since it seems you cannot unequip them once they are equipped, could they be made more like the binoculars maybe?).

How would one go about doing something like that?

Edit- Also, what do you guys do about the lighting? Even if I turn in game and my monitir brightness all the way up, it's just too damn dark. Like pitch black. I'm using the enhanced ogl renderer, if that makes any difference.

[Kee715]

Have you seen Shifter? It allows you to turn powered items (Ballistic Armour, NVGs, Thermoptic Camo, etc...) off.

As for the lighting, I have no idea WTF is up... I can have the brightness all the way up and it is too bright (Removes the "Deus Ex" and gives it more of a "Half-Life" feel. ), and what about the Contrast? That might be worth adjusting. And are you using the ENB series? That makes TNM/Deus Ex WAAAAY darker (Where there is darkness (Which is almost everywhere that is not indoors)), if not then I can not help you.

[Ebenezer Grymm]

I was just reading about shifter, was going to dl it from their site but it's too busy right now or has exceeded its bandwidth or something. If anyone happens to know another site I could DL it from that would be mucho appreciado.

As far as my in game darkness problem. Heres an example. You start a new game and see the 2 guys having a conversation. The guy that looks like a doctor, half his face is normal and half is damn near pitch black. The 1st level? Forget about it. You just can not see almost anywhere. I've played soooooooooooo many games and never ran across anything like this. It's not something the games doing wrong or my machine, it's just they made it too damn dark.

So what I did was just used my video cards control center thing to change the brightness and gamma and tweaked those. Got it to look really good actually. It's amazing how good the game actually looks when you can see things. Just sucks that I have to adjust it back whenever I'm done playing, but such is life. I've never ran across a game where I had to change monitor or video brightness and gamma settings, rather than use in-game sliders if they were even necessary.

That said, I'm really tempted to try out the ENB thing now.

[Kee715]

Well there is Filefront, Mod DB (Soon, their servers are temporarily down), I am not sure of Fileshack but they might have it, if Fileplanet has the latest version you can get it from there (The latest version is 1.8.1 (The one from Yuki's site is only 1.8.0)), I wouldst suggest waiting for Mod DB or getting an account at Fileshack if they have it, I always have trouble with Filefront. (Not everyone does though, but I do, I think it is my ISP)

[Dark Reality]

There are a few small things I'd like to change in just regular old vanilla DX. Specifically off the top of my head I'd like to make the flashlight augmentation cost 0 energy. I'd also like to make the night vision goggles unlimited use, if possible (not quite sure how that would work since it seems you cannot unequip them once they are equipped, could they be made more like the binoculars maybe?).

Well, what you do - and I would assume this is where TNM started (though, they had to do much much more) is you use UnrealEd to unpack your DeusEx.U file, which gives you a whole boatload of random files you didn't have before. You edit them to your heart's content and then use an app called... oh damn, I don't have that name handy, but it's a small command-line app that rebuilds everything. It's buggy as hell - you have to edit an INI to get it to work, and you have to delete or rename the deusex.u file first because it can't overwrite it. But then you have your changes.

As others have said, Shifter makes some changes, but Shifter's author Yukichigai is pretty conservative. His primary goal, I would say, is making DX a better game, in the spirit of the original. His skills-for-kills system sort of goes against that, but he also fixes the unlimited lockpicking/multitool bug, and a couple other exploits, so I guess it balances out. He also reintegrates stuff that was taken out at the last minute or that Ion Storm couldn't get working. Like there's this conversation between Lebedev and Tong where Tong's telling Lebedev to kill you, but Lebedev says you can be turned. Yuki didn't know where to put it, and it's had a few homes during the life of the mod. Currently IIRC it's a VOIP conversation you access through a ground-level PC in the terminal (under the security room).

I sort of maintain a fork of Shifter called ShifterPlus whose goal is to make the game more fun. It's an attempt at creating a middle ground between all-out cheating and not cheating, to make it more fun without spoiling it. The biggest thing I do is blow all the ammo and item caps through the roof. How'd you like to carry 100 LAMs on you? How about a few thousand clips of pistol or AR ammo? Yeah, ShifterPlus + ALLAMMO is a lot of fun.

I've been meaning to adapt Shifter 1.8.1 but never got around to it. Now I'm waiting on the TNM-friendly Shifter, as Shifter and TNM don't get along. Once that's done I'll update ShifterPlus. I asked Trestkon over on GameFAQs if I could use code from TNM and he said it was alright, so I'm already planning on doing the cost-free lamp. But like in TNM, you'll have to upgrade it one step. (My Datalink is also upgradeable, just like in Smoke's mod - you can access computers and security terminals from the range of the sniper rifle. If I could think of a cool way to allow the IFF to be upgraded I'd do it in a heartbeat... or as long as it would take to get it right.)

I mostly hang out at GameFAQs, sad little piece of 1995 technology as it is, but I see people who used to post there a lot here, so maybe I'll stick around.