I've been working on a mod for the last three weeks that you guys might be interested in. I'll let the intro I wrote for the readme do the rest of the talking:
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BioMod Beta 2
Based on Shifter 1.8.3
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Author: Michael Justice ('Lork' on most forums)
Shifter's Author: Y|yukichigai
BioMod is an extension of Y|yukichigai's excellent Shifter mod for Deus Ex. While I still think Shifter is a definite improvement over the original game, I sometimes felt while playing it that it was too conservative for my tastes. Eventually I decided to make my own mod which would contain some radical changes that might give some people pause, but would hopefully breathe new life into the game for everyone else.
As the name suggests, BioMod is primarily concerned with Deus Ex's augmentations, with the aim of making them more balanced, but also a lot easier to manage. Most augs are now automated, using energy only when they're actually doing their jobs. Some augs that were less useful or that would be a pain to manage have been made free or given extra abilities, while those that I thought were un-salvageable have been replaced with entirely new augs.
In addition to the augmentation system, BioMod also makes a few general gameplay changes, such as the addition of a pickpocketing system, an autosave feature, and an improved environmental training skill.
Interesting, I'm intrigued by this pick-pocketing system. Frob an enemy without him seeing you and you get their weapons? If so, that's a great idea - I'm surprised no one's thought of it before.
nerdenstein wrote:Wow sounds great
I'll have to give this a try later
So this is basically Shifter 1.8.3 with your own addons/improvements?
Yep, that's it exactly.
AgentSmithereens wrote:Interesting, I'm intrigued by this pick-pocketing system. Frob an enemy without him seeing you and you get their weapons? If so, that's a great idea - I'm surprised no one's thought of it before.
Right now it's only for keys, sort of like pickpocketing in Thief. In future versions I plan to extend it to single slot items and credits, though.
Fascinating. I like the looks of this, and will try it out quite soon. In the meantime, I had a comment about the pickpocket feature. Rather than making it have a failure chance, which just ends up causing people to do a lot of save/reload, you might want to consider making it a skill. The levels might work like this:
Untrained - no pickpocketing allowed
Trained - can get keys and money
Expert - can get ammo/lockpicks/multitools
Master - can steal their weapons right off their backs
Perhaps doing what Hotal Carone did and change swimming skill to a stealth skill and implimenting Pickpocketing as one of the features of it.
I think it was Hotal Carone anyway.. Not played it in a while
Correct me if i'm wrong
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.
DDL wrote:fucking with DX window code is shitty anyway.
Amen to that. Anyone who ever downloaded my "Gambler" package off DXEditing (It's just a Video Blackjack machine for DX) would know it can be done from scratch, but probably doesn't know that that ONE game window took me 3 weeks to make. Most of which wasn't even the Blackjack AI/back-end code...
Window code is a bitch.
Click, and watch with false amazement as this dragon grows up.
DDL wrote:see TNM: add fists, but drop swimming, to avoid remaking the entire menu...
Actually it kind of worked the other way around: drop swimming because it'd be close to useless in TNM, implement fist skill to replace it because we didn't want to have less skills than DX
Well, I suppose everyone has their own preferences. Personally, I would replace medicine. I always put a point into swimming, and never put anything into medicine.
Really? I consider medicine to be one of the most useful skills in the game, especially at the start. For just 900 skill points you can double the amount of healing a medkit can do!
Yeah, lots of skills are useless.. so probably replacing em with swimming is the best, There's only 1 long swimming thingie I remember, and that's in the first mission, Liberty island.. and it's only to get the 'sawn-off shotgun' (which I can get without any swimming skill)
Also in laguardia, also paris catacombs, also sub base, also A51....there are quite a few places where swimming is useful, but nowhere it's essential. It's just ...less generally useful than the other skills.
