Off Topic Productions

How're things coming along?

I am also very interested in the latest developments.

Anything you can share with us, G-Flex?

Is this mod no longer in progress?

please, G-Flex let us know!

thanks

I am also eager to know more and I've even sent G-Flex a private message. No answer yet.

It seems he's not be active for a couple of months and I can not help but worry.

Good news, everyone! I'm not dead!

I apologize for the long delay and lack of contact; there have been a few things contributing to that. I was doing some really annoying and difficult work on the mod before, which caused me to lose some motivation. I also wasn't doing very good version control, generally just making commits for new versions, which made it pretty hard to isolate features to certain code changes. This was compounded by the fact that the longer I've gone without working on it, the less I recall what exactly I was doing and the more I need to brush up on my own work. I've also been dealing with a new full-time job this year, as well as a computer that kept overheating up until yesterday.

I've disassembled this crummy old laptop I use and cleaned out the fan and vents so that running anything more strenuous than a single Firefox tab doesn't cause it to overheat and shut off, and should hopefully be building a new computer in the near future as well.


My first order of business is to finish my map patch, and upload that somewhere Then, I'm going to remove the Human Renovation scripting changes that those map fixes take care of in their own way to avoid redundancy, and make map changes specifically for Human Renovation. After that, it's mostly a matter of finishing up some fairly annoying work for the mod itself. I'll probably also make real installers for these things, since they'll have a bunch of files involved now that I've bitten the bullet and chosen to do map changes as well.

Feel free to continue to suggest features and report bugs, whether they regard the maps, the scripting, or anything else!

Great to have you back!

Glad to hear you are still working on it. Of course, I've played lots of mods, and I'm sure I still will as a change of pace is always fun. However, this is the one that I consider currently provides the definitive "Deus Ex vanilla+" experience, my base install, and which I recommend to other fans I know who are looking to replay, so I really look forward to its completion.

Ah, I wish there was a version without the gameplay rebalance and with just fixes (no offense).

There is, it's called Deus Ex 2.0.

Well, kind of. Deus Ex 2.0 doesn't have any of the fixes from this yet, although it may at some point in the future.

Of course, some things are necessarily both fixes and balance changes. For example, it's kind of hard to fix bullet spread without balance being affected in some way. I'm not sure how I'd handle that.

Random feedback on skills.
Environmental training- the ability to switch off these items is really a big balance change. I think this skill is probably now too cheap, and could reasonably be increased to the same cost as demolitions. Medicine is still of very limited use- it could happily replace Environmental Training as the cheap skill.

I am tempted to go into a more fulsome analysis of how computers, lockpicking, athletics, electronics and others all have problematic costs, but I feel the type of changes and issues I would be discussing are probably beyond what you would view as the remit of the mod.

Tinter wrote:Random feedback on skills.
Environmental training- the ability to switch off these items is really a big balance change. I think this skill is probably now too cheap, and could reasonably be increased to the same cost as demolitions. Medicine is still of very limited use- it could happily replace Environmental Training as the cheap skill.

For what it's worth, I did significantly reduce the charge capacity of hazmat suits (2000 -> 1250), and rebreathers no longer fill up your lungs entirely, so there's less abuse potential there. I'll take a look at this at some point, though.

I am tempted to go into a more fulsome analysis of how computers, lockpicking, athletics, electronics and others all have problematic costs, but I feel the type of changes and issues I would be discussing are probably beyond what you would view as the remit of the mod.

Hey, if you want to share your opinion, go ahead. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll act on all of it, or in some specific way or another, but I'm interested in knowing.

Glad, you're back G-Flex

Please, give priority to game play re-balance along with the fixes as much as you can in keeping the original charm of Deus Ex.

I have to go over some of my ideas that slipped my mind due to your long absence to list them down. I'll attempt to share my suggestions soon.

Since your happy to at least read, I shall expand on skills, on the basis that their should be at least a plausible case for taking any skill to Master.

Electronics & Lockpicking: The pricing vs utility of these skills is totally wrong. AFAIK, the vast majority of players take these to trained and then thats it; for experienced players, the number of multitools & lockpicks available mean theres no reason to do otherwise, and there is no reason why 6000 for master could possibly be worth it. I see two possible ways of addressing this:
1- rebalance the effectiveness of the skills downwards at each level, as I think some other mods have done. Even just taking 5% from trained would be significant, advanced is probably about right, Master could go up to 90-100% perhaps.
2-Change the costs downwards, heavily. The standard way of doing this would just to make the whole line cheaper, but I think theres a good case for deviating from the pattern of making later upgrades cost more. Weapons upgrades should cost more as you get to higher levels as they give you more in terms of benefits, but here we clearly see reduced returns.
Personally, my preference would be to combine 1 with reducing the costs of advanced and master very heavily- probably to less than 2000 for each. They just give very little benefit.

Computers- runs into the same patterns as above. In particular, Master provides no gameplay benefit beyond making email easier to read for the impatient and a handful of credits. I would probably leave the first two, but upgrading from advanced to master should reasonably cost even less than advanced. Failing that, Master computer badly needs something adding to it to make it a realistic option, maybe +10% EMP resistance ["As an elite hacker, the agent may reroute his internal circuits to resist electrical discharges"?]?

Medicine- its too expensive, especially given Regeneration exists. The higher levels provide explicitly less benefit at greater cost. It would be neat if the toxin resistance could be modelled by some low level of environmental resistance? Or just increase the boost it gives medkits at higher levels? But mostly, make it cheaper.

Athletics- Has the opposite problem, its a passive skill of use 100% of the time, even at the increased price its still perhaps a little cheap. However, with your nerfs to starting JC, I think increasing the cost of the first level would be unfair, but a slight cost increase for later levels isn't unreasonable.

Essentially, I think the balance in costs for all the non-combat skills is totally wrong, and I think abandoning the traditional experience cost chains is the easiest way to fix it. I don't expect it to be a widely agreed with opinion, though.

Tinter wrote: Computers- runs into the same patterns as above. In particular, Master provides no gameplay benefit beyond making email easier to read for the impatient and a handful of credits. I would probably leave the first two, but upgrading from advanced to master should reasonably cost even less than advanced. Failing that, Master computer badly needs something adding to it to make it a realistic option, maybe +10% EMP resistance ["As an elite hacker, the agent may reroute his internal circuits to resist electrical discharges"?]?

The computer skill could use the % based success rate. That means that when you are trained, you have a 50% or 30% chance to succeed. This makes searching for passcodes (which is REALLY fun and interesting, like being a detective) needed. Once you upgrade it, it could let you into other places (for instance you couldn't hack a SecTerminal at Trained, but you could a classic computer). The cost is i think OK. I would absolutely love to see this here, it was my favourite feature of GMDX.

Reloading the game over and over is a concern, since people will do this, therefore i would make it that you either manually set what you can/cannot hack or you could make a little script the game generates when you first load into a level, so you cannot just load back and expect different results. GMDX fixed this with their goddamn annoying checkpoint system.

TLDR; Make the hacking so that on level TRAINED you can ONLY hack computers and not the security terminals; or make a % based chance success rate of hacking that would be pregenerated when you first start the game for all levels.

EDIT: Fixed my retarded spelling and sentence forming. This one is written poorly too.