Free kitchen sink designs from Nigeria

[Cybernetic pig]

Whoever is playing this i'd like to hear stories of how you dealt with the first MIB MK2 that you encounter.
There are plenty of possiblities, but i'd like to know if any have found exploits. Plus it would be interesting. Bobby?

[Cybernetic pig]

Just improving the skybox for Silo map, anyone know what to do with the corner there, besides putting a mountain in the way?

[bobby 55]

Whoever is playing this i'd like to hear stories of how you dealt with the first MIB MK2 that you encounter.
There are plenty of possiblities, but i'd like to know if any have found exploits. Plus it would be interesting. Bobby?

No exploits that I noticed or tried coz if it's that dude with the scientists in the secret MJ12 facility, I splattered him with a GEP rocket. I'll check it out when I play the refined version.

[Cybernetic pig]

Can I get some suggestions!

All the skills are now nicely balanced, new features have been coded up for V2 to balance them out further.
(now being developed by two people)

There is only one skill left to balance out- Demolition Skill. It needs improved worth (rather than just making each level really cheap).

Can anyone think of a new feature to put the final touch in the possible perfection of the Skill System?
Has to be Demolition related, but a stretch will be considered if it's a good idea.

[DDentonas]

Make LAMs and other wall mounted grenades almost impossible to disable without some skill points invested on Demolition. Lower the time they give you to disable them, to a minimum. After all, mines are not used to damage an opponent, but as area-denial weapons, forcing the intruder to try another way in (if they cant disable them).
Trained should give you a fair, but hard chance to disabe them and Advanced should give you a little more time to disable them.

Another (basic) thing you could do, would be to nerf quite hard (but not as hard as the DTS when you started out) the damage when you are untrained and give juicy bonus damage with skill upgrades. Be sure to let the players know that grenades get a lot better by upgrading, through the skill description. You should use at least 5 LAMs or 3 emp grenades, to take out a MilBot, if you are untrained.

Make scramber grenades more common, but reduce the time they convert the enemy robots, but give nice big time upgrades as you upgrade your skill.

In fact make all grenades more common but less deadly(on untrained/trained) period.

Increce the radius of LAMs when they are put on a wall and rise more as you upgrade your skill points.

Put rebreather back in, make the water deadlier :p

Hope it helped a bit.

[Cybernetic pig]

Make LAMs and other wall mounted grenades almost impossible to disable without some skill points invested on Demolition. Lower the time they give you to disable them, to a minimum. After all, mines are not used to damage an opponent, but as area-denial weapons, forcing the intruder to try another way in (if they cant disable them).
Trained should give you a fair, but hard chance to disabe them and Advanced should give you a little more time to disable them.

Yeah, thought about this one, but they can just be shot. However disabling them allows you to pick them up. Yes this will be implemented.

Another (basic) thing you could do, would be to nerf quite hard (but not as hard as the DTS when you started out) the damage when you are untrained and give juicy bonus damage with skill upgrades. Be sure to let the players know that grenades get a lot better by upgrading, through the skill description.
You should use at least 5 LAMs or 3 emp grenades, to take out a MilBot, if you are untrained.

5 LAMS! That is nerfing hard! Probably will nerf them a bit though.

Make scramber grenades more common, but reduce the time they convert the enemy robots, but give nice big time upgrades as you upgrade your skill.

Hmm, not bad. We won't increase the amount there are though because even
untrained there would be enough time to just throw one down and run past the robot, even if the timer were 5 seconds or something. They would be easy to abuse if there are lots of scramblers.
But yes, may adjust the converted time some.

In fact make all grenades more common but less deadly(on untrained/trained) period.

Abuse on untrained, as above. Blowing doors, spamming gas grenades etc.

Increce the radius of LAMs when they are put on a wall and rise more as you upgrade your skill points.

vanilla already does this, although I don't understand why you would want the change for proximity triggered only.

Put rebreather back in, make the water deadlier :p

No rebreathers, and drowning damage is 25pts per two seconds, regen aug heals 20pts per two seconds. You can no longer swim with regen activated, regen got huge nerf, although it drains energy at half the rate (since it heals at half the rate...well 1/4 technically) and choosing energy shield over regen may even be a not so crazy choice (it's passive, no drain + more enemies wield plasma rifles). Still definately recommend Regen over it though; challenging mod.

I just played through my makeover of the Silo map for testing (no sneaky BSP holes thankfully), it was very challenging and fun, even with a little bit of quicksave abuse. Talking of quicksave abuse, there may be an optional super extreme difficulty mode that prevents such atrocities (choice and consequence will be enforced even further this way).

Hope it helped a bit.

Yes, it did, thanks. I think we'll nerf grenades ever so slightly, and change the disarm times a touch. Will definately be the cheapest skill though, as even Swimming, medicine and Environ training are far better now.

-Swimming skill is a must to swim in some areas without any rebreathers and you cannot just swim with regen activated (You can use fully upgraded Aqualung, but those aug upgrades are precious. Probably best to combine LVl 1-2 with the swim skill Lvl3 or so). Taking swimming routes are also far more rewarding in some cases. (To sneak past tough enemies, plus some better rewards in some spots).
Karkians are more common in water though but upgrading swimming to master will allow you to swim rings around them hacking away with even a combat knife for example.

-Environ training each upgrade allows you to stack Hazmats, Ballistic Armour and Thermoptic camos in the inventory, +1 stack to each item type each upgrade, plus there are more hazards and tougher enemies so they will help if you choose the skill.

-Medicine skill gives you a small max health increase to head and torso each upgrade, but is very expensive.

-Computer has the start high price but descending costs from before plus implemented eskhrw's code that adds a chance of being detected whilst hacking, higher skill less chance obviously. Along with descending costs this further encourages actually taking computer skill past Trained.

-Heavy weapons skill is cheaper as there is less ammo to find in the mod, and gep + law isn't really effected that much by the skill. Sure, you get a big damage boost, but they already have instakill capabilities to begin with. Same for flamethrower, instakill to common enemies pretty much.
Now it has less ammo to be found + no longer sets MIBs alight. MIBs (Mk2) are super tough in the mod so just setting them on fire was an easy way out.
Anyway, it's cheaper because less ammo for heavies, and other than movement speed for the other heavy weapons it's only actual use is for the Plasma Rifle imo.
There are also hardly any LAWs to be found. Probably about 2-3 in the whole game.

-Nerfed DTS means Low-tech skill is needed for the tougher enemies, and since Throwing Knifes are far better and more common, low-tech would be useful for those too. Riotprod needs the boost for the tougher enemies late in the game also.

Pistol & Rifle Skill Remain vanilla, and Tech and Lockpicking remain V1 (Slightly lowered cost, less tools/pick in the maps, and lowered percentage boosts gained from the skill (vanilla jumping from 10% to 25% first upgrade was ridiculous).

All the skill point bugs have been fixed (Some courtesy of HuRen Code and the mods it was built on), mutitool/lockpick glitch, inventory glitch, all those ridiculous ones gone.
All skills will be tough choices now, once some of your demolition ideas are added anyway to finalize.

This is just the work done on the skill system, there is much more
Oh, and DTS is now 30dmg. (30 + 100%=60 damage with Low-tech skill, then there are headshot/stealth kill multipliers, extended range, and combat strength aug). But yes, ten dmg was definitely overkill/overnerf. It should be just right now. It will need some upgrade focus if you want to effectively take on MIB Mk2's and MJ12 Elite troops head-on though.

Anyway, V2 will be released soon with most of the major changes listed in the readme/posted here.
There will also be an optional iron sights mechanic. It will also be effected by the weapon skills in the form of weapon sway, and faster movement speed whilst ADS*. *aiming down sights.
Slow movement speed whilst ADS is akin to heavy weapons untrained, improved each upgrade. At master skill can walk around @ normal speed with no sway. From the get go whilst player is ADS, accuracy is set to 100% and crosshairs hidden, but the sway, recoil and slower movement speed will definitely give vanilla aiming system the edge at times. When you have 100% accuracy for a weapon the vanilla shooting would be superior as it takes time to bring up the sights, but iron sights is fun and adds variety so i'll be combining both mechanics all throughout playthroughs anyway.

Oh, also should say fixed some V1 bugs/errors- females, MJ12 Elite carcass, Custom skin for the custom sniper rifle (renamed) and the music on HongKong_Storage bugging out for some unexplained reason.

[Cybernetic pig]

http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/143755 ... gest-flaw/

A nice little discussion that I cite to get across why a different, optional save system would be great for DX/this mod.

There are other points not discussed such as "Oh! A locked door! *quicksave, pick the lock "fuck, just one item in here" *quickload, get back lockpicks.

Or saving before a defining choice in the story, then reloading to take a different one.

Or saving before deciding what to spend resource X on (aug upgrades, skill points, weapon mods), then reloading to try something else.

He has a point, the save system IS the biggest flaw of LGS styled games imo, Well of a lot of PC games for that matter. I've always preferred save points for games with strong gameplay.

It will be an optional mode, so no worries for those who disagree.

Just having trouble deciding- set savepoints/checkpoints that are marked by something distinctive (so players don't accidentally trigger it whilst surrounded by enemies), or an "ink ribbon" (Well, nanotech equivalent) type system, that uses up resources/pickups to save the game (seen in many old console games), however for this system it would be different- you can use them anywhere, which unfortunately would still allow all the abuse above, but would definitely restrict it.

[G-Flex]

Increce the radius of LAMs when they are put on a wall and rise more as you upgrade your skill points.

vanilla already does this

Where in the code is this? I don't recall noticing anything like this. I'm curious.

-Medicine skill gives you a small max health increase to head and torso each upgrade, but is very expensive.

Be aware that a lot of code uses the player's default max health values, or otherwise assumes a maximum health per part of 100. You'll have to take a look at that if you want that to work.

[Cybernetic pig]

Where in the code is this? I don't recall noticing anything like this. I'm curious.

Yeah I read his suggestion wrong. Still not quite sure what he even meant, specifically.

Be aware that a lot of code uses the player's default max health values, or otherwise assumes a maximum health per part of 100. You'll have to take a look at that if you want that to work.

Yeah don't worry, it should be sorted. Medbots, medkits, regen, everything related to health should have been accounted for.
Even though I work alongside him (digitally) I don't know exactly what he has done with the code, but my partner gets things sorted, fast. And from my (Admittedly minimal in this case) testing, all seems well. He is testing everything himself too with a little test room I built him. But I was hoping we could get some more testers as we are working non stop, plus I have already played the game three times in the past few months for previous testing, not to mention all the other playthroughs over the years. So whoever is reading this and looking for more challenge and the choice and consequence of Deus Ex further prevalent, then let me know. Unfortunately the Iron Sights mechanic is not done yet though, along with a couple of other things on our list.

[Cybernetic pig]

I encourage people to not download this mod Until V2 is released (5-6 days give or take), as there will be a ton more features and bug fixes.

Also, Iron sights.

[Marcelo]

Iron sights!? I can't wait for the next release. Btw I think this was discussed before in this mod (Or Renovation perhaps?) About making the AI react to a dart hit with alert mode instead of search and attack mode?

[Cybernetic pig]

Iron sights!? I can't wait for the next release. Btw I think this was discussed before in this mod (Or Renovation perhaps?) About making the AI react to a dart hit with alert mode instead of search and attack mode?

By alert mode do you mean increased awareness stats given when an alarm is activated? Or something else?

Hmm perhaps you meant where they look in the direction, but don't move, much like when they are looking at the player before actually spotting you.

[Marcelo]

Hmm perhaps you meant where they look in the direction, but don't move, much like when they are looking at the player before actually spotting you.

This. Another touch would be to make the AI not react as taking damage when hit by a tranq dart. Instead he looks around in a similar way as when he sees a dead body and then he collapses.

A few other ideas:

-Make the AI take passive damage when shot as if wounded. Or perhaps like the player in that particular body part where he got shot? (Is it even possible?)

-Are toilets treated as seats in the game engine?

-I personally preferred the original 2 second reaction in one of your betas. I also liked how low on bullets the NSF where, but that's a matter of taste.

And sorry bout my English. It gets worst when I try to express ideas.

[Cybernetic pig]

This. Another touch would be to make the AI not react as taking damage when hit by a tranq dart. Instead he looks around in a similar way as when he sees a dead body and then he collapses.

I like the idea, but the running around was probably done to save from the animation work I guess. I think i'll save myself the work by stating that it is a gameplay/challenge/choice has more meaning mod, not an immersion enhancing/graphics mod.
But if it were to happen, tranq darts would be overpowered, so there's that too.

-Make the AI take passive damage when shot as if wounded.

I like this one too, but would make the game far easier because when the pain animation plays AI cannot shoot, plus if they are taking passive damage, 1 shot, hide and wait...a bit like the tranq darts

Or perhaps like the player in that particular body part where he got shot? (Is it even possible?)

Yeah, should be possible.

-Are toilets treated as seats in the game engine?

Dunno, actually. I may make an MJ12 Troop sit on one and see what happens

And sorry bout my English. It gets worst when I try to express ideas.

There's no problem here, other than:

"I also liked how low on bullets the NSF where were".

But I am the last person that should be correcting people's English.

[Marcelo]

Hey just throwing some ideas around and see what sticks.

I agree about the overpowering thing about the tranq darts and the passive damage, maybe making the player suffer the same effects perhaps might balance the whole thing? Is there some whay to adjust the time between each passive damage hit?

About the toilet thing, that's something I've always wanted to know. I think it might not be possible since otherwise the developers would have placed some AI at several bathrooms with some fart sounds or something silly/funny like that.