SS2 Straylight ADaOB v0.3.0

[676c29c6c7598Kolya]

Tags: °gamesys °mis °string °texture °sound °object °SS2 °obsolete

A newer version is available: Shock Community patch

This is Straylight's Anomalies, Discrepancies and outright Bugs mod - the most thorough attempt on gameplay-adjustment for System Shock 2. (As discussed on TTLG first here and then here. Then the v030 release.)
It fixes and rebalances a huge number of anomalies, discrepancies and bugs, all while staying true to the developers intentions.
This is simply the closest thing you will come to a second patch for SS2 after the official patch.
ADaoB was made by Straylight up to version 0.2.2 and is currently maintained by Kolya, Nameless Voice and Miracle.Freak.

Known Issues
- You will need to start a new game after installing this mod if you were previously playing the original game or a version of ADaOB earlier than 0.2.8.  If you do not, then you will encounter serious problems (the most obvious of which being that med hypos will stop working).
-

ADaoB enthält modifizierte englische Texte, die auch in einem deutschen SS2 Spiel erscheinen. Das kann vermieden werden, indem der Ordner "strings" aus dem Archiv (ADaOB-v030.7z) gelöscht wird, bevor ADaoB dem Spiel hinzugefügt wird. Wir arbeiten an einer besseren Lösung, voraussichtlich eine Übersetzung von ADaoBs Text-Änderungen.

Changelog
- 0.3.0:
   - Inclusion of SHEMP high resolution terrain textures (mostly screens and other tech displays)
   - Fixed light switch in Med/Sci corridor over training stations
   - Med/Sci armoury note is now correctly ticked off
   - Added shields on shuttle ports on the training stations and in the Command deck shuttle bays
   - Added targets to the shooting range on Ops
   - Added ceiling glass to a room in Rec that previously opened out into space
   - Realigned many textures and fixed many object placements
   - Re-added a small number of French-Epstein devices and Auto-repair units on Impossible difficulty
   - "Plasma" pistol changed back to laser pistol.  Significantly decreased degrade rate for non-overcharge shots
   - Auto-repair units and French-Epstein devices can now be recycled (for 20 nanites)
   - Hazard suit now makes you completely immune to toxins from worm piles
   - Removed ejecting casings from blast turrets because they looked too strange
   - Shrank physics model on a Rickenbacker turret that was very hard to walk past before
   - Fixed the hole between the pipes in Rickenbacker Pod 2 where you could easily fall to your death
   - Localised Pyrokinesis now deals 1 damage / 400ms instead of 5 damage / 2000ms
   - Replaced elevator music with high-quality full-length version from SS1
   - Various minor tweaks

- 0.2.9:
   - fixed level transition crash bug (after using psi pull)
   - fixed exploit that allows leaning through MedSci sub-armoury door
   - broken shotgun ammo moved to hybrid inventory (so you don't have to drop your gun when your inv. is full)
   - removed med hypo caps (correct healing while being hurt)
   - previously added grenade casings for turrets disabled due to an irredeemable bug
   - added crystal shard "singing"

- 0.2.8:
   - the pistol's slide barrel joints have been reversed to achieve a smooth slide animation
   - An accordingly fixed but otherwise original pistol has been added to the mod
   - ejected casings that don't disappear immediately for most guns implemented
   - fixed a bug where player would spill casings while hacked turret was firing by moving the pistol casings up in the projectile hierarchy
   - player's weapon becomes invisibile when using Psi Invisibilty
   - Psi Burnout no longer wastes your psi points when you have that anti-burnout trait
   - fix to stop the security system breaking and security cameras being permanently offline if you hack security, save, and reload
   - Ice picks have been reset to their original number to allow melee only players to finish the game
   - fixed a game breaking bug that occurs when hacking the replicator on Command before SHODAN uploads the schematics
   - fixed non-glowing laser rapier (1011) on hydro2.mis
   - fixed invisible monkey corpse (183) on medsci2.mis issue that occured while using Rebirth
   - cheating by using training machines' undo feature is no longer possible

For previous changes see the changelog (also included with the mod)

[676c29c6c7a18tetracycloide]

with all the extensive fixes and rebalances in this mod for the weapon and tech skills i was hoping that the PSI tree would get some love as well.  if i'm reading this readme right, and i'd like to think that i am, not a single psi skill was changed in this mod.  why?

also, was reading through the notes and found this

"could EMP have some temporary effect on the player?
  shake?
  temporarily lower stats?"

and i had a suggestion.  for realism emp would have no effect on an organic body, at least not one that you would notice or feel.  for cybernetic parts it's a completely different story.  emp basically creates the effects of a close proximity lightning strike when it interacts with conducting materials but only for an extreamly brief period of time.  the effect on unproteted electronics would be rendering them completely useless because the circuts would all be fried, not unlike a power surge.  the physical effect on your organic body parts with cyber parts embedded in it would be almost nothing since emp would generate extreamly ahigh voltage but very low amperage pulse.

so, if one is to assume no emp shielding, then emp would completely disable all of your cyber mods permenatly.  obviously there are a few balance issues if this assumption was made and implemented.  complete emp shielding would require a faraday cage with no electrically conductive inputs and obviously this isn't the case for cybermods because you would have to have something outside the shielding in order to recieve radio transmissions, which you clearly do.  partial emp shielding, in the real world, would allow the possibility of 'wounding' electrical systems so that functionality is intermitant with failures. 

this could be interpreted in a number of ways but the one i like best would be disabling the hud for a short period of time, if possible.  movement should still be there and you  should still see your gun and be able to fire it, but hacking, inventory, and the cross hair should all be temporarily inaccessable or invisable.  in the real world the effects would never wear off unless the systems were replaced but we can make an exception since the game is science fiction after all.  another possiblity would be to temproarily disable the use of implants, this would result in droping things when hit by emp under certain circumstances.  stats should not change at all unless you're assuming that they are representative of electrical devices implanted in the body.  i would interpret stats as simply being numerical approximations for real physical or mental conditioning to your organic body.  under this interpretation changing stats would not be a possible effect of emp damage.

[676c29c6c7b33Kolya]

Which anomaly, discrepancy or bug do you think of?

[676c29c6c7dbdtetracycloide]

outright bugs, not many but a few:
-psi pull skill not working on all objects (already listed in the notes)
-occasionally photonic redirection doesn't work properly (minor)
-some psi skills have maximum effect levels below the maximum psi level when you include hypo, overcharge, and armor buffs.  i'm not sure if this is technically a 'bug' but when you're playing as a psi only character it really feels like one.

rebalances, however, are wide open. psi is an extremely expensive tree, especially on impossible, but the returns at high levels of psi are small compared to similar module investments in other trees:
-not as versatile against multiple enemy types as other weapon types (this is the main one)
-remote electron tampering is almost totally useless even at extremely high psi levels
 -my idea for changing this would be to have psi attributes effect the range and duration of the effect and have the hacking ability be based on the actual hacking stat
-the psi ability that replaces the recycler offers negative returns vs. the real thing on impossible for most items once you factor in the costs of psi hypos
-anit radiation and toxin skills are economically infeasible given the number of toxin and radiation sources vs. the early accessibility of the rad suit and the number of anti toxin and rad hypos
-psi amp melee weapon is weaker than the crystal shard in spite of being more expensive module wise to access (i think, i could be wrong on this i don't have the numbers in front of me)

given that i play as a primarily psi character and never on anything but impossible difficulty i am more than willing to admit i'm biased but at least some of these are valid points right?

[676c29c6c804fNameless Voice]

I had noticed that about the Molecular Transmutation ('Alchemy') psi power - once you factor in the cost of psi hypos, even at a cheap hacked replicator, you realise that it gives negative returns.

The Psi Sword would be more powerful than the Crystal Shard (24 vs 15) if it wasn't for a bug in the Crystal Shard's properties that make it deal 27 damage for an overhead smash instead of the proper 15.
Regardless, the Psi Sword deals 18 damage with a normal (non-overhead) swing, compared the the Shard's 12.

However, the two weapons also deal different types of damage.
The Shard only deals half damage to Robots, whereas the Psi Sword deals full damage, and can also deal damage to the head in the endgame, unlike the Shard.

[676c29c6c8176Kolya]

I have sent a mail to Straylight only yesterday linking to this thread (because of the version 2.3) so there's hope he will see this, or if he answers my mail I'll point him at these ideas.

[676c29c6c82c0Louis Cypher]

Can someone confirm if there were any changes to the gamesys between 2.2 and 2.5? And if so, what was altered? There's no changelog that goes after 2.2.

If I recall, everything after 2.2 was made by Kolya, so...

If no changes were made I suppose I'll look into fixing the Crystal Shard overhead bug.

[676c29c6c83c7Kolya]

The crystal shard overhead damage was fixed already. That's the only bug I'm aware of in this context.
The other changes didn't affect the gamesys.

[676c29c6c84d9Louis Cypher]

Ah. I'll just fix that in the merged Ejecting Brass gamesys then... hm.

[676c29c6c862dIagainstI]

I'm experiencing a crash with ADaoB v0.2.5 installed.  It is definitely this mod that causes the game to crash.  The crash occurs at Ramses Center if I walk behind the truck at the left side of the UNN building and turn around to look down the street.  The images become terribly corrupted and if I walk by the truck, the game crashes.  The workaround is just don't do that, but I'm concerned that this issue might arise later in the game, which would not be good.

Any ideas?

[676c29c6c877eKolya]

Our local shocked guru just pointed me here. This might be a portalisation error in earth.mis. I seem to remember having that error myself some time ago. Don't worry about it. It won't drag into later parts of the game. Just avoid it for now. We'll find a way to fix it.

Thanks for pointing this out.

[676c29c6c8881IagainstI]

Right on; thanks for the lightning-fast reply.

[676c29c6c896aKolya]

Updated to version beta 0.2.6. See first post.

[676c29c6c8a58Kolya]

Updated to version 0.2.7. See first post.

[676c29c6c8b8eChinese Jetpilot]

Excellent mod.  Yeah I know I'm late, but just got back in SS2 after its initial release.  One question though.  Is there any way, outside of a mod manager, to incorporate the current version of ADaoB with the weapons casings mod?  I've seen several on this forum, but they were for previous versions of ADaoB.

[676c29c6c8de8miracle.flame]

ADaoB mod consists of many files and shock2.gam. Ejected casings are only in shock2.gam so any ADaoB fixes considering other files should remain after applying this mod.

If I am correct applying ADaoB 0.2.7 and  Straylight-0.2.2__Ejecting_Brass_v1 afterwards should miss only those two fixes considering shock2.gam:
- fixed crystal shard's damage while using the overhead smasher upgrade
- all broken doors (-1772) have the Door->translating attribute

I think that's tolerable and if you want you can use ShockEd to apply those fixes to shock2.gam yourself.


To use any music you like in elevator simply replace snd\amb\elevator.wav with any wav format music you want (convert to 22khz... if you are using SHMUP then 44Khz).

[676c29c6c8f14Chinese Jetpilot]

Thanks for the reply!  I was under the (false) impression that I would have been missing out on more of the fixes.  Thanks for clarifying, really do appreciate it!

[676c29c6c9060LordYupa]

Hmm, the last version of ADaoB worked fine for me (0.2.6), but for some reason, my recycler stopped working entirely when I installed this new version.  If I uninstall it, it works again, so it's definitely this mod causing it.  Anybody else having that problem?

[676c29c6c91acxdiesp]

I am playing SS2 for the first time, with Straylight's mod installed. The idea of not seeing how the game was originally only bugged me until I read of the dreadful weapon balancement. Being a fan of energy weapons, I would have been displeased with the original settings. I have no particular complaint about the mod: the only thing I noticed, is that at Normal I have plenty of ammo all the time - but after all I melee 90% of the time even on Deck 6 and I'm a good scavenger, so that.

Little suggestion: have Toxins last a limited amount of time, it is ungodly annoying to die like that.

[676c29c6c9336V-Raptor]

Does somebody have this bug with bleaking ligh?

http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/1506/69784318qg2.jpg
 
And if there is Ejecting Brass Mod version for ADaoB v0.2.7?
 
Thanks for answering!

PS
And how can I start the new topic? I have some nice thing to put here...

[676c29c6c944aNameless Voice]

In order to create threads in the resources forums (which must contain attachments), you need to contact Kolya and ask him to give you Uploader status.

[676c29c6c9564Kolya]

You're new here, so without any offense, I'm not sure if you know what sort of nice things we like here. Maybe you could elaborate a bit?

[676c29c6c965dV-Raptor]

2Kolya
take a look in PM

So, any ideas about bugging light?

[676c29c6c9762miracle.flame]

That bugging light looks like it was cast with Quick lighting while portalizing in ShockEd...instead of ObjCast lighting. But it seems to be working fine by me.