Hello everyone!


Background: I am well aware SS2's multiplayer is not overly popular among the "hardcore fan base", and I fully acknowledge the key points made against coop mode in an immersive survival RPG. However, two friends of mine and myself have been hosting coop events once a year for more than a decade at this point. We keep having a tremendous amount of fun every single time. We also always relied on the amazing mods posted specifically in this community to "spice up" our common gameplay experience. Now, with the kind help of voodoo47 and ThiefsieFool, who endured and replied to my countless embarrassing posts, I was finally able to tweak the necessary difficulty settings and some other mechanics to (hopefully) make the multiplayer aspect significantly more challenging and centred around diversified class / skillset synergy. Additionally, it was very important to ensure general compatibility to the System Shock 2 Community Patch and being able to combine this mod with as many of the wonderful fan projects out there as possible.
So, anyway, this is all very much still work-in-progress, and many things will require extensive testing and tweaking. Indeed, most future implementations are essentially pipe dreams of mine - but I would like to share what's there & working for now:

• Features:
• Significantly increased difficulty settings
• Modified traits
• Changed gameplay mechanics
• Future additions

---

Significantly increased difficulty settings:

• Massively increased research time for alien organs & artifacts.
• Nearly doubled damage output against enemies with "researched" weaknesses.
• Reduced damage increase per weapon stat level to +3%.
• Higher stat upgrade costs (at a factor of 2.25)
• Slower walking speed for players.
• Reduced hitpoints for players
• Decreased item loot rate from bodies (loot hose: 85%)

Modified traits:

• The "Tank" trait HP bonus is 8hp.
• The "Sharpshooter" trait now adds 33% damage to ranged weapons.
• The "Lethal Weapon" trait adds 50% damage to melee weapons.

Changed gameplay mechanics:

• Camera destruction will always trigger the alarm.
• NB: Polito's dialogue was changed accordingly, as suggested. I also changed the subtitles for those who use them.
• Security cameras are much less noisy.
• Vastly increased projectile speeds for most weapons (monsters & players).
• The Midwife leads the target while aiming. Avoid encounters in open spaces.

Things I would like to implement in the future:

• Disabling the alarm requires a security terminal to be hacked, instead of merely frobbed.
• Include the ingenious Spawn Randomizer by Zygoptera (but ensuring SCP compatibility).
• Entirely disabling automatic respawning for players. Respawns can only be triggered manually by activating a Quantum Bio-Reconstruction Machine.
• Combine this mod with ZylonBane's fantastic Health Randomizer and Vague Healthbar.
• Proximity-based voice chat.
• (Yeah, yeah, I know ... not going to happen, I suppose. Arma & Minecraft mods did it flawlessly, though..!)
• No crosshair while weapon is equipped and aiming via ironsights

Again, thank you all very much for the time and effort you continuously pour into this amazing game, even 20 years after its release.
If you have any ideas and/or suggestions in regards to balancing aspects, recommended settings to add & tweak, and especially for the implementation of the future features listed above, please bring these points up here!

Cheers, voodoo!

Fingerprinting the gamesys.dml with

!FINGERPRINT
{
   GAM shockscp.gam
}
would kill the projectile speed adjustments, though, right? Or is it sensible to transfer all of these to the shockscp.gam.dml?
I uploaded the corrected archive structure, thank you!

Great, thank you very much! Edited, removed the gamesys.dml and re-uploaded.

removed the gamesys.dml

nno, you misunderstood. basically, we have gamesys.dml, which contains all the tweaks and will activate for everything but SCP, as that requires special handling on the camera archetype, and the SCP specific dml, which will activate only for SCP b4, and contains all the tweaks from the regular gamesys.dml, but with modified camera stuff to work properly.

yes, that's why I was saying, with b5, the extra SCP dml won't be necessary anymore (so once b5 is out, the mod will have to be updated, deleting the scp dml and removing fingerprinting from gamesys.dml).

The script was written to be used by authors. To be used as a mod for existing maps, you'd also need additional scripting to spawn script host objects, location markers, and create links between them all.

you have used the SCP camera alert code in the regular gamesys by mistake. also, both vanilla and SCP complain about Droid Laser Shot not existing (which is correct).
WARNING: no object named "Droid Laser Shot" was found, skipping
WARNING: invalid object id 0, skipping
WARNING: no object named "Droid Laser Shot" was found, skipping
WARNING: invalid object id 0, skipping
WARNING: no object named "Droid Laser Shot" was found, skipping
WARNING: invalid object id 0, skippingshould be Droid Laser Bolt. fixed everything, and attached the new archive to the first post. will move to the mods subforum soon (would be nice if someone gave it a run).

ok.

you can use the dbmod_load command in the editor to load a dml, and the console will spew out errors and warnings in case something straight out doesn't work (things like broken syntax and non-existing props or archetypes. successful load of course doesn't mean that everything works - whether the dml actually does what you intend it to do is a different matter entirely. basically, the console will only show whether the dml is getting applied properly, nothing else).