Citadel - System Shock Fan Remake

[674261dc9b78cJosiahJack]

Care to elaborate?  I'm not sure what you mean.  Like player walk speed is too slow or something?

[674261dc9b965voodoo47]

well, in SS1, the player is sort of bouncing around like a giant ball of rubber bands (it's been mentioned a lot around the forum). it feels awkward and irritating when compared to a modern FPS (by "modern", I mean Quake and newer).

I wouldn't mind not having to deal with that. yeah, I'm aware that purists would rip out my heart and eat it just for mentioning this, but those people probably won't be playing Citadel anyway.

[674261dc9ba6cJosiahJack]

I've been targetting more of a Quake feel for movement already...just not as fast of movement speed.

[674261dc9bb50voodoo47]

I really need to check how the game feels one of those days.

is the current beta public? I've never really checked.

[674261dc9bc36JosiahJack]

No but I can PM you the next alpha build after I fix some more of these embarrassing bugs.

[674261dc9bd36voodoo47]

ok, I'm in - not a SS1 expert by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe that's for the better.

hope it's optimized enough to run on a decade+ old machine..

[674261dc9beccJosiahJack]

Game isn't optimized yet, still working on that.

My machine is about 8yrs old and slogs out 30fps, sometimes more.  Not exactly a comfort but if you lower the resolution it might help.

My main rig specs:
AMD FX-8370E 8core CPU, 3.30GHz (possible to overclock but I'm not, poor cooling)
6GB DDR3 Ram, 1600MHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti, 1GB GDDR5 GPU paired in SLI with
Nvidia Geforce GTS 450, gpu clock 783MHz, proc clock 1566MHz, 1GB GDDR5 (SLI pair speed is double that of the lower of the two cards, this one)
256GB SSD

On my rig, I'd like to get 60+ fps as a midlevel target, 30 fps on my wife's potato laptop, and on newer rigs 120+fps for those with high refresh monitors.  Current bottleneck is CPU time spent calculating realtime deferred pixel lights.

I can run Crysis 1 at max settings except with antialiasing turned off and it's mostly smooth with some slow areas.  Not sure if that gives you a better idea...Crysis was the old "but can it run ___?" standard back in the day.

[674261dc9c052Kayael]

Hi JosiahJack,

I only stumbled now on your project. I've been following the ND remake for a while and while just looking for news, I see the work you're doing. That looks absolutely PHENOMENAL. The crazy love you're dedicating to this project is impressive. To be honest I'm a recent fan of System Shock (both games), but it's never too late to play masterpieces. I must admit that I prefered the set of SS1 overall. And dang, seeing a conversion as faithful as yours is beautiful.

I'll patiently wait for a public release, my hands are full for now and I wouldn't have the time to give you proper feedback.

But you have all my praise for still working on it after all these years. Congratulations and thank you !

[674261dc9c408RocketMan]

I didn't get much time to play but the first and most prominent thing I noticed was how hard it was to control, not because the control scheme is bad but because I'm so familiar with the way it was.  Playing it now feels like if I stepped into a right-handed car.  I keep hitting the windshield wiper when I want to signal.   Any way to just have a legacy control scheme?  It would make testing easier and fairer since I keep dying in 2 seconds currently.

[674261dc9c560JosiahJack]

Thanks Kayael!


RocketMan, really?  You do realize that the controls in the original were the number 1 complaint right?  Anyways, can you please be more specific?  I'm not sure what you want that can't already be changed in the options.  Maybe I'm missing an option or keybind?

[674261dc9c6a9RocketMan]

yeah... i always get annoyed when ppl complain about the controls - I thought they were pretty decent but that's me - to each his own.

I'm referring to the mouse buttons being SS2 style and all the inventory activation mouse clicks and stuff.  It's just reversed from the way SS1 works.  Clicking things in the world, placing them in inventory, swinging weapons, etc. 

Homeworld had the right idea with the "classic" and "Cataclysm" modes when they came out with Cataclysm.  I figure, maybe something like that would be a nice convenience, if not too hard to implement.

[674261dc9c876icemann]

I always thought that SS1's controls worked fine when in context. You did get a neural interface shoved into your brain. So your nearly a walking cyborg yourself. In that context, the controls are understandable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYc2jQaM8gM

Don't watch the above if you've not seen the first Terminator film before. Too good a section of the movie to spoil.

[674261dc9ca58RocketMan]

Had a little bit of time to play again tonight.  Nothing really jumps off the page.  Sure there's the stuff that's just not done yet, the odd sprite that's too small or wrong aspect ratio but only a couple things really worth mentioning in my opinion.  Maybe I'll find more later:

1) objects that were destructible are no longer so.  Maybe consider changing this, as it's kind of a System Shock thing to be able to break stuff and some things like the machine in the healing suite under which some needles were hidden are no longer fun.
2) There's only 1 set of info panes on the left side instead of both sides.  I can see how this might have been seen as redundant but it's actually really helpful to have 2 things open at once like the weapon/ammo pane and the minimap.  Can't do that if there's only 1 set of panes.  Also sensaround is kinda nerfed this way.
3) I think in original SS if you were close enough to a ledge you could mantle onto it.  I can't seem to do that anymore. 

Other than that and the control thing I mentioned before, everything is 100% fluent and is just better than the original.

EDIT: Also requesting either a save file of level >7 or the ability to skip to the end of the game with all weapons and implants.  Makes it easier to playtest with limited time.

[674261dc9cc40JosiahJack]

Oi ve my playtesters are wearing rosecolored glasses.  No wonder they are missing glaring bugs like the inability to click on the hud when pain static is active or not stating exactly what we just picked up.  No matter, got most of these fixed and a lot of polish with stuff like pausing, adding back buttons to menus and actually adding the functionality for grenade hotkeys.

1. Still working on adding these though some stuff does break already like crates (meh still need gibs though).  The consoles were destructable??  Dang, still learning stuff about this game...it's ridiculously complicated!
2.  Of course I'll have the RH MFD pane added.  It's saved a lot of time doing things twice just having the one but I think I'm at the point where I can prefab and make an instantiated RH variant.  Hope all those isRH checks in my code work like I expect them too lol.
2b. You just don't have version 2 of sensaround yet   All 3 panes work already.
3. No, this is an SS2 feature.  Which is it?  Do you want SS1 controls or don't you lol?  It was possible to bunny hop rubberband your way higher than a normal jump in SS1 however...since trying this will just fatigue you in Citadel, maaaybe adding mantling is justified.

Awesome, thank you!  Super encouraging.  I was kind of expecting a lot more critiques so I must being doing stuff mostly right.

[674261dc9cda2la0s]

I use Mac, if that has any interest

[674261dc9cf1cRocketMan]

Double-check on the mantling.  I know you're thinking of SS2 mantling but SS1 has some sort of mantling because if you land on a corner and hold jump you sort of climb over it.  Maybe it's like a ball landing on a rounded corner.  If enough forward velocity is applied you roll over it?  I dunno how the physics work but it works that way.  It just doesn't feel like SS2 mantling at all which is far more mechanical.

I used to do this pogo thing in SS1 where I would hit jump precisely as I landed over and over again and I would jump higher and higher with some sort of spring force until I reached a ledge which I could then grab and mantle over.  This is how I got out of the trench in the reactor level - that maze-like trench thing.

[674261dc9d0a8JosiahJack]

I know the pogo maneuver you're talking about.     Citadel doesn't have this bunny hop feature.

Yes in SS1, the player is a 2 ball snowman, body and head.  So long as you get your bottom ball up past the lip of an edge, you can slideworm your way the rest of the way up.  I sort of have this...but you have to pronejump like you would do a crouch jump in Half-Life.  I actually implemented that by accident.

You do realize you can climb any wall that has those gray horizontal pipes on it right?  And you can climb vine walls too for that matter.  No pogo slideworming required.

Ia0s amd JML, once I figure out how to get this crosscompilation working, I'll send builds your way.

[674261dc9d1a0voodoo47]

pogo slideworming rubber band ball potato. I'm using that to describe SS1 physics from now on.

[674261dc9d27aJosiahJack]

on skates

[674261dc9d382JosiahJack]

Ok...I think I've refixed everything I broke when I fixed a bunch of other things.  Feeling less frustrated now and like this project is back in a good state.  Also good is that I've optimized and improved framerate 50% so that's nice.

Still several gamebreaking bugs with loading saves however.

[674261dc9d500JosiahJack]

Today I got to feel the feeling I want my players to feel...that I was just playing System Shock and that this was the remake I had always wanted to play myself.  Was rather exhilarating...especially when wandering enemies snuck up on me in unexpected places.  Or when 3 zero-g mutants chased me down the hall and about killed me before I had found a ressurection bay.

My heart broke when a hopper torched me and I couldn't reload a save because it failed on an array index somewhere.  Ahh what rookie coded this nonsense!!  I wanted to keep going! 

[674261dc9d664JosiahJack]

60+ FPS!!!!!  WOOHOO!!

Holy beleepers that was hard.  Long road to hoe from 28fps.  Testing is MUCH more enjoyable now!

Now to fix out of memory errors during load, enemies dissappearing after load, and make loading from save take less than 33.8secs.  Oh what's this...some idiot coded iterating over all 7168 saveable objects 7168 times each.  My logic is deniable.  Saving/loading is looking to be harder to solve than performance.

I still have a tremendous sense of relief though.  Stupid sky was forcing all the lights to render twice because of how I setup its rotation (on top of other blatant stupidity with camera layers).  *facepalm 

[674261dc9d9cdcallum13117]

Today I got to feel the feeling I want my players to feel...that I was just playing System Shock and that this was the remake I had always wanted to play myself.

Very cool.

Checking back in on the forum after a year of inactivity. I'm amazed at the progress you've achieved in one year (and how much further along this is than Night Dive's remake). Keep up the great work on Citadel, JosiahJack, and I'm excited to play the public release!

[674261dc9db76JosiahJack]

Thanks!

Good news, I've finally got saving to only take 1 second and loading to only take 1.4 seconds and not crash and not run out of memory nor even take much memory at all.  Phew!  Lot of simple bad placement of temporary variables and rechecking stuff that had already been checked, just needed to mark it as checked and then skip it in later iterations.

Also fixed a number of improper setups on certain objects that weren't saving properly,

Now just to figure outa bunch of poorly loaded things like NPC's and cameras dissappearing or falling out of level, doors not getting their animations set properly (I'm telling them to!), not resetting keycards in player inventory, etc.

Oh and I broke keypads and elevator pads UI when I tried to add the righthand MFD.

Cursed bugses!!
I'll kill them all, sir