SS2 TF's Secmod 3

[6740e5744b7faThiefsieFool]

I still haven't given SecMod a proper playthrough, but I did just run around hydro4 in DromEd, and the visual problem is that the green lighting overwhelms what little color this texture set has, giving the entire level a sickly monochrome look. I tried tweaking things to more of a desaturated blue-green, and IMHO it's much easier on the eyes that way.

Also if I hadn't been playing through DromEd I would have been cursing your name. Drowning puzzles are my least favorite thing ever in games, even worse than escort missions. And then an insta-kill death trap right after the worst one? GRRRRRRrrrrrwhydon'twehaveanyangrysmiliessss....

But the ambient track is pretty cool. So there's that.

That ambient lighting is not bad, I would have it maybe somewhere in between that and what it is now. Maybe some more red lights since they seem to jive well with green, complementary but without being an overused combination like the awful green+purple.

Like the other player proved, you would have actually had a better time playing the mod properly, since you would have the gills implant from the earlier levels, there is even one such implant hidden inside hydro4 too, among other secrets like a speed hypo that lets you breeze through the first water segment.

Won't deny it's a death trap but there's a gradient of performance and outcomes there, you only fall in the deadly electrified water if you fail to make the jump to the top level, don't strafe to the pipes on the side if it's too late to make the jump, and you don't at least scrape it to the lower level where the eggs toxify you.
I guess it would be a nice place for an autosave to take place the way Half-Life 1 always had before any sudden death parts, not sure if there is support in Dark for that these days.
The ambient is an unreleased track from Biosphere.

Catching up with the latest Secmod after a gap of about a year and a half.

Do all weapon modifications only have 2 mods to choose from now, rather than the list of 6 they used to have?

Weapons have somewhere between 4 and 9 mods depending on the weapon, each weapon supports up to 3 mods installed at the same time.

[6740e5744b9a0Trance]

The reason I ask is when I looked at the mods for a pistol and laser pistol I had on me, I saw only two different mods on offer to apply to each gun. I had no points in modify so I couldn't try putting them on there, but I remember seeing a big set of possible mods when I last played this. Do I need to develop my modify skill before these extra modification options appear in the list?

[6740e5744baacThiefsieFool]

Definitely an install bug or mod order bug of some kind, the pistol should have around 6 mods.

[6740e5744bc16Trance]

Found out what the problem was: UI bug. Two-thirds of the mods are hidden behind the panel brought up when you right-click the weapon. When I minimize that panel, all six of them are visible.

I'm running at 1680x1050x32 resolution, using "d3d_disp_scaled_2d_overlay 64" to scale up the HUD. There may not be enough screen space to put the whole mods panel out to the side of the weapon panel, so there's a lot of overlap.

In any case, I think I can work with it now that I know what to do to see the rest.

[6740e5744bd39ThiefsieFool]

I should have known it was something like that, it's always been a challenge to fit extra UI panels into the game, with scaling I'm not sure there's even room for the mods panel, assuming the scaled UI setting could be detected by the mod.

[6740e5744bf11voodoo47]

yeah, the extra UI elements don't play too well in resolutions below 1024*768 - Secmod pretty much requires you run the game (or the hud) in a resolution higher than that.

I'd just slap a warning somewhere.

[6740e5744c013ThiefsieFool]

It's in the main post now.

[6740e5744c675Join2]

The point of the level is to show off large scale views with fog and precipitation effects rather than dark corners, raising the ambient lighting a little and leaving the rest of the lighting to be sparse notes to be spread around gave me enough for what I had in mind.
I don't think it would improve the level much to lower the ambient lighting back to normal parameters and add more lights all around, what it would benefit the most from is geometry improvements and maybe finding some way to have both enemy encounters and maximized level uniqueness and creep factor. I thought about having enemies emerge only when you're on your way out of the level but thought that was too cliche.

Based on paper at least, color me skeptical, but I've played Secmod which I think is (mostly) very good so I know you're probably good for it. Generally speaking though, heavy use of ambient lighting sucks as it makes everything uniformly lit which is not only unbelievable, but it just looks shitty.
But yeah, benefit of the doubt. Will say no more until I've actually played Secmod 3, and I'm damn well looking forward to it because Secmod 2 was awesome.

[6740e5744c843Trance]

I'm not sure if this is a vanilla bug or a Secmod bug because it's the first time I've encountered it, but I can't be arsed to disable the mod to check right now so feel free to tell me it's old news if it's warranted.

Near the end of the game, right before launching into the BOTM, I decided to split off most of my hypos and other equipment that I wasn't going to need quite so much of to see me through to the end, to recycle them into nanites that I could buy CMs with via the scramble grenade method I read about earlier in this thread. However, when I tried to split off my maintenance tools into 2 stacks, I could split one off, then when I tried to stack another one into it, the first one disappeared. This happened a few more times before I decided to stop attempting it. Maintenance tools stack fine when I'm picking them up from the ground or an external inventory, but when I try to stack them manually, the destination tool gets eaten.

Could it be that the maintenance tool is trying to upgrade the condition of a maintenance tool?

[6740e5744c958voodoo47]

if I remember correctly, this is precisely what happens in vanilla - you can't merge two stacks of mtools in the inventory, and you will need to drop one and pick it up to do that.

no disappearing should be going on though.

[6740e5744cb0eNameless Voice]

SecMod bug.

(Technical: mostly for TF)
To fix non-standard objects like turrets, maintenance tools send a "FixStim" to them, and receptrons on the target heal it up and send a FixStim back to the tool, which reduces the stack count by 1.
Unfortunately, it uses the same intensity both ways (and the receptrons don't check intensity anyway), so using a tool directly on another tool will just reduce its stack count by 1 each time.

The system needs tweaking to use different messages going each way.

[6740e5744cc80Trance]

Sorry to be bringing nothing but bug reports in here, but I should say I am having a lot of fun with Secmod and these are just things I'm stumbling into as I progress to the end.

I notice that there's something different about the Pool of No Return just before the run-up to the brain in the BOTM. The air jet at the bottom of the pool rockets the player upward, like before, but when I then hit the surface of the water (from below, mind you) I die instantly. Is this intended behavior?

[6740e5744cd9bvoodoo47]

don't apologize for reporting issues.

I think something similar has happened to me as well, but in vanilla, so unless it's something you can replicate at will, I would just write it off as Dark being weird again/sometimes.

[6740e5744ceedTrance]

I have a save file just after the psi reaver guarding the pool is killed. I can jump into the water, swim down onto the base of the air jet, and it kills me every time I surface using it. I noticed something this time around that I didn't catch before: the jet is inverting the player when it pushes them. I am falling up through the water, upside-down. Could this be why it's killing me?

Also let me know what I need to upload if you want to take a look at what I'm talking about.

[6740e5744d076hemebond]

I've seen players dying from that vent in vanilla.

[6740e5744d1cbZylonBane]

I wonder if this is one of those excessively high FPS physics weirdness things.

[6740e5744d418Trance]

Come to think of it, I did adjust some things related to physics in cam_ext.cfg in my efforts to get the input lag under control. I will admit I wasn't paying particularly close attention, and looking at the comments on those options again, they don't say quite what I initially thought they said, and I probably shouldn't have messed with them in the first place.

I uncommented use_high_res_timer, changed phys_freq from 100 to 60 (but I think I still left it commented out because I didn't notice), and adjusted SlowFrameUI from 10 to 16. This was to try to get them to match up better with the framerate_cap that I turned down from 100.0 to 60.0. All that mattered to me at the time was that the changes I made worked, and this is the first physics oddity I've encountered during the entire playthrough.

I've just changed all those settings back the way they were in cam_ext.cfg, though, and playtested my changes, and the air jet is still turning me upside-down and killing me when I hit the surface. *shrug*

On an unrelated note: what's the deal with this? Either this wasn't here the first time I went through Secmod, or I'm blind as a bat (probably the latter), since I didn't notice that opening there even though I did the parkour section to get up on top of the roof of Happynoodle. Is this a WIP area, TF?

[6740e5744d564ThiefsieFool]

You guessed it, that is a bunch of original geometry which I decided to make accessible just for fun. Maybe added a texture here or there, can't remember exactly but changes were minimal.
There's more weird unused stuff, like some unused tram tunnels that some cutscene might have taken place in like you get in Half-Life, didn't do anything with those.

I've fixed the maintenance tool bug and it will be in the next patch since it's not a big issue.

[6740e5744d6b0voodoo47]

ohh, so you can fix up turrets with maintenance tools in Secmod? I wasn't aware - and it sounds like something I should perhaps uhh, borrow.

also, a small reminder - would be great if you could change the gamesys name (and delete the faulty models and include the rest of the stuff I've posted earlier) in the next patch so we could finally get rid of all the weird workarounds and fixes.

[6740e5744d794BcSeed]

Hello, I have a one question, what other mods are compatible with Secmod?

[6740e5744d8c2voodoo47]

generally, all mods that update the visuals are very compatible (with everything). gameplay tweaks meant for the vanilla game (or its close derivatives) usually aren't (like the Repairman mod).

just post the list of mods you'd like to use (at the helpdesk, preferably), and we'll let you know whether you need to remove or add something.

[6740e5744da46BcSeed]

I actually wanna install only Community Patch ( https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=9111 ), Rebirth ( https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=8 ) and maybe Tacticool ( https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=691 ), so i think its gonna work, because its only visual things, right?

[6740e5744dc1avoodoo47]

Community Patch is not compatible, Tacticool is needs to have higher priority than Secmod, Rebirth is fine, but don't forget to use the Secmod patch (first post of this topic. can be used as an extra mod on top of Rebirth, or extracted into the Rebirth folder).

also remember, the dmlfix (extract it to the Secmod folder) is pretty much mandatory, unless you are using a manual (not patched with SS2tool) install of SS2 (not recommended for most users).

I'd also recommend SHTUP-ND, but there is a bit of a catch - for it to work properly, a few bin files need to be deleted from Secmod\obj:

Code: [Select]

bay1
bay2
confer
crap
crewsign
hydsign
offic
tram
upperalso, CW001.tga in obj/txt16 as well while at it. I know, bit messy, and I could clean it up, but am reluctant to mess around with other people's mods that aren't abandoned yet.

and to finish it off, TF recommends giving Secmod maximum priority in the first post - to my best knowledge, a gamesys/mission mod should actually have the lowest priority (that's how I played it). quite possible that this instruction is/was valid for the old mod manager or something like that - maybe TF will pitch in and tell us.

[6740e5744dd23BcSeed]

Thanks, everything working properly
And i have one last question about game, is there somewhere a list of all inventory combinations?