SSR: System Shock Kickstarter

[674395bac503aSynaesthesia]

It looks like they seriously tagged. Every. Single. Texture asset as "texture filtering: nearest neighbour."

The prospect of editing every single texture file (which includes BaseColour, Normal, AO/Roughness/Metal, and Emmisive maps) in the entire game to change that setting is a bit daunting.

Perhaps a smaller-scale test on some of the Medical textures?

This was a conscious decision that was made before I'd started working on the game - and I'm personally pretty happy with how it turned out. The pixelated textures give the impression that you're looking at the world through a cybernetic interface instead of through normal human eyes. An even better implementation, IMO, would have been to create a post-processing effect that pixelated everything up close but left high-def textures in place.

If you want to make it easier for yourself to edit the textures, I'd suggest bulk editing which should be significantly easier to do than hand-editing every texture in the game.

[674395bac51d9icemann]

Long time no see Synaesthesia. Hope your doing well.

[674395bac54besarge945]

@Synaesthesia I doubt this is your department, but was there any talk of mod support while working there?

I have some gameplay ideas and Unreal seems somewhat limited with what we can do without source code.

[674395bac592cZylonBane]

The pixelated textures give the impression that you're looking at the world through a cybernetic interface instead of through normal human eyes.

They do not. Looking at the world through a (low-quality) cyber interface would uniformly pixelate your entire field of vision, regardless of what you were looking at. What the pixelated textures DO do is give the impression that you're playing a video game with pixelated textures.

Or I guess one could argue that every software-rendered 3D game gives the impression that you're looking at the world through a cybernetic interface. But of course that would be silly.

Also if one were seriously committing to this excuse, all the textures in the playable intro would have looked good instead of pixelated.

[674395bac5a3eAutz]

Something I would like to add (or more exactly, re-add) is the Giger unknown bio contamination on the bridge. Still no idea why they removed that, same with the virus on the grove that got replaced with a myst.

[674395bac5c0cNameless Voice]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, re-enabling texture filtering makes it quite obvious how low-res many of the textures are.

Mod attached.  Should be pretty much every texture in the game, though there might be a few outliers where the filenames didn't follow the naming conventions I was searching for.
[NVEnableTextureFiltering_P.pak expired]

[674395bac5f75Synaesthesia]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, re-enabling texture filtering makes it quite obvious how low-res many of the textures are.

Mod attached.  Should be pretty much every texture in the game, though there might be a few outliers where the filenames didn't follow the naming conventions I was searching for.

That's because this was an intentional design choice.

Using any type of filtering is going to make them look worse because the UVs, materials, and textures were not designed for filtering. If you want to have filtered textures that look good, you'll have to redo every texture in the game and do it close to 3x the current resolution of what shipped.

[674395bac6126voodoo47]

challenge accepted. maybe.

also yes, this sucks less, imho.

[674395bac6350icemann]

Played through Flight Deck:

This level was a bit of a disaster. Layout is more or less a 1 to 1 of the originals layout (with some minor changes) but this one REALLY made it ambundantly clearly that the physics of this game are just off. By off I'm referring to very floaty enemy physics. I witnessed a cyborg assassin lay a land mine that caused a nearby security bot to completely spaz out and fly about super speed before exploding in hilarious fashion, enemy dead bodies flopping about on grav shafts and more.

This game needed more time in the oven unfortunately. It just pulls you out of the immersion when stuff like that happens and its hard to take it all seriously after you see things completely bug out.

On the plus side: Cortex Reavers have been bumped up in difficulty significantly. Magpulse appears to do bugger all damage against them now (took me around 20+ shots to take 1 down which negates the usefulness of the weapon significantly). Good challenge level again. Lots of puzzle circuitboards (3 in a row in one section).

Annoyances:

It was in this level that I realised that the remakes version of the radiation suit's benefits (of improved radiation and biological resistance) is now an ability that you have toggle on and increases energy use (thus not in effect if you have zero energy left). And when you get it earlier in Storage its more a backpack addon than an actual suit, even though audio logs in the game describe it still as a radiation suit and not backpack.

This is annoying as often you wont know ahead of time that your about to step into a biological or radiation hazard area and thus take a good chunk of damage before you think to switch it on (if you even remember to switch it on as the game nevers tells you that you need to).

[674395bac66b5Nameless Voice]

That's because this was an intentional design choice.

Using any type of filtering is going to make them look worse because the UVs, materials, and textures were not designed for filtering. If you want to have filtered textures that look good, you'll have to redo every texture in the game and do it close to 3x the current resolution of what shipped.

Well aware.  We did point out how foolish this was, repeatedly, for seven years.  No one cared.

[674395bac69e8Synaesthesia]

Well aware.  We did point out how foolish this was, repeatedly, for seven years.  No one cared.

I would caution against falling into the trap of "my group of friends doesn't like this design choice, therefore this design choice is bad" - art is subjective. There is no right or wrong way to go about it. The majority of players seem to enjoy the art style. It took me a bit of getting used to as well, but I appreciate it for what it is - a clearly retro callback to the 1990s and its limitations.

[674395bac6d68voodoo47]

Number of players who would have refused to buy the remake because it DIDN'T have pixelated textures: Zero
Number of players who will refuse to buy the remake because it does have this ugly half-assed pixelated aesthetic: Non-zero

the decision to not make this toggleable was indeed, foolish. and sorry, I simply do not believe this wasn't technically feasible/doable - if NewDark can do a retro pixelation look with a flip of a switch no problem, then UE can definitely do it too.

but lets not start beating this dead horse again..

[674395bac759eXkilljoy98]

Played through Flight Deck:

This level was a bit of a disaster. Layout is more or less a 1 to 1 of the originals layout (with some minor changes) but this one REALLY made it ambundantly clearly that the physics of this game are just off. By off I'm referring to very floaty enemy physics. I witnessed a cyborg assassin lay a land mine that caused a nearby security bot to completely spaz out and fly about super speed before exploding in hilarious fashion, enemy dead bodies flopping about on grav shafts and more.

This game needed more time in the oven unfortunately. It just pulls you out of the immersion when stuff like that happens and its hard to take it all seriously after you see things completely bug out.

On the plus side: Cortex Reavers have been bumped up in difficulty significantly. Magpulse appears to do bugger all damage against them now (took me around 20+ shots to take 1 down which negates the usefulness of the weapon significantly). Good challenge level again. Lots of puzzle circuitboards (3 in a row in one section).

Annoyances:

It was in this level that I realised that the remakes version of the radiation suit's benefits (of improved radiation and biological resistance) is now an ability that you have toggle on and increases energy use (thus not in effect if you have zero energy left). And when you get it earlier in Storage its more a backpack addon than an actual suit, even though audio logs in the game describe it still as a radiation suit and not backpack.

This is annoying as often you wont know ahead of time that your about to step into a biological or radiation hazard area and thus take a good chunk of damage before you think to switch it on (if you even remember to switch it on as the game nevers tells you that you need to).

I didn't have too much issues with the physics

Also in terms of the suit, there is an audio log in Research that explains why it is a backpack, I would have preferred a suit but that is where you can find an explanation

[674395bac7924Synaesthesia]

the decision to not make this toggleable was indeed, foolish. and sorry, I simply do not believe this wasn't technically feasible/doable - if NewDark can do a retro pixelation look with a flip of a switch no problem, then UE can definitely do it too.

but lets not start beating this dead horse again..

I don't recall saying UE couldn't do it - what I said was that the choice to make the textures pixelated was by-design. This is an art style that's meant to look the way it does. The textures are stylized with hard pixels in mind.

[674395bac7a91voodoo47]

yes, and as I've said before, what I find puzzling here is that out of all the ways this could have been implemented, they chose one that irreversibly alters the textures and makes modding this out pretty much impossible unless they are recreated from scratch.

welp, it is what it is..

[674395bac7f08Toaste]

icemannEnviropack from storage doesn't protect from radiation, only from biohazard so its suitable only for groves. For the reactor core you'll need the radiation pack from the room in maintenance, which is opened by Abe Ghiran's head.

Also sensaround unit can highlight contaminated areas on the minimap before you encounter them.

[674395bac8070Pacmikey]

guys I'm running out of popcorn

[674395bac830bToaste]

Nameless VoiceIs it possible to make inventory mfd popup/hide animations faster, and also to make text in the upper ui panel to appear instantly instead of slow rollout?

Would appreciate modpack with these fixes greatly, this thread is already a goldmine for fixing so many remake flaws in less than first week. 

[674395bac8443Nameless Voice]

The upper UI panel seems like it would be hard to fix, since drawing that one letter at a time is likely done in code (Blueprint or C++).

I don't even remember the inventory description pop-up being notably slow.

[674395bac8653Toaste]

Nameless Voice
I mean each time it takes a second just to be able to read what am I looking at, while in SS2 the same item name was shown instantly. And if you use one item and then look at something else it waits another second or two before rolling out the right description on the panel.

[674395bac87deZylonBane]

That's just the delicious little "because fuck you" cherry on top, isn't it? Not only does it dole out the descriptions one letter at a time, there's actually a delay before it even starts. Someone was ordered to code that in.

This in a game that's packed with junk objects, so sweeping your cursor across a shelf full of stuff while watching the description bar would have actually been useful! But nope, try that in the remake and you get nothing, or just "PD" ... "B" ... "SC" ... "A" ...

All because someone at Night Dive is convinced that having messages appear one letter at a time is "cool", and cool is more important than usability.

[674395bac8e65sarge945]

I'm just going to weigh in and say that realistic lighting and high-poly models definitely clashes with low-resolution, blocky textures. Even if art is subjective, I feel like anyone could reasonably assume that a reasonable number of people would find this jarring because of the juxtaposition between the high quality lighting, shadows and enemies, with the low-resolution pixelated textures. Texture resizing and filtering are both things that can be done in real-time in-game with a high degree of performance, so it would have made a lot of sense for the developers to create high-resolution textures, dynamically scale them down, and apply the pixel filter, to allow for a degree of customisation (not just pixels on/off, a full slider to determine how pixelated everything is). I'm surprised this approach wasn't used.

We did point out how foolish this was, repeatedly, for seven years.  No one cared.

I think this sums up many of the weird changes in the remake in general. Lack of real communication between the dev team and the fans, and I feel like the same thing is happening for the SS2 Enhanced Edition (literally nobody asked for VR support)

Overall I still think it's pretty good, but it's kind of a shame how much better it could have been.

Also, the fact that it was handled with a high level of mismanagement to the point that it needed to be restarted at least once during development, and these sorts of bad decisions have managed to make their way into it (whoever decided to make the intro an interactive cutscene needs to be fired immediately, that was purely a fuck up), and yet it still turned out pretty good, really goes to show just how absolutely solid System Shock's gameplay is, and I feel like had this been handled with more care it could have absolutely blown everyone away, including all the diehard grumpy cynical System Shock fans, and may have even replaced the original. Right now, the consensus seems to be "it's pretty good, but not as good as the original version".

It's strange how not listening to your actual fanbase can make your game worse...

I really hope NightDive isn't becoming like your typical mainstream game development company, where they essentially think they know what players want and make games based on that rather than actually talking to players to see what people want. To me, the botched design of the intro suggests some higher-up on the development team basically said "interactive first-person cutscenes are immersive, and are a staple of modern game design, so we should use that", essentially assuming that the original cutscene style was down to "crusty old game design" rather than a conscious choice by the original development (this sort of modern-developer arrogance is not uncommon in the industry nowadays - modern developers seem to think they "know better" than old developers because "old developers made hard to play crusty games that were primitive"), and so the choice to redo it as a modern-style first-person cutscene naturally made sense to them. What they didn't realise was that in a story-driven game like System Shock, having the protagonist be a literal mute absolutely kills the immersion because literally anyone would speak in that situation, and it just results in a lot of awkward dead air. Diego lampshading it by saying "you're the silent type, aren't you?" doesn't fix it and just calls even more attention to it. The original was cut in a way where it was implied that the main character could talk and communicate, but we never saw it, allowing us to give him a voice while allowing the story to make sense. The developers of the remake seem to have missed this entirely.

Sorry to go on a rant, but I feel like all the issues with the remake largely stem from a very common form of arrogance that exists within the game industry in general, a sort of historical revisionism that essentially assumes that modern game design ideas are always superior to old ones, and adding more modern-game design tropes (such as item recycling) is always a good thing for "making the gameplay more interesting". I guess we should feel lucky this game doesn't have a crafting system.

All that said, maybe I'm wrong here, because there are times where listening to your fanbase is absolutely the wrong thing to do, especially when fans become purists and hyper-critical of any change, even if it's a good change. For example, if the Tri-coin economy was extended to medbeds and regeneration bays, making them cost coins to use, it would absolutely be a benefit to the gameplay (they are extremely exploitable right now, as they were in the original, and essentially undermine the resource management aspect of the game), but players wouldn't like it because "in the original they were free! Stop making changes!"

It seems like this remake is simultaneously too faithful in some areas and not enough in others.

Overall, I really like the remake and think it's very fun, I just wish a little more thought was put into putting it all together. I'm mostly indifferent on the recycling system in general, I mostly hate how it wastes my time and how clunky it is, but I'm not against it on principle. The remake is pretty good so maybe I shouldn't dunk on it so much.

[674395bac9569ZylonBane]

SS2 Enhanced Edition (literally nobody asked for VR support)

Yeah no. When it comes to VR, no matter what game, somebody has asked for VR for it. Especially so for a game that's a sequel to a game that had VR for it.

[674395bac98c1sarge945]

Yeah no. When it comes to VR, no matter what game, somebody has asked for VR for it. Especially so for a game that's a sequel to a game that had VR for it.

"Someone asking for it" doesn't mean the community wanted it.

When I say "nobody asked for it" I don't mean "I took a census of every single person in the system shock community and not a single one was in favor of it". It's a figure of speech and means there was really no outcry for it, not even a minority in the community saying "VR would be cool, please spend time implementing it" as a group. When they announced VR support the community at large was just like "what, uhh....cool I guess?". I think pretty much everyone just wanted SS2 with some better graphics.

I don't think I have ever met a single person in the gaming community or in real-life who has wanted to see VR support in System Shock 2 in any serious capacity. People have done cool "what if's" in conversations, but nobody I know has ever seriously pushed for it to actually be a feature with work and resources actually put into it, because I think most people realise that it wouldn't be a very good experience without major changes, and it wouldn't really be SS2 anymore at that point.

People definitely want more Immersive Sim VR games, but not really SS1 or SS2 specifically. People who say that these things would be cool generally haven't thought about what they actually want and are generally non-specific about what they actually want.

The worst part is, ND don't seem to be putting in the work required to change it to function as a proper VR game, nor should they, as it wouldn't really be SS2 at that point. You can't just slap VR on a regular game and expect it to work well.