SSR The System Shock demo is OUT!

[67477e2a1f146DKDArtagnan]

Reality is truly humbling 

[67477e2a1f34eZylonBane]

At least you already have a pet Hikari following you around. Just don't forget to walk and feed him.

[67477e2a1f43fDKDArtagnan]

Seriously, though, I hope against hope that this new version will find a way to please you.

As hard to believe as it may be - I don't see any upside in upsetting any fan of a great game.

[67477e2a1f5d7voodoo47]

personally, I'm only worried about the music at the moment. and I very much dislike that they dropped "remastered", for obvious reasons.

[67477e2a1f7c0Synaesthesia]

I'm pretty sure they'll fix up the music. If they don't, someone will patch in the old stuff.

[67477e2a1f8b7voodoo47]

that reminds me, I don't think I've seen modding tools/editor in any of the stretch goals.

[67477e2a1fe1dTachikoma]

So, 3 days after the Kickstarter campaign was started and before development was even funded, you predicted they were lying and were really making a Bioshock reboot - and that they wouldn't be listening to anyone for the next 18 months - except for the evil profit monkey commanding them to make an as anti-LG System Shock as they possibly could?

The Legend of Nightdive and the last System Shock corruption crusade

Notice, it was you who said that. I didn't really state my opinion on this reboot.

All what I said is that SS fans have all rights to demand SS game and not BS game. There simply can't be excuse such as "our poor developers need to eat something so we have to listen to the evil publisher and make BS successor" because people are funding the development of SS game and those people are SS fans mostly, I assume so at least. They promised to deliver and they have to stand by their words. Though looks like we shouldn't expect music by Eric Brosius already. Hopefully I'm wrong though and they'll change their mind again because this is my main issue right now (but who knows, I bet they going to surprise us more).

Wow, this place is really full of.... interesting and reasonable SS fans.

Totally agree, how dare those.... interesting and reasonable SS fans demand something or criticize some of the flaws of this reboot, they have to be happy that someone is bringing System Shock game at all. Besides, we should 100% believe Night Dive, there is no chance that SS can become another MN9! And it's totally uncommon to see shitty reboots these days too! Moreover, who do they think they are to demand quality, right? Damned purists, worst community ever!!!!

On an unrelated note, will they release source-code of the first game? And did they fix that CPU bug in enhanced release? When you have to face SHODAN.

[67477e2a1ff09voodoo47]

yes on the cpu bug, if I remember correctly.

[67477e2a20213Gawain]

The game feels like System Shock. It looks like System Shock.

This is an objectively ridiculous statement.
I didn't specifically mean student projects about SS. Just overall quality.

I will try the updated demo and see if it changes my mind about buying this game before actually seeing what it is. I don't pay for dreams.

[67477e2a20520Gawain]

Here are some of my thoughts about the demo. Talking directly to Nightdive.

• The pixelated textures. I know you want some of the original retro look. I just don't like the way they look.
• Paneling in the corridors. The extruding squares are clearly at three different hights (higher at the edges, lower at the middle). They are also called "soft paneling" in the original.
• Why does the space station look like old garbage truck? I tought it was supposed to be state of the art research station. Of course SHODAN has made lots of modifications. But they are clearly indicated in the original (visually and with its own music). This demo level is supposed to be medical (sanitary and all that).
• Sparq Beam. This is clearly taken straight out of Star Trek. I understand you want to make weapons more heavy. This is exactly what I want, but I feel you need to think more about the references and background where the orignal ideas came from. I think this should be exception. Just as the tranq darts. I see no need to make those feel heavy. The whole point to give player such a shitty weapons in the beginning is to make player feel weak.
• The scale of level feels a little bit too big compared to original.
• Power station recharging. Why would there be very dangerous high voltage thing making sparks all around? It would also be ten times cooler if the player would take cord out of his hand and plug it into the station to recharge. This can also add som additional fear factor, since the player needs to wait a little (like med patches). Would also make batteries little bit more useful (instant recharge).
• I don't like taking the players control away when picking up weapons or implants.

You can make traps and bigger explosions by stacking stuff and using mines or bullets as trigger. I hope you will develop this aspect further.

[67477e2a207fbRocketMan]

I thought the whole point of the hacker's omni-glove or whatever it is, was to interface with various pieces of hardware/software/cyber stuff, etc.  Why not just have some port on the energy station that he plugs his fist into instead of this magic "open sesame" sequence where he gets zapped just by standing there.

[67477e2a2094dHikari]

Agree. Frankly I was expecting less tesla coil and more 'hacker grabs glowing thing' *glove gets zapped, hand clenches, arm muscles twitch. charge complete.'

[67477e2a20abfChandlermaki]

All gameplay stuff aside, the demo for some reason is running pretty poorly on my 2600K/GTX 970 machine. Lots of stuttering, etc.

[67477e2a20ba2Synaesthesia]

That sounds more like an issue with your CPU and/or RAM. I use a 6700k and a 970, 32GB of RAM, with no issues.

[67477e2a20e18Learonys]

MOAR GOODIES!

https://twitter.com/madewithunity/status/750047179616595968

Is it me, or does the character actually feel faster? They may be fooling us by sprinting, but who knows.
The bio meter got updated, The HUD looks slightly different. The humanoid mutant's arms also have been made a lot less bloody.

Do you think they're already working on processing the feedback posted? Very interesting indeed.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt24r_Okdjk

Podcast of an interview with Stephen Kick. Night Dive as a company and the reboot is being talked about. A lot of interesting things are mentioned, but i'm only going to highlight what's more or less relevant to the reboot.

20:34 Stephen Kick explains why NDS decided to pick "System Shock" as the name for the reboot.

36:17 Visuals of the game are mentioned, and how the current developers and their connections to other game is going to influence this.

37:38 Chris Avellone, and his influence on this project is mentioned. This one is especially interesting.

49:00 Stephen Kick talks about some of the things he thinks could be improved on from the original.

[67477e2a20f6eHikari]

I like the HUD curve.

Mutant still has a bit of a jelly walk to it. Though I did like that on death twitch animation.

Agree they could be fooling us with using sprint as the game had a nice sprint speed.

I liked the pipe swing. Can't tell much else from a thirteen second clip.

Expecting this to mostly be bug fixing, UI, very minimal changes to this newest demo since it's likely they haven't processed everything we've been saying. That said they might have a few things baked in we have mentioned. Hoping for the best.

Given how borderline my system is I'd like word on the ability to turn things off as opposed to 'here let's bolt on more stuff that taxes your video card.'

...counting the seconds.

[67477e2a21101JosiahJack]

Seems snappier.
Servbot satisfyingly fell over.
Still hard to see, very sharp contrast between light and dark areas.  For a game stating that it's using global illumination, it sure doesn't look like it (not necessarily bad as GI can have horrible performance impact.)

[67477e2a211efSynaesthesia]

I don't know of any real-time engine that uses GI dynamically. GI would refer to lightmapping in every method I'm familiar with.

[67477e2a21320Matty]

Voxel Cone Tracing on Sparse Voxel Octrees is one way engines are trying to produce real time GI. The other one is through "dynamic" light probes which is what Enlighten does (it still does a lot of preprocessing).

You are correct in that both are still quite taxing on modern hardware and therefore prohibitive for general use. VCT has a big memory footprint as well.

As you may know, Unity uses Enlighten. We've toned down a lot of the "dynamic" aspects of the GI for performance reasons, but there is still some in the game. Baked GI is still GI.

[67477e2a21482Hikari]

Hey thanks for keeping us looped in Matty. We have general confidence that if nothing else if anyone can do this you guys can. It's more a bunch of cane waving oldsters quibbling over details.

[67477e2a21611Join2]

They'd do well to listen to the cane wobblers and they know it. The little details matter. Stop dismissing them, Hikari. Yes, some have overreacted a bit, others have probably criticized things only intended to be placeholder, further still other critics may be missing the point (such as not seeing the greater good /lacking context regarding a particular feature), but the vast majority of criticisms have been entirely valid, it's undeniable.

It doesn't mean everything everyone critical has said should be adhered to or is correct, but taking it all on board and going over it is well worth it.

[67477e2a21717Hikari]

@join

Look. I'm ALSO one of the cane wobblers (I've been on the TTLG forums since 04ish, possibly a little earlier. Definately lurked before then.) I also am willing to see just how snitty and bratty this community can and often does look especially to an outsider.

[67477e2a21814Matty]

The game is going to evolve quite a bit over the course of development. I can't promise specific changes, but I'd not get too worked up about what's in the game right now. We're still iterating and experimenting - while there's still time.

[67477e2a21950Learonys]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/482400/discussions/0/351660338713339416/?ctp=7#c358417008716066949

Seems like they're testing their current possibilities with porting the demo to Linux and OSX. But nothing has been put in stone yet.