SCP Beta 4 Issue Reporting

[6747fee9edbe5sarge945]

see, you can do it if you put your mind into it - a screenshot of proper size with minimap active, and almost half of a description. maybe even log it into the tracker like a big boy next time.

You're doing better than me. I have no idea what the issue is.

EDIT: Nevermind, the roof clips down and is wonky. I was looking at the light very confused

[6747fee9eddbavoodoo47]

not going to mess with the geometry, but will change the texture (which is indeed the problem here) into something more appropriate.

[6747fee9ee0f0Nameless Voice]

Even so, there's only like four wrenches in the entire game.

Which is conspicuously also the maximum number of players allowed in multiplayer.

[6747fee9ee20dvoodoo47]

pretty sure it's more than four.

[6747fee9ee4ceOlfred]

Well, multiplayer was forced in at a later time. So I think they just put them there in case some player might be like "Oh, I found a better weapon and I don't have any more space in my inventory so I'll just discard of the wrench"

And aren't they even coveniently placed where you have to smash something right besides them?

[6747fee9ee835ZylonBane]

And aren't they even coveniently placed where you have to smash something right besides them?

Aside from the first room, not really. Wrench locations:

Medsci1: Near level start; near first recharger
Eng1: Near the Xerxes column
Hydro1: In storage room near map start
Hydro2: Near Xerxes column
Hydro3: Near map start
Ops2: In chem storage room
Ops3: At entrance to mess hall bathrooms
Rick1: Near Nacelle B door; at base of ladder that leads to level exit

Hmm, ten of them. Way more than I remembered.

SCP also adds one to the Many escape pod, so the player is guaranteed to have something to break the membranes with.

[6747fee9ee950voodoo47]

one is next to a corpse in the irradiated eng1 tunnels as well, so make that eleven.

[6747fee9eeb08sarge945]

I made a bug report about the Xerxes Voice being used on earth, which got a response alone the lines of "This might just be a generic operating system voice". But this still presents another problem - if Earth also has a xerxes, that's fine, but after we shut down the Xerxes on the Von Braun, he continues to talk when we shut off security/hack/get caught etc. You would think that shutting down xerxes would also shut down his voice elsewhere?

Ideally, the original developers would have gone all out and actually disabled all the gameplay related to xerxes (turrets, cameras etc) for story reasons, but I can see why they didn't for gameplay reasons. But it does leave the game in a weird state where Xerxes is simultaneously under SHODANs control while also working against you.

I'm not necessarily saying it's a bug/issue that needs fixing, but IMO it's worthy of a discussion as there might be other ways to work around it or make it less glaringly "gamey"

[6747fee9eec1evoodoo47]

his main part gets fried, but the automated subsystems still operate, much like when your windows is toast and you can still have fun in BIOS (or DOS). also Xerxes is a series, so an earlier version might be operating happily on earth and other places.

just don't think about it.

[6747fee9eed96sarge945]

Suriving RNG's latest video has a visible Hybrid spawn right at the end. Is that supposed to be possible? Is this the same as issue #113 reported in the SCP Issues List?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6eNhA6IW1k&feature=youtu.be&t=33m28s

[6747fee9eee99voodoo47]

yeah, #113 allright. the Many always watch.

[6747fee9ef001sarge945]

Quick question.

Was the vanilla bug with the sympathetic resonator fixed in SCP? I can't find it anywhere in the readme pdf.

The bug being where if you hack the replicator before SHODAN tells you to, the game soft-locks

[6747fee9ef107voodoo47]

that was fixed by the last official patch, afaik.

[6747fee9ef2ffBuff Skeleton]

Not sure this is even worth worrying about, but I didn't see it in the sheet or elsewhere in the thread. In station.mis, it looks like these cylinder wall wedge lights (are they even used elsewhere in the game?) have their texture backwards vs. how they cast light.

How they appear normally:

vs. when pitch is set to 180:

I never even noticed these things until today, and I've played through the game dozens of times over the years.

Unrelated, but there's also a fair bit of unused / inaccessible geo in this map. Kinda neat to check it out. And lots of room brushes. I wonder if the original plan for this map involved a lot more exploration and freedom of movement? There's even a #4 mission door above #2, suggesting they had plans for more selections at one point. And then I imagine reality came crashing down and they had to get something much simpler out the door in a short amount of time.

[6747fee9ef43cvoodoo47]

hard to tell whether they are meant to illuminate the ceiling or not. what is stranger is that some don't seem to emit light at all, despite having the light params set properly.

unused geometry is pretty common, rick1 has tons of it for example.

[6747fee9ef5a8Buff Skeleton]

They have an offset of -0.5 Z by default, so it looks like they're meant to behave like smaller, jankier versions of those wall wedge lights. When I tried flipping the ones by the windows, then I ended up getting warnings about those lights not reaching any surfaces (presumably because of the -0.5 Z offset + 180 degree pitch causing the light origin to exist outside of the world). Changing it to +0.5 Z fixed the warning, but the light still shone upwards instead of down, so it seems tricky to fix with lighting params alone. Unless there's a simple tweak to correct the light direction, that is.

[6747fee9ef6f1voodoo47]

yep, the object is messed up - currently unsure whether the model needs to be fixed or whether this can be fixed in the gamesys by tweaking renderer/spotlight on -2008.

nice find.

[6747fee9ef815sarge945]

It would be nice if the station felt like a station rather than 2 rooms floating in space. Any chance we could get some extra rooms especially if they follow developer intent by being there in the original game

[6747fee9ef950voodoo47]

no, making stuff up is out of scope, see Deus Ex Revision.

there are exceptions (some unfinished bits where the original intent is very clear), but lets add chunks of levels here and there lol is definitely not something we are planning to do.

[6747fee9efa68sarge945]

I was under the impression there were some mostly completed or totally completed rooms in the station. My bad.

Also you really hate Deus Ex Revision, don't you

[6747fee9efbb4ZylonBane]

The station is not a typical level. As noted above, there used to be a lot more of it, but Irrational intentionally stripped it down to the bare minimum, specifically to funnel players through the character generation process as quickly and simply as possible, to get them to the real start of the game.

[6747fee9efd7dvoodoo47]

yeah - more doesn't automatically mean better.

as far as Revision goes, it's more like I kind of feel sorry for anyone who plays it thinking they're getting the ultimate Deus Ex experience (same with people who use all those horrible SS2 modpacks and think the same thing).

as far as I can tell (from reviews and youtube videos, did not actually play it yet), Revision is possibly the best example of a community effort to overhaul and improve a classic game gone wrong. not denying the effort and good intentions, but all that matters little if the end result is crap - no idea how the heck did they manage to go official on steam and GOG.

hatred is something I reserve for the real world - online, the best, or rather, the worst you can get out out me is being mildly annoyed or slightly disgusted.

[6747fee9efeceZylonBane]

And for the "2 rooms in space" accusation, the station level actually includes a hell of a lot of detail to create the illusion of a larger facility. There are locked doors, windows you can see other rooms and other parts of the station through, that raised walkway with the guy walking back and forth, etc.

[6747fee9f00b1Buff Skeleton]

It's actually staggering how much detail went into Earth and the station levels considering their scope and gameplay purpose. Most games would give you a menu-based character generator (which, in some ways, is better since it's really fast if you just want to get going). SS2 gives you two large areas to explore slowly and leisurely if you so choose, giving you time to get immersed in the world -- which makes the real start of the game that much more jarring and disorienting. And there's a lot of detail to make both locations convincing without going overboard. For SP, I wouldn't change a thing about either.

I've been working on gutting some of the unnecessary or unused geo from those maps for a MP-focused mod, though, primarily for the sake of getting through character gen faster and to reduce the filesize of those otherwise-useless maps. The hope there is that it helps improve level transition stability a bit, seeing how each MP save is just a serialized copy of every level you've visited sans world rep, as far as I can tell... which is then synced between the players. Less to sync is faster and, fingers crossed, less prone to failure. Not sure if it'll hold up in reality, but I spare no effort to make sacrificial offerings to the gods of the network pantheon.