Does anyone want to make a SR Deus Ex mod?

I realize that mods are a lot of work and so this question is silly on some level. On the other hand, people here do talk about SR video games a lot and complain about the upcoming SR FPS even more, so I thought it might be worth asking if anyone was motivated enough or interested in the concept of making the ultimate Shadowrun game themselves.

I think Deus Ex would be a logical choice. The New York City maps, *and* the anime somewhat Blade Runner esque maps from the Redsun 2020 mod are probably very good for the look and feel of Shadowrun. You also have a built in system of skills, including an Electronics skill, a Lockpicking skill, a Pistols skill, a Rifles skill, a Heavy Weapons skill, and a Melee combat skill.

The biggest difficulty would be if you tried to implement deckers and astral space.

Decking could be achieved to a certain extent using the old SR2 paradigm of a virtual reality scape and this could be done by teleporting the character to a seperate map which is designed to look like the Matrix virtual reality. The mod Burden of 80 Proof did something like this where, when your character played a vieo game, the game just handled that by teleporting the first person view into a seperate game map and temporarily deleting your inventory of "real world" items.

Astral space would probably be tough for a player side thing. You could probably have invincible ghost images of enemies floating around though and claim they were in astral space.

Probably the easiest way to make a SR mod would just to write a scenario called "Physad's Quest" (remember the [character class]'s Quest series of modules for D&D 2nd edition?) and have the augmentations be your physad powers and have biolectric energy correspond in some way to your Stun meter. A few mods today have various implementations of bullet time and I think that bullet time could be a nice way of handling Wired Reflexes.

I highly recommend against this. Deus Ex is a wonderful game, but the engine is sorely, sorely lacking (no dynamic lighting!). It was bad enough for Deus Ex, but in Shadowrun, where darkness should be easy to find, it would be an absolute nightmare.

Q3 is GPLed, that might be a better place to start.

~J

The one issue is that Deus Ex used a slot system for upgrades rather than a point system, a fact that makes character building far less flexible in general.
Adapting it to simulate physad powers is doable, but it would obviously be incorrect from a rules standpoint.

This should be over in Community Projects. I'll leave it here for a bit for recruiting if ya' like, but it'll move after a bit, 'k?

Dynamic lighting is lighting which changes depending on the conditions of your environment. For instance, standing in the middle of the street at night, your character would be more visible with the street lights shining down on you than if you ducked into the alleyways. Also, if you were carrying a lightsource (flashlight, lantern, etc.), you could cast that light source onto objects in front of you. When you have dynamic lighting, you have shadows. So if you are standing close to a building, and the moonlight is shining behind you, you would be blocked from the moonlight by the building, but if you stepped away from the building several feet, the shadow would not be covering you anymore.

One other nice feature about having dynamic lighting would be if you were hidden around a corner in a hallway, you might be able see someone's shadow before they actually come into view.

Jaymes gives a general idea, but he focuses too much on new and neat but not IMO vital uses of it. Dynamic lighting allows you to do things like cast light on arbitrary surfaces in the game—if you note, when you turn your eye-lights on, what lights up doesn't rely on what you're looking at. Instead, certain predefined areas get swapped for brighter textures.

For an example of why this matters, try swimming around in some of the darker areas of Deus Ex and getting lost. Because the designers didn't expect you to be down there, you'll remain in pitch blackness when you turn your eye-lights on, and probably drown. That happened to me more than a few times.

~J

Moved to Community Projects

I think that Deus Ex is best suited for that kind of mod as it already have a lot of required element implented (be it code, objects, texture and so on). Too bad Invisible War isn't moddable though. (yes I know, a lot of people hate it, but I loved it).

But it would still be a lot of work. (for example, you need metas. So you need a modeler to model metas)

Anyway, I have some experience in UScript, so if you ever get the project on track with a serious and motivated team, I could give you a hand with the scripting part... A lot can be done quite easily.

the real question is: what would be the focus of this mod?

would it be a single player RPG, or a multiplayer team-based objectives mod (a 'la dystopia, with magic. and drones.)

or perhaps a combination of both?

either way. I cast my vote against using Deus ex for the following reasons:

1. It's old, very few people still own copies.
2. It's old, very people play it any more.
3. It's old, the engine is outdated, and while has some spiffy things (skills, inventory) it has many drawbacks (no dynamic lighting, modding tools?)
getting the original to run is quite a pain on any modern XP systems. why? It's OLD.

not saying Deus Ex is bad, but; old dog, new tricks.

Deus Ex runs perfectly under XP.

Actually :

1. It's old, you can find used copy for cheap (or you can go for abandonware if you don't mind going into the grey areas of the law)
2. If the mod is good, people will play it all the same.
3. The engine is outdated, true. It might not suit everyone, but I can do with it and some of the features that are already in it might be a pain to add in another engine (inventory for example). As for the modding tools, they don't age you know. They are as good now as when they came out, which is good enough.

It runs fine on WinXP.

I can understand that you'd prefer a more recent game, but I fail to see a better candidate what we need.
Actually, the fact that it's old might also be an advantage, as there's no need for full time CG artists to create decent ultra-high poly models and levels.

There are quite a few newer games that have more dynamic protaganist AI, plus dynamic lighting capabilities. The down side would be building asteral/AR/hacking layers on top of everything, plus the addition of the syberware mechanic. HalfLife2 mods (like Dystopia) and Far Cry have some good systems... but you'd need some hefty programmers/designers in on soemthing of that magnitude. Really it couold be done on any FPS (if that's the way you want to go) engine, it just depends on how much work a team would be willing to put into the dev proccess

i always thought Fallout:Tactics would be a great SR platform. i've loved the 3/4ths view since old school SNES shadowrun.

I was reading another forum about cyberpunk genres and system shock2 seemed to be a much better platform

Then have fun adding inventory management, good single player support (with saves), NPC AI, multiple choice dialogs, triggers and events (though Q3 may have these already), "cyberpunk" objects and textures, stealth and so on in Q3.

I don't say that can't be done, it's GPLed, you can rewrite the entire game to make it a cellphone emulator if you want to, but it will be a lot more work and will need more programming skills (you have to do actual programming rather than just tweaking some classes here and there) and I'm not sure it's really a good idea.

Anyway, I'm not the project lead so that's not my call.

(And I also prefer the overall feeling of the rendering of Unreal engines to Quake engines, even if they are not as good on the technical side, but that's just my personal taste.)

What about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?

it looks like it may have everything we need (LINK TO PARENT ARTICLE)

it hasn't been released yet, so god knows how mod-able it is, but a built-in RPG, lethality, inventory, and scripting system means our work is mostly content-related.

Yeah, but isn't STALKER never being released some kind of running joke by this point in time?

er, actually it just GOT released.

gotta pick up a copy...

Oh, that's good.