new mod/modder

[66492de2c2c83duyec]

hey fellow shockers, brand new modder here still wet behind the ears. mostly i just want this to be a gamesys mod and possibly scripts so that people can use it with map randomizers or whatever. this mod is mostly a difficulty mod. i want to bring back the feelings that i had as a kid when i played shock 2 and didnt want to leave the safety of the safe room with the upgrade modules. knowing that all the zombies were out there. and sitting in the cargo bays of engineering hearing all the enemies around me hunting me down. i want to bring back the horror. so the enemies must be buffed up to the extreme. i want to make them very deadly and put an emphasis on slow, tactical combat. where you must utilise cover at all times and sneak as much as possible to keep the upper hand over the enemies. enemy fire will be unrelenting and do high damage with great accuracy. players weapons and abilities must be buffed some to compensate. rate of fire has been increased for higher DPS. weapons will sometimes have damage increases. armors and implants will be modded. i also want to get rid of game mechanic of blocking the player out of playing with certain things or abilities in the game. i dont believe you should not be able to use certain items you found just because you havent put the skill points in it. so you i will lower all the usage requirements but base damage wont be very significant without high weapons skills. so you still have to upgrade but you have hte freedom to choose whatever weapons you want. i want to make implants more valuable and difficult to use, speeding up discharge rate and increasing skill requirements. i will open up research, repair and modify to all players. but they will be expensive and difficult without higher skill. i will increase camera difficulty with night vision, alarm sound on destroy, and 'must hack security station to deactivate alarm' i dont have any programming experience so this is all pretty new to me. i just recently got on the object hierarchy program and began modding. i already feel kind of stuck. im only able to do small tweaks to existing settings but the settings i tried to add (like worm bite tox) didnt work. im going to need alot of help with this thing i think... and the list of chages is pretty huge. alot of the ideas are mine but alot are also from other mods that are already out, so im hoping the guys who know all about these things can help me. im including a file with all my current progress as of 12 am saturday. any help would be greatly appreciated. im going to let you guys look over a little of my matieral if you want and offer any suggestions about how i can implement changes and also about possible negative balance repurcussions or other suggestions for me. any help would be appreciated but it would be so great if i could actually finish this mod some day. just for your info not all of the changes ive currently implemented are listed in the "mod plan" file. the full list of changes in contained in the "my changes" folder. i realise the mod is still kind of a dissorganised mess at this point but like i said, i already feel a bit stuck so i just need to get this stuff up here i think.

general idea for things to help me with initially:

delete the pipe hybrids uppercut swing animation or deactivate it, it misses all the time and its extremely slow. speed up his other attacks. i couldnt find where to speed them up. and also speed up his running speed and AI awareness. i want these guys to run the player down like a sick dog, so to speak.

i want a bullet hole with smoke when you shoot walls and sparks and lighting when you shoot metal

monster gibbing and blood splatter upon damage

crouching reduces recoil

add the ability to hack cameras

fix the player flying through the air when you are running on the ground with high agility/increase player gravity

make the assassin use laser rapier when too close

worm bite toxin effect

make the droid run towards you when you shoot them like on secmod

goo drip toxin effect, shielded by the hazard suit

replace the original blue corpse model with one that doesnt have broken looking legs/fix the broken legs on the model

eggs have a chance of bursting open when frobbed

headshot location damage multipliar

make cameras' alarms sound upon destruction

the password is 35^Shy^Jire#yjmYUoKMHJ90j76J

[New folder.7z expired]

[66492de2c305fduyecc]

so im working on the camera right now and using Alya mod as a reference. im pretty much stuck just trying to duplicate all the information contained in that mod because i just dont understand this program. there isnt any reference guide to objects or any help file. its like the only people who can effectivly use it are the people who have gone over the source code or the original designers. how did you guys figure out how to do so much advanced work in this program? i would really like to learn how to do it myself also, so i can finish and release my mod to the community.

object>physical>monsters>security camera

aiAwarenessDelay
time to level 3 4000 to 3000

aiNoticeDamage false to true (it still doesnt sound alarm on camera destruction somehow)

psiRadarType blank to Enemy

aiVisionDescription>vision cone>
0>
flags Active to Active,Night Vision
acuity 200 to 400
range 50 to 400
1>
range 5 to 400
2>
flags No Alert 2,No Alert 3 to No Alert 2,No Alert 3,Night Vision
range 5 to 400
3>
flags blank to Night Vision
range 10 to 400
4>
flags No Alert 0,No Alert 1,Omni to No Alert 0,No Alert 1,Omni,Night Vision
range 6 to 400
acuity 70 to 100
5>
flags blank to Night Vision
range 22 to 400
acuity 120 to 200
6>
flags blank to Night Vision
range 35 to 400
acuity 80 to 200
7>
flags Peripheral to Peripheral,Night Vision
range 60 to 125
8>
flags Peripheral to Peripheral,Night Vision
range 80 to 100
9>
flags blank to Night Vision

aiTurnRate 45 to 25

[ADD:property]HackDifficulty, HackText, aiThreatResponse, objArgList, RequiredTechSkills

RequiredTechSkills>
hack 1

objArgList>
NVRelayTrapOn="Slain"; NVRelayTrapOff="Null"; NVRelayTrapTOn="Alarm"

aiThreatResponse>
threat threat

HackDifficulty>
success chance 1
failure chance 1
cost 1

HackText>
CamHack: "Hack to disable security camera."

scripts>scripts>
0 basemonster to cameradeath
1 cameradeath to NVrelayTrap
3 blank to turret

[ADD:receptron]

[ADD:object]object>stimulus>CameraStim

object>stimulus>cameraStim

(add hackduration and hack difficulty when i figure out how to make it hackable)

so im just going to finish copying this information that i dont understand and see if it works...

[66492de2c31a0duyecc]

so the camera hack worked (woohoo!) but its still moving... i guess when i finish adding the code it will be stationary... i think i just have to create the objects in stimulus and add the receptrons in "monsters>security camera" then i hope somone will help me with the pipe hybrid! if worst comes to worst and no one will help me with it, ill just try to replace it with the shotgun hybrid

[66492de2c32b7Zygo]

Most of the stuff people have learned has been from trial and error, and because ShockEd is very similar to the Thief version which is more well documented. For Thief there was some (official) documentation as DromEd was officially released with rather more fanfare and on disk with Thief Gold, and LGS was around for some time post release as well. Had there been a System Shock 2 Gold or similar we may have got more stuff too.

[66492de2c3383duyecc]

70 views and no replies

[66492de2c3549SoldierG65434-2]

Most of what you want to do has been accomplished in other mods. Look around and you can either get in contact with the authors or reverse engineer from them.

I would also caution against adding headshots. This isn't a twitch shooter and the enemies don't take cover or behave with much of a sense of self preservation, so headshots would likely make things too easy.

[66492de2c3699duyec]

my obj heirarchy program is apparently corrupting my game sys... my maintenance droid's parts upod death, just fall straight down in a neat pile instead of fly outwards like normally. i ran a test.. i opened the original shock2.gam and resaved it without changing anything and it still messed up the droid's death... help?

[66492de2c37fbZygo]

IIRC it is the explosion that scatters the droid parts, not anything directly to do with the droid itself. Changing or removing the explosion, or giving the droid parts extra weight would be the obvious potential problems but that would not explain why the original gamesys would not work. There is also an occasional bug that doesn't spawn the explosion if too close to architecture.