sounds delightful.

just a little note to myself - lower the chance of looting the large beaker a bit, doing a (first) full playthrough with this (and the Pistol Hybrid mod) enabled, and while everything slots in seamlessly (actually forgot I had it enabled, and the first shard hybrid almost managed a jumpscare - nearly forgot how that feels. good job, me), the hybrids spawn often enough to drop a fair amount of large beakers.

I'm literally swimming in worms.

I may take a look at it and see whether it can be fixed in an appropriate manner.

yeah, worm clusters are the only ammo type that cannot be farmed or purchased, so there is a hard limit to how much you can collect (unless you go psi and duplication). SCP beta5 will most likely remedy this by adding replicator purchasable beakers.

Oh for some reason, maybe I've just been really lucky with the spawns, but I usually only see one or two assassin's down there which I thought were hand placed.

Well thanks for clearing that up, I guess

I wonder if it's possible/desirable to replace pipe hybrids with shard hybrids on engineering, once the "Set engine core to self destruct" objective is given, so that backtracking down there carries at least SOME level of threat.

It's pretty silly going from hard enemies in command down to fodder in engineering, even if it makes sense from the perspective of the game. It would be feasible that the hybrids are upgrading themselves over time, like the player is.

Might not even need a special case for engineering. Just, once a certain progression point is reached, all new pipe hybrid spawns become shart hybrids.

Great, thanks for this.

because it's not-yet-a-mod, hence, the Engineering subforum. anyway, it will be later this week.

System Shock 2 is such a complicated game that even it's fan-made mods exist in a quantum state of uncertainty!

proper, full beta now available, ops, rec, command, rick and botm should now spawn shard hybrids here and there. this obviously means less spiders, assassins and other pests.

as always, bug reports and suggestions are welcome.

whatever rows their boat, I suppose.

because it's not-yet-a-mod, hence, the Engineering subforum. anyway, it will be later this week.

I've abandoned it mostly because it's only doable on the vanilla model, and even there, I was not able to prevent the rapier from very obviously going through parts of the AI model sometimes (which, funnily enough, is consistent with the problems Korenchkin was mentioning).

maybe I'll revisit this once the SS2EE AI models are up for grabs.

hey, look what I forgot even exists for about 3 years.

I think I'll modify the spawns for the rest of the maps, call it proper beta1, and attach to the first post.

prototype already exists (somewhere) on my hdd.

People looking for SCP might not know about the tag system or about the existence of that particular tag.

Maybe add a link to that tag search to the SCP post?

I'm just trying to help out people who haven't played system shock in years and someone just told them about this cool new SCP mod. They might go on here, find SCP, click on the link and then install a few other mods they would have otherwise not known about

This is awesome. Would fit into SCP really well.

Now we just need a crazy cat lady hybrid who throws cats at you to replace the grenade hybrid on higher levels

Seriously though I think you need to gather up all the SCP minimods and add them to the main SCP thread. It can be annoying to hunt them all down on the forums

Well as voodoo said it's 2x dmg.
One could argue that goggles is indeed mostly flesh and therefore should take extra beating from the shard, one could also argue that at that point he would already have standard armor. I wonder if 2x dmg on him is realistic, since his organic parts shouldnt be exposed that much. Is a shard hit that much more painful than a pipe hit?

don't tempt me.

definitely, and actually the purpose of this topic - once I have the final setup figured, writing a few mission dmls that will modify the spawnspoints will be trivial (there are no more hybrid spawns at command and above iirc, so we are talking just about ops and rec, unless we want to add them, which is also easy).

the loot and damage is pretty much all that needs attention, if everyone is ok with the standard pipe hybrid loot plus low chance of a large beaker and two times the bash force of a pipe hybrid, and shard hybrid serving as a pipe hybrid replacement late in the game then we are ready to go.

but will let it sit here for a week or so, maybe someone will come up with something interesting.

yeah yeah, I know, but a man can dream.

the idea comes from Secmod, though the implementation is completely different. also, this is actually something I wouldn't mind including in the main build of SCP - the existence of shard hybrids is hinted/confirmed in at least one log, so they definitely are canon to the SS2 universe.

the fragility mentioned in the log is an inconsistency we will have to live with (we can duct tape it with something like "he had a small/incomplete shard not doped with germanium so it was fragile, unlike the fully grown shards which are sturdy") - not planning on doing anything fancy like shatter the shards once the hybrids are slain, it would be just weird and also pose a technical problem (solvable, but still).

the current upload is basically just a techdemo, meant to test whether all the dml gears turn as they should, working this into the game in a balanced fashion will come later, but I'm thinking basically replacing all pipe hybrid spawns on ops and higher with shard hybrids - surprisingly, that would make them quite rare.

It has been a while since my last play-through, but wasn't there a log about how frail the shards are?
Maybe you could make them shatter (or just despawn with a glass-breaking sound) a few moments after the hybrid hits the ground, something something psionic stabilization field collapsing after death, to keep the immersion up if you can't collect them.

And yes, they do hit hard.