System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition Update & Community Participation

[664901bcc5cebeldrone]

voodoo47
There's exactly one in there, but the way the shotgun kicks back when it fires have been bothering me too, even me knowing it doesn't touch that joint while doing that!

Will tweak the kickback value a bit closer to vanilla.

[664901bcc5f21voodoo47]

currently, it almost looks like the shot is triggered by the first big pump action, and then a smaller double pump action follows that ejects  the empty shell and loads another one.

or is that just an optical illusion and the first pump action actually does not exist?

[664901bcc6216eldrone]

voodoo47
Yeah exactly like this, optical illusion. When I lowered the kickback so that you still see the relevant parts of the shotgun you'll see that it didn't move, and it doesn't feel off anymore, so that should fix it!

[664901bcc63b3Livo]

Looks fantastic, nice work! The pump animation looked like it was double pumping as voodoo47 elaborated, but you've said you've fixed it already.

Can there be an extra visual indication of the selected firing mode on some of the firearms? Literally just a lever that moves up or down, a button that pops out, extra light or screen glowing on the weapon, nothing fancy or elaborate.

Apologies if SCP fixed this already, I haven't played SS2 in a very long time, can bio-weapons sound a bit more like they're "fleshy" and "loading worms from a beaker into something icky" when changing fire modes & reloading? 

[664901bcc670aWalterREQUiEM]

eldroneextremely cool to see ss2 with fullblown viewmodel animations. To add onto what Livo suggested, it'd be cool to see the exotic weapons twitch or pulsate as you held them. Any plans to have casting animations for the psi amp as well? would it be possible to have the psi amp morph into the psi sword or is that sorta beyond dark engine as a whole?

[664901bcc6a59Chandlermaki]

Post action in action. I've been trying to parse archetypes for the relevant information so it's completely compatible with anything, but it might have to go into args along with a new script, so far this part of the shotgun is a predefine/exception in the script itself.


edit: and yeah I know, muzzleflash got janked at some point.

Even if it looks a little bit off, that is extremely impressive to see in action. Awesome work!

[664901bcc6bddZylonBane]

I wonder if the hard drives and backups from when Looking Glass went out of business even exist anymore, and if so, if Night Dive now has the rights to any System Shock 2 data on them. Being able to access the source files for all the textures, models, and sounds would be amazingly useful.

[664901bcc6ed6Divinus Prime]

 eldrone

[664901bcc71fdeldrone]

ZylonBane
I wish!

But knowing development back from those days it's very likely there wasn't much sources or repositories kept for everything, would've been nice to have some non-palletized textures for everything though.

Likely there's a harddrive or two somewhere on the planet with these things on it.


Right now I'm keeping everything in nice source files, psds and blends and a one button solution to export everything into the game, will be sharing my solution later on.


Have had some ideas to implement the material system to be viewable in blender so those mtl's can be kept and viewed on the source side and pushed to the game along with the rest of the stuff.


There was also an animated elevator button in several bins (not sure if that was yours or voodoos work) that I've converted to be set up as an animation in blender, and the exporter just pushing each frame of the animation as a seperate bin.

[664901bcc75e9ThiefsieFool]

This is getting out of hand. You know you can use the Joints system to create smooth animations with a single bin model.

Jointed elevator button from Secmod which is publicly available. It's not hard.

[664901bcc7927sarge945]

Since you're already looking into making some of the underlying features more extendible, can you have a look at adding some of the stuff from my newdark wishlist?

It will go a long way to ensuring mod compatibility going forward.

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=12296.msg148823#msg148823

[664901bcc7c96eldrone]

This is getting out of hand. You know you can use the Joints system to create smooth animations with a single bin model.

Jointed elevator button from Secmod which is publicly available. It's not hard.

Yep!

I think the elevator button is due to emission changes through the animation, which I'd also like to see more control over.

[664901bcc7dfdZylonBane]

Using frame-based animation also allows precise control over easing, which joint-based animation does not.

[664901bcc80d7eldrone]

Using frame-based animation also allows precise control over easing, which joint-based animation does not.

Setting the JointPos has worked really good for me in this case, but yeah, tweq'ing has its limitations, would be nice to have some more fine control over the easing of those.

But frame-based animation does give you everything else such as full control over anything visual about the model, you could do any kind of mesh and material manipulation to the mesh in a 3d program and the game really wouldn't have to know how to handle anything about it.

[664901bcc83dfeldrone]

Since you're already looking into making some of the underlying features more extendible, can you have a look at adding some of the stuff from my newdark wishlist?

It will go a long way to ensuring mod compatibility going forward.

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=12296.msg148823#msg148823

For sure saving this one down, some of those are even on my own wishlist

[664901bcc8532ZylonBane]

The only real downside of using model-based animation is that there's no mechanism for pre-caching all the models, so animations can be a bit stuttery the first time they play. Well, it's no worse than shader compilation stutter, and most gamers seem willing to put up with that.

Oh, and there's no native support for model animation sequences longer than 4 or 5 frames. You have to either chain together multiple objects with corpse links, or use a script to manually switch models.

[664901bcc865fThiefsieFool]

Man, you could have just said that nothing that you implement will ever be changed, not that the orange elevator button absolutely needs to have emissive animations on it for whatever reason. This is the last time I'm gonna bother making suggestions for SCP because it's just pointless.

[664901bcc89acNameless Voice]

I think the elevator button is due to emission changes through the animation, which I'd also like to see more control over.

Why not just dynamically change the Self Illumination property to change the emission brightness?  Much easier than fighting with frame-based animation sequences.  And smoother, too.

[664901bcc8d2aZylonBane]

Seems like having a script chase after the joint state to keep the self-illum synced would be even more of a hack. And that approach wouldn't work anyway if you had multiple materials in the model with different illumination levels. Anyway, we're talking about model-based animations in general here. The SCP elevator button is just a handy example. Remember years ago when Sliptip demonstrated some impressive work in this area?

This is the last time I'm gonna bother making suggestions for SCP because it's just pointless.

Great, first Join2, now you. Is it National Go Off Your Meds Week or something?

Maybe sit down with a nice warm herbal tea and repeat to yourself, "I will not become emotionally invested in buttons."

[664901bcc908aeldrone]

The only real downside of using model-based animation is that there's no mechanism for pre-caching all the models, so animations can be a bit stuttery the first time they play. Well, it's no worse than shader compilation stutter, and most gamers seem willing to put up with that.

Oh, and there's no native support for model animation sequences longer than 4 or 5 frames. You have to either chain together multiple objects with corpse links, or use a script to manually switch models.

And having massive amounts of .bin's in the one obj folder, can't make any promises on this front but there's ideas about solving both precaching and a better way to store mesh-chains.

I've currently used it on the grub to make a non-segmented animation for it, and so far it's the only way to really animate static meshes beyond joints, and in the blend it's a rigged object pre-export:
[grub_test_2.gif expired]
[grub_rig.jpg expired]

[664901bcc934aeldrone]

Why not just dynamically change the Self Illumination property to change the emission brightness?  Much easier than fighting with frame-based animation sequences.  And smoother, too.

Yeah, Joint + SelfIllum change, would still be through squirrel for full ease control.

But as it is now for me, frame-based sequences are super easy to implement and I'm just looking for scp compatibility.


Regardless, it's all interesting hacks to reach a goal, if I hadn't peaked at the button stuff in scp I would've missed out on a lot of the cool things that I'm doing right now.

[664901bcc955dsarge945]

Another feature Request.

It would be nice if there was an easy way to make psi effects, alarms, etc persist through loading zones.

The way levels are handled by the game engine obviously makes that extremely problematic.

Being able to add new sounds via dml would also be fantastic. Currently there's no real way to do that and it's very limiting.

I'd also love a way to disable saving via squirrel, and perform saves using squirrel so we can make the SS2 equivalent of ink ribbons, but I'm a bit insane when it comes to difficulty and I understand that mashing the quicksave key is so entrenched that there's probably no point asking.

Same thing with enabling/disabling multiplayer respawns via squirrel.

Also, I think @RoSoDude would appreciate a way to draw on top of game ui elements using overlay handlers (or even replace them), since iirc that's caused annoying issues with RSD mod.

Sorry for asking for so much, we have a chance here to have the best possible version of SS2, and it's an opportunity I feel is important to capitalize on.

[664901bcc9846ZylonBane]

And having massive amounts of .bin's in the one obj folder

Meh, modern games have a hundred times as many asset files as SS2.

[664901bcc9a8fsarge945]

Meh, modern games have a hundred times as many asset files as SS2.

IIRC Pathologic stores every model in every map as a separate bin file, with an offset from the origin.

SS2 having a few extra bins is a drop in the bucket compared to modern game shenanigans.