Silver's Bioshock mod Version 7.2 Alpha

[666600d6525e0Kolya]

You cannot recycle monkey brains in SS2. Other than that you're right. This isn't the place for general gripes about Bioshock.
Legitimate as those are, it's doubtful if there's still a place for that.

[666600d652757psikoticsilver]

Ahh, ok.  I may have been thinking of one of the many fantastic mods the SS2 community has put out.  HOURS upon hours of fun Alya and Pops mods provided me

I'll just ignore any future comments out of the great ZB in the future to avoid conflicts.

[666600d6528c8ZylonBane]

He's an excitable fellow, isn't he? 

[666600d652c11Kolya]

I may have been thinking of one of the many fantastic mods the SS2 community has put out.

Could happen to anyone.
Now please let it go, both of you. Thanks.

[666600d652d60Hannibal Rex]

I don't expect psikoticsilver to pick up work on this again, but here's two bugs I noticed in the replacement hacking.ini:

1) The tile count for Deck 1 Health Stations doesn't add up to 25, this causes most stations in Medical and some in Neptune's to crash when you attempt to hack them.
2) The elbow tiles for Crafting Stations have the wrong distribution, relative to the start and end points of the hack.

Both of these are easily fixed with an editor.

[666600d652e97psikoticsilver]

I will start working on it again, I've just been so very busy.

 Thank you for letting me know about the bugs.  I will look into them as soon as I possibly can and address them with a fix.  Could you let me know which version you're using?

[666600d6530c1Hannibal Rex]

I used the 7.2 alpha with the updated separate hacking.ini.

There's another bug I noticed, in weapons.ini: One of the grenade launcher upgrades won't show up in the PttP machines. It looks like you didn't properly roll-back one of your experimental changes there.

Also, you seem to have intended Little Sister research to grant some ADAM? As far as I can tell, that doesn't work.

I've made a few personal changes to your files during my playthrough; regarding hacking.ini

-Added 1 second to InitSpeed on everything.
-Revised damage for Overload and ShortCircuit; Overload does ~3/4 of max health damage, scaling over time relative to possible health upgrades, from 150 to 500. ShortCircuit damage is 20% of Overload, from 30 to 100. Intended to encourage retries over save-scumming. (Q: Do certain tonics affect resistance to this damage?)

As for some general thoughts: Increasing the speed while completely removing the preexisting pipe starts felt rather unsatisfying, and often unfair. Especially at the beginning, you often don't have the time to either determine the often only route to the exit, and find the proper tile that needs to be placed at the very start. It's frequently unavoidable to fail. Hence, my reduction to short circuit and overload.

I think it would be a bit more interesting if there were less straight tiles and more curved ones, also including an according reduction in alarm/overload tiles, forcing you to build more winding connections.

If you want, I can send you the complete changes I made, which also include a complete overhaul to the ADAM costs and plasmid progression. I've kept a changelog, but I'm unlikely to ever pick up Bioshock again. Still, I'd be happy to discuss the game and the limited ways to balance it some more.

[666600d6531adpsikoticsilver]

Hey Hannibal... are you still around by any chance?

[666600d653284Hannibal Rex]

Did you get my message?

[666600d653386amanwithaspoon]

Hello, I know this is a dead topic, but maybe you're still checking up on it.
i'm replaying BioShock with your mod and i'm enjoying it very much. I wonder if you'll ever do something like this for Infinite?

[666600d6534b6psikoticsilver]

Hey there.  I have a problem.  Recently, I seem to have misplaced or lost my work on this mod... I had made some serious changes, but now I am forced to start over from 7.2.  I'd rather not do this and  I am pretty sure I have given out some of my post-7.2 work... so  I would be interested if anyone has files newer than 7.2.  Get it touch with me through email, Skype, or Steam.

[666600d653783psikoticsilver]

Hello, I know this is a dead topic, but maybe you're still checking up on it.
i'm replaying BioShock with your mod and i'm enjoying it very much. I wonder if you'll ever do something like this for Infinite?

I do not think I will do anything like this for Infinite.  I literally just bought it the other day, and haven't even played an hour yet.

You never know, though.  I might just feel like it sometime.

[666600d653a65xdiesp]

I do not think I will do anything like this for Infinite.  I literally just bought it the other day, and haven't even played an hour yet.

Play on 1999 mode from the get go, and skip the room full of tonics at the beginning of the game. Those are DLC prizes that make you way overpowered.

[666600d653d70amanwithaspoon]

I randomly decided to check this post again and wow, there is actually a response.

Hey there.  I have a problem.  Recently, I seem to have misplaced or lost my work on this mod... I had made some serious changes, but now I am forced to start over from 7.2.  I'd rather not do this and  I am pretty sure I have given out some of my post-7.2 work... so  I would be interested if anyone has files newer than 7.2.  Get it touch with me through email, Skype, or Steam.

Didnt know there was a newe version than 7.2, I can't help you there.

An unrelated note:
I wish that I could find the guy ''Z008MJ'' who made a similar mod for Bioshock 2, so that he could give a link for the newest version of the mod he made. Maybe someone here has the Balanced Ultra-Hard Mod for Bioshock 2 v2.0 ? I could only find v 1.1.

[666600d654116ThiefsieFool]

I've been playing through Bioshock with this mod and I'm not so sure about the balance with regard to items and hacking, at some point before and during Arcadia I started swimming in ammunition (making combat easily manageable) while hacking has remained completely impossible on all "decks" I've been on, no matter if I freeze the machine or use the normal hacking tonics that you can find, it's way over the line difficulty-wise and worse, very random because of the randomized initial piece.
There's also an issue with the reactivated "hack skill requirement" that counts your engineering tonic slots, in theory I like it but now you cannot use autohack tools on an object that you can't hack normally. Irrational didn't think that one through at all.

I wonder if anyone has any ideas about forcing the game to load more data from the .ini files? That would be a real game changer, so you could change weapon mods and so on. (like replace the brainless splash damage immunity mod with something else)
Or maybe decompiling the .u files is possible with UE Explorer, might look into that.

[666600d6544e9ThiefsieFool]

For the record someone managed to get more ini files and put them up here: https://github.com/AlphaMatterr/Bioshock-All-Versions/tree/master/BioshockConfig

Looking at these files combined with decompiling the unrealscript source of the game (ShockGame.u) with Gildor's decompress.exe can give you a lot of hints on what variables can be changed to create much more impressive mods than we've seen so far.
Unfortunately most of these new .ini files refuse to load, even if you edit Bioshock.ini/Default.ini and so on to add the new ini files as "files that should be loaded".
Still, more hacks are now possible because you can use the "set" console command to change these new properties, at least for testing.

Here's a video with some hacks that involve mostly properties that can't be edited from inis at all (unrealscript variables that were defined without the "config" keyword), only with the set console command can you change them, things like MaxUses and InitialCost can make things feel pretty different/hardcore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVLiKl4Ci8Q

I would like to see modding for Bioshock go further with some kind of big mod to make it less dumbed down, but there's still very significant hurdles in deploying such a mod.
- macros using the set console command need to be executed manually on each run of the game, and can't change array contents, only variables
- some important ini files (Abilities, ModEffects) don't seem to get loaded even though the unrealscript source shows the ini files should work as there are config keywords associated with the variables that these inis change

It's a shame because Bioshock is very data-driven and there is a lot of deep modding potential, you can change how stations work, create new consumable items or change how existing ones work e.g make it so healing is slow and over time instead of instant, modify research rewards (both the passive effects and tonic rewards), create completely new crafting recipes and gene tonics, fix serious bugs like SportBoost not giving you any extra movement speed as it advertises in the description and more

[666600d654865Jerkakame]

An unrelated note:
I wish that I could find the guy ''Z008MJ'' who made a similar mod for Bioshock 2, so that he could give a link for the newest version of the mod he made. Maybe someone here has the Balanced Ultra-Hard Mod for Bioshock 2 v2.0 ? I could only find v 1.1.

Im also interested in that mod, but I cant even find v1.1

[666600d6549d0BroodingToast]

I know It's been some time since the last post, but, with the remastered versions of the Bioshock games coming any moment now, I thought of revisiting this website, which I'd lurked around before, and I just happen to have Z008MJ's files for his/her Bioshock 2 mod.

I managed to get from another user some time ago, as I was looking for it all over the web, and found no trace.

If you're still intersted, PM me, I'll send it your way.


Cheers.

[666600d654b63voodoo47]

upload it somewhere and post the link, we'll attach it to the first post.

[666600d654c74BroodingToast]

Any prefered upload site? I don't any Mediafire accounts or anything. Is there one that doesn't require an account? (if not I'll just make a Mediafire account and upload it there. Just curious if there's a simpler alternative)

[666600d654d91BroodingToast]

TinyUpload Link - Bioshock 2 Extreme Difficulty Mod


Just searched free upload site, and that came up first. Let me know if you prefere it somewhere else.

Cheers.

[666600d654eb5Kolya]

Thank you. I created a new thread for it. If you can provide any further information about this mod please post it there.

[666600d655252JDoran]

TinyUpload Link - Bioshock 2 Extreme Difficulty Mod


Just searched free upload site, and that came up first. Let me know if you prefere it somewhere else.

Cheers.

Great, Bioshock 2 is by far my favourite of the three, and sadly, like the other two, it suffers far too much from the dumb-it-down-and-make-it-as-easy-as-possible mindset of the businessmen who run gaming now, so hopefully this mod will help correct the fault.

[666600d65536aBroodingToast]

My experience with it, while short lived, was very positive. I do wonder if it'll work with the remastered version.