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.

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.

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

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.

don't tempt me.

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?

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

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

prototype already exists (somewhere) on my hdd.

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.

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.

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