Deus Ex Mods - a How to guide by Jaesun

[mikaelis]

Jaesun, I was just wondering: in advanced rendering options for DX10 renderer I see that bumpmapping and paralax occlusion are set to FALSE. Any reason for that? Does it look like shit with this options? Are those options broken for Deus Ex?

EDIT::

Oh, I missed bumpmapping part at the end of your tutorial. Still what about other option?

 

[LusciousPear]

This is godlike with New Vision.

 

[Jaesun]

Jaesun, I was just wondering: in advanced rendering options for DX10 renderer I see that bumpmapping and paralax occlusion are set to FALSE. Any reason for that? Does it look like shit with this options? Are those options broken for Deus Ex?

EDIT::

Oh, I missed bumpmapping part at the end of your tutorial. Still what about other option?

That is a good question. I do not honestly know, however with the new release of New Vision, when I get the time I'll give that new mod a try and see what changed and update this guide accordingly. And I'll look to see if they changed some of the default graphic settings like bumpmapping (I assume they do).

 

[Breaking Axe]

The game runs fine for me unmodded installed on Windows 7, but when I install the stuff under 'Getting Deus Ex working with Windows 7' the game freezes when I go to play (Doesn't freeze at the screen where you have the configure and play options) When I put it into window mode I see that it is freezing with the words "Precaching". Not really sure what to make of all this. I'm going to try and install the direct x 10 renderer now without the modded DeusEx.exe.

Edit: Unsurprisingly that didn't work, I'm gonna fiddle around with the settings and see if I can do anything so it doesn't crash immediately.

Edit2: Putting it into compatibility mode for 98 seems to have solved this.

Edit3: Yes and no, it still crashes when I change the renderer to direct x 10

 

[Gord]

@Breaking Axe: Did you try to update DX and/or reinstall the optional D3D10 renderer for DX?
If this won't work, try the OpenGL one, there's also a D3d9 renderer available somewhere.


Regarding stuff like Parallax occlusion mapping or Bump Mapping, does it have any effect at all with the New Vision or default textures for anyone?
I can't see any noticeable effect, but I guess thats because the textures don't come with normal/height maps?

 

[rogue009]

Thank You So Much For Posting This!!

I'm so glad I finally found your posting. I hadn't even been able to get into the game, and believe me, I've tried everything. I had found Kentie.net but as helpful as I believe the updates are going to be, I found it wasn't very clear as to how to install them.

Maybe they were before and as I am later installing the game, most everyone already has the info they need.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to explain this. Now I can play the original Deus Ex.

 

[Jaesun]

Re: Thank You So Much For Posting This!!

I finally d/l and installed the New Vision 1.0 (and hot fix) and.....

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!

Deus Ex is fucking BEAUTIFUL! I'll need to make some adjustments to my guide, but it's very minor. If you read the read-me of New Vision 1.0 mod it's not exactly rocket science, it's very simple.

 

[ghostdog]

I Just realized that the 2027 mod has been released. Looks like it's worth a try : http://project2027.com/en/#/

 

[Jaesun]

Yeah, that looks pretty cool ghostdog. I think I might wait for a few more fixes before I give it a go.

 

[someone else]

BioMod is a set of gameplay improvements and additions based on the popular Shifter mod for Deus Ex. Features such as pickpocketing, an autosave, and Thief style ledge grabbing are included, as well as a much easier to manage augmentation system.

I prefer this 'improvement' on Shifter's mod. It removes Shifter's XP kills and stealth bonuses and reverts to Deus Ex's original. Passive augs means you can leave them on all the time and they drain only when used. Regeneration is also nerfed.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/biomod/downloads/biomod-10

 

[Serious_Business]

Shifter was pretty shit. Made the game into a generic shooter and had you grind kills / risky stealth to get xp. Broke the balance too because xp points should be limited. I didn't try it more than 10 minutes to be honest but that was my conclusion about it. Maybe I'll try this though.

 

[Jaesun]

Does it also include all the bug fixes shifter fixed?

I really wish he would have done a bug fixes only version of shifter.

 

[someone else]

^

BioMod uses Shifter's code as a base, so any changes are made in addition to or in place of the ones made by it.

I assume it has the same bug fixes.

 

[ghostdog]

Shifter was pretty shit. Made the game into a generic shooter and had you grind kills / risky stealth to get xp. Broke the balance too because xp points should be limited. I didn't try it more than 10 minutes to be honest but that was my conclusion about it. Maybe I'll try this though.

You know, any enemies you sneak by will give you an appropriate skill reward at the end of the mission. Still, I agree that you get too many skillpoints. The skill requirements should have been increased accordingly. Other than that I find the augmentations tweaking pretty good, and the enemy AI has been improved.

 

[ghostdog]

On other news here is a progress roundup for HDTP :

Apr. 19

The reason it's not out yet is we're trying to play-test it but we can't get on the boat.

Apr. 25

Alright you tasty muffins, the models are all animated and imported. I somehow saved all the easiest ones for last lol. Still gotta test and fix bugs n shit tho. Which is hard because I have to test the mod by looking at it's reflection in a mirror. If you look directly at HDTP it will melt your face, it's that hardcore.

May 06

Testing will be internal only, better that way anyway since we can actually fix the bugs when we finsd them.

The next release will be the final release and will include everything we have done. There will be an exhaustive list of what models have been HD-ified in the final release.

May 07

'fraid so: vanilla DX used maybe..15 character meshes, to represent every single person in the game. Did you know Joseph fucking manderly uses the same mesh as JC and Paul? S'true!

They could get away with this because the meshes are pretty low detail, and thus allow for a lot of purely texture-based "imagineering".

We can't get away with this: our meshes are so detailed they could only belong to the character they're intended to represent. Anna and Gunther actually have their augs modelled on: reskin them and...you've got a creepy looking reskin fail. Hell, we can't even get away with using anna's mesh for jordan shae, because ms. shae only lost her damn arms, and the anna mesh has a big ol' eye aug.

So. Given that there are..*thinks* fuck, probably over a hundred unique characters in DX (ok, 95 or so actually), this would require 95 or so unique meshes, all of which would require jumping through the same horrible fucking hoops we've been jumping through just to get this far (seriously, it's like jumping through hoops on fire, using a springboard made from broken glass. Also the hoops are made of laminated dogshit).

So given that folks want HDTP soon (or, apparently five years ago, if some angry internet men are to be believed), rather than in twelve years' time....we're putting in the number of characters we have, not the number of characters we'd necessarily like.

Mind you, we prioritised characters you'd see a lot of (i.e. MJ12 troops and UNATCO peeps), so hopefully it won't be too jarring too often. After all, can you really imagine some poor bastard sitting down and spending upward of 100 man-hours creating, texturing and then animating Sarah Mead? She's in one map, and she's fucking annoying even then... :p

Aug. 26:

Since this topic is addressed to DDL, I take the opportunity to ask him a few questions, hoping to not divert too much of his precious time from working on HDTP! :smile:

Seriously, I don't know anything about Deus Ex modding but I am a rather curious person and I am sure your answers would be of interest to many other lurkers:

1) What does your HDTP work consist of?

2) Is it you the only one working on HDTP at the moment? If not, who else, and what are their tasks?

3) Once HDTP is released, do you think it will be final or there will be updates to fix possible bugs/errors?

4) Could you estimate how many hours you have spent on this project?

5) Considering your answer to question number 4, do you ever feel regret for even having been involved in HDTP?

6) How has a biochemist ended up working on HDTP? :smile:

Well heck, I could answer some of those.

1) He is importing and coding a lot of the weapons and characters alongside Akerfeldt, which is mostly all that is left to do.

2) Akerfeldt is the other major contributor, especially with his magic animation-ripping program that (from my understanding) analyzes the animations from Deus Ex and converts them into a functional skeletal rig, which can then be applied to the HDTP models to make them match the original game animations. Which are pretty shitty, but it's sure better than animating every unique animation set.

3) Probably not because it's quite easy to test all the models etc. are working by throwing them in a giant room.

6) Because he's fucking smart, basically. I mean, anyone who can program effectively already has to be pretty damn smart.

Aug. 29:

Since this topic is addressed to DDL, I take the opportunity to ask him a few questions, hoping to not divert too much of his precious time from working on HDTP! :smile:

Seriously, I don't know anything about Deus Ex modding but I am a rather curious person and I am sure your answers would be of interest to many other lurkers:

1) What does your HDTP work consist of?

2) Is it you the only one working on HDTP at the moment? If not, who else, and what are their tasks?

3) Once HDTP is released, do you think it will be final or there will be updates to fix possible bugs/errors?

4) Could you estimate how many hours you have spent on this project?

5) Considering your answer to question number 4, do you ever feel regret for even having been involved in HDTP?

6) How has a biochemist ended up working on HDTP? :smile:

Dave's answered a lot of these already, and incidentally has also massively underplayed his own involvement (involvement, incidentally, which has been awesome). Christ, some of the stuff he just "magics up" overnight is...fucking incredible. Mind you, he's apparently incapable of making any texture smaller than 1024x1024, so if you ask him to rustle up a texture for a 'plain, red, button', you're gonna end up with one fucking INCREDIBLE button, but your texture caching won't thank you. 8-[

So yeah, Dave's been doing lots of textures and modelling and UVmapping (not, of course, normally in that order).

Akerfeldt, as noted, has been doing a fuckton of stuff, and he's very much at the magical coding end of the spectrum: where I am reasonably proficient at making the shitty unreal engine play ball, he seems able to write his own software that can then do things to super-high-def-uber-models which will A)animate them with vastly less fuss than one normally encounters, and B)make them STILL appear to be super-high-def-uber-models when in-game, rather than "super-high-def-uber-models regrettably mangled by the unreal engine".

Metche, who has (understandably) been fairly distracted recently what with various job moves, and (I believe) getting married, and getting basically worn down by massive accumulated HDTP fatigue, has done tons of organising, some textures, more organising, and has essentially acted as the central focal coordinator of HDTP efforts for god knows how long (and also a source of collective motivational guilt: "you can run away and just try to pretend HDTP isn't happening and you don't have to do anything, but Metche will fiiiiind you....and ask you nicely to do some stuff").

Myself, ultimately....well: I'll answer 1 and 6 together: modding the unreal engine and biochemistry research are actually very similar, in that both are essentially (on a day to day basis) composed of mindless, mindless, fucking mindless, repetitive tasks. A child of like...10 could do my job (both in HDTP and biochemistry...though admittedly on the biochem side I don't currently have a job..but you get my point). The catch is, they could do so only if everything actually worked according to plan.

Things NEVER go according to plan. Much like biochem, where you hire a postdoc not to do northern blots every fucking day, but to be able to do northern blots (or suitable alternative) even in the face of major obstacles, and to know why something when wrong when it did, and what to do to fix it.

For HDTP this could be things like rearranging texture order to fix muzzleflash wiping, or if that's not possible, recoding the weapon to use different texnums for muzzleflashes. Or making sure a given texture has the right flags on a mesh. Or reUVmapping it slightly if it turns out it has conflicting texflag requirements on the same multiskin. Or readjusting the UVmap to avoid texture shearing. Or even adding a muzzleflash if one isn't on the model, and THEN doing all the above. Or in fact making a muzzleflash myself, UVmapping it, adding it, and then doing all the above.

And that's just for muzzleflashes.

There's also the fact that HDTP has taken many contributions from many different people, many of whom did not perhaps totally understand the brief, so I've also spent a lot of time taking essentially unusable stuff and working out how we can use it.

My work on HDTP is basically being willing, able, and inventive enough to get everything imported in the first place (which is actually fairly easy, but tedious as FUCK: I've kinda got that role because most people can't be fucked learning how to do it, and the others can't bring themselves to confront the tedium), then get the code references written, and account for all the clever stuff like weaponmods magically appearing on weapons when you add them, and then to fix the myriad number of tiny irritating bugs that can crop up, which really means I need to be capable of doing a lot of things (textures, modelling, UVmapping, fucking tweaking import lines...*shudders*) to a...reasonable standard. Jack of all trades, master of none.

Incidentally, this is also pretty much what my academic CV looks like, which is not helping me much: you wouldn't THINK it'd be possible to have 'too broad' a focus in a subject as inherently niche as biochemistry, but apparently it is.


2) has been answered by both me (above) and Dave (higher above), so I'll move onto...

3) probably. I can't guarantee it'll be prompt, but I don't think I'll be leaving this forum anytime soon, so I should be able to read through lists of bugs and tackle those I can. Akerfeldt and Dave will also hopefully be around to do those I can't. Admittedly some of them might be "slightly gippy animation in model X during reload while under obscure situation Y", which I reserve the right to respond to with "ah well. Still looks better, eh?", because animation fixing is (even with Akerfeldt's magic program) still quite an arse.

4) I really really shudder to think. What gets me is how much of that time is tedium. Not OOH LOVELY LOVELY MODELS, but
"fucksake: it's offcentre by about 3 uunits"
10*delete package*
20*adjust import code offset by arbitrary number (because import code offsets and in-game offsets do not correspond in any convenient fashion)*
30*recompile*
40*reload UEd*
50*check model*
"ok, so that's gone about 5 uunits over, so if x=1500 was 8, then 3 would be..X=562"
60*GOTO 10*

...but then, fuck: I spent a year and a half doing NOTHING BUT radiolabelled RNA stuff, so I think I'm reasonably good at handling tedium.

5) Hah! I'll tell you in about a month's time.
I'm still proud of our first release, so hopefully that'll carry over.

And for the record, we're definitely on the home stretch now.

Sep. 4

Peeps're still working on shit: I'm thinking "released in a month" should perhaps be "released in a valve month".

Sep. 7

Still, when we're done, the plan is to release all the assets used for HDTP so that people can presumably modify and recompile things should they so desire. While this won't help you make a new mesh, it would presumably make something like a reskin (same mesh, different texture) far easier.

...

But, as noted above, we'll be releasing all the assets used, including the modified deusex.u source, so people can stick their own changes in and recompile should they so desire.

Sep 10

Here's something I made back when I was working on HDTP:

Disclaimer: This may or may not still be in HDTP, I have no idea.

I hope the fucktards play HDTP and hate every minute of it.

Unrelatedly, that sword is totally already in, and totally pimp.

Also, DDLVote++; for Akerfeldt to be made official HDTP spokesman. :p

Oct 3

Well, by the time the mod is down to 1 or 2 people, as it is right now, it pretty much is a matter of whether those people manage to maintain motivation to pull through with it in the face of all the shit getting hurled at them. Seems like DDL got genuinely pissed at the trolls the other day, though I don't think he was about to quit because of it. At least not that time. But if the work keeps dragging on long enough, and the support stops completely while the bullshit keeps coming, I wouldn't blame him for just saying fuck it and pretending HDTP never happened.

It won't come to that now though, fortunately they're quite close to being done. I totally got their latest build, to make sure TNM is fully compatible with it, and it rocks my socks off. The new trees especially are ridiculously pretty, and instantly make any outdoor scene look 50 times better.

OTP thread.


It seems there was some butthurt recently but hopefully it won't result to any emo rage-quitting.

 

[joeydohn]

Thanks for the guide, just thought I'd pop in to mention everything works fine the with GOG / Good Old Games version too in case people were wondering.

 

[Jaesun]

just thought I'd pop in to mention everything works fine the with GOG / Good Old Games version too in case people were wondering.

Ahhh good to know. Thank you!

 

[revealer]

Is there any way to get New Vision mod working on Windows XP?

 

[Tolknaz]

Is there any way to get New Vision mod working on Windows XP?

Did you try to equip the ring use the opengl renderer?

 

[ghostdog]

Forget the instructions and simply extract all textures in the the "Textures" folder and replace the old ones. Remember to make a backup of the old textures in case you want to revert back to them.

 

[revealer]

Yup, combination of using opengl instead of direct3D9 and replacing the old textures did it, thanks guys.
Although I still can't manage to enter the console ('t' key?) for advanced settings no matter what I do (or is that only for dx10?)
(already tried editing the .ini file and adding the -hax0r in the shorcut)
EDIT: T was assinged for scope -.-

 

[joeydohn]

Wasn't there a way to install DX10 on Windows XP back when it was a Vista exclusive? I remember a lot of drama about it at the time.

 

[sea]

There was some ridiculously dirty hack to indeed get it working. I don't think it was stable or ran very well, though.

 

[Gord]

Rumor has it that HDTP is very close to release a public beta.
According to the forums they are only making sure again that it's working (which it should be) and then it will be released, allegedly "This week or next"...

 

[Gord]

Holy St. Duke of Vaporware! They just have released the beta:

http://www.offtopicproductions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11566