Deus Ex Deus Ex

[kites]

GMDX is the only way to fly. All the QoL and improvements to core systems, without changing the flavor. Playing on HxCx feels properly tuned most of the time, and prevents the vanilla save-scumming head-bonk-fest.

Look into RoSoDude’s gmdx fork as well

 

[Butter]

I can't speak to RoSoDude's version, but GMDX 9.0.3 is amazing.

 

[Gargaune]

I tried to do a Vanilla play through and did the Kenti shit but whenever I get ESC to the main menu I will get a "not responding" thing and have to wait like 30 seconds for it to resolve. Online it seems like a lot of people have the same issue so out of my laziness I wanted to do a mod install. Something awful seems to recommend Shifter mod over GMDX, who is right though?

Set Kentie's renderer to native Fullscreen, don't use Borderless, that causes hangups with the main menu and inventory etc. That sorted it for me, but if you still have trouble, disable Kentie's FPS cap and use your GPU driver to set one or to enable V-Sync.

If this is your first time playing, don't even think about installing an overhaul mod, Kentie's renderer is all you need.

P.S. After you've sorted out the freezes, in-game hit T, backspace over the Say, type preferences and hit enter. You'll get the Advanced Options panel, expand Direct3D 10 and set Classic Lighting to True for the vanilla visuals.

 

[Dave the Druid]

 

[Ryzer]

Cringe,

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

 

[flyingjohn]

Cringe,

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

Warren and Harvey had practically no input in UA and Redfall. They were glorified advisors at best.
Both Warren and Harvey decline started with Thief deadly shadows. A game they both worked and failed.

 

[NecroLord]

Cringe,

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

Warren and Harvey had practically no input in UA and Redfall. They were glorified advisors at best.
Both Warren and Harvey decline started with Thief deadly shadows. A game they both worked and failed.

I wouldn't call Deadly Shadows a straight out failure, but it is certainly not a perfect game like Thief 1 and 2.

 

[Ryzer]

Cringe,

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

Warren and Harvey had practically no input in UA and Redfall. They were glorified advisors at best.
Both Warren and Harvey decline started with Thief deadly shadows. A game they both worked and failed.

No input? Harvey was project director on Redfall, so he had the most input on and Warren Spector was creative consultant on UA.
Besides Harvey did many interviews on Redfall.

 

[flyingjohn]

I wouldn't call Deadly Shadows a straight out failure, but it is certainly not a perfect game like Thief 1 and 2.

As a commercial product and as a sequel to Thief 2, it failed.
It neutered the original games level complexity and added bugs and a shit tps mode. At best the game can be called mediocre, which is a failure in my book.

Harvey was project director on Redfall

He is titled as studio director which just translates to consultant. Ricardo was the man with the horrible ideas that got implemented.

Warren Spector was creative consultant on UA

Which translates to:
"Give small ideas/corrections and congratulate everybody on doing good work while being paid a lot of money".

Besides Harvey did many interviews on Redfall.

When you game sucks, you put somebody "famous" for the media stuff. I bet that UA had Warren in interviews/promos even though he had minimal input.

 

[Ryzer]

Harvey was project director on Redfall

He is titled as studio director which just translates to consultant.

Stop shilling these men, this is just stupid.

 

[Nano]

Cringe,

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

Warren and Harvey had practically no input in UA and Redfall. They were glorified advisors at best.
Both Warren and Harvey decline started with Thief deadly shadows. A game they both worked and failed.

Tim Stellmach was the lead designer on UW, so it's actually a Thief alumni who's most responsiblefor that one.

 

[caffeine]

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

Development teams are so big now that select men find it hard to make a difference. Game development works better with groups of 20 persons.

 

[Gargaune]

Daily reminder, that the minds behind Desu Ex are behind Underworld Ascendant and Redfall.

Development teams are so big now that select men find it hard to make a difference. Game development works better with groups of 20 persons.

You could maybe make that excuse for Smith's involvement with Redfall, if you really wanted to, but not for Spector's with Ascendant, that was an indie-sized production. And I'm pretty sure his role in Ascendant was even less creatively-involved than in Invisible War anyway.

Look, I don't think this needs a lot of careful analysis - people age. Their perspectives change and so does their stamina and enthusiasm, there comes a point in a man's life (especially a successful one's) where he just doesn't have it in him to get down in the trenches of videogame development anymore, with all the crunch and minutiae, and he just wants to do a "civilised" job and get back to the things he's come to value more, like his family or his Lambo or other grown-up stuff. And if he still enjoys videogames, he probably enjoys different things about them. That's not to say the unmanageable scope of development teams isn't hurting modern gaming, it absolutely is and in a major fashion, but it's not the reason our heroes of old aren't mesmerising us with their work anymore. It's because they're our heroes of old and time only flows in one direction.

Coming back to Spector and Smith, we can certainly argue about what they did in their Invisible War days, but not anymore, they're still in gaming, but in different positions and for different reasons - back then, they wanted to make cool stuff, nowadays it's what they do. I'm sure they still "love" the field, but if you pressed them on it, they'd probably admit they care less than they did way back. The ideal situation would be that new blood flows in and takes the reigns under the tutelage of people like them, but for some reasons - and that's a separate discussion - that's not working out too well.

 

[flyingjohn]

Look, I don't think this needs a lot of careful analysis - people age. Their perspectives change

Spector was mostly a console gamer during his ion storm career and Harvey always fucks up when left alone.(didn't help he was going through a divorce).
Deus ex was a lucky accident.

 

[caffeine]

You could maybe make that excuse for Smith's involvement with Redfall, if you really wanted to, but not for Spector's with Ascendant, that was an indie-sized production. And I'm pretty sure his role in Ascendant was even less creatively-involved than in Invisible War anyway.

Well, Spector was always a hack carried by other devs. Every time he opens his mouth I'm more convinced of it.

 

[v1c70r14]

For all you awakening goth wonders out there

Grimbeard is strange cookie, all youtube essayists are like him, but in the context of this game review it gets extra weird. They're all drowning in post-irony and there's always a pretend edge to their content, a mild forced criticism of the status quo, while bending over for it. He makes eggy comments about dysmorphia and uses they/them when he could just have said she or he, something even transgender people would laugh at in a review of a video game about fake ideologies and social movements created to keep the powerful in control.

He makes a point about how the game predicted parasocial relationships that weren't a thing when the game was released while trying to foster something of the kind with is own audience.

I zoned out and ended the video when he started to retell the game beat for beat like so many of them do to pad out the runtime of the videos.

 

[v1c70r14]

Sorry, not sorry for the necromancy. The game was mentioned in the Core Decay thread and now I've reinstalled it, so I need help to get the best experience on a modern system. This time I'm going to play the release version, since it's always been the GOTY version before, and I'm aiming for the period authentic experience, not using widescreen or a too high resolution, mods or anything like that.

I've seen you post a lot about Unreal Engine games in the screenshot threat, schru, so I'm hoping you'll reply. According to kentie.net Deus Ex seems to be stuck in an awkward place where multi-texturing causes some issues, but not enabling it causes others. Can I have my cake and eat it too somehow? Anything else I should be aware of? Is Glide or Direct3D the better option for Deus Ex? Do I use dgVoodoo 2 and if so what settings are the best for Deus Ex?

 

[schru]

Sorry, not sorry for the necromancy. The game was mentioned in the Core Decay thread and now I've reinstalled it, so I need help to get the best experience on a modern system. This time I'm going to play the release version, since it's always been the GOTY version before, and I'm aiming for the period authentic experience, not using widescreen or a too high resolution, mods or anything like that.

I've seen you post a lot about Unreal Engine games in the screenshot threat, schru, so I'm hoping you'll reply. According to kentie.net Deus Ex seems to be stuck in an awkward place where multi-texturing causes some issues, but not enabling it causes others. Can I have my cake and eat it too somehow? Anything else I should be aware of? Is Glide or Direct3D the better option for Deus Ex? Do I use dgVoodoo 2 and if so what settings are the best for Deus Ex?

I can't test the game today, but generally speaking, multitexture had been a feature of the Unreal Engine for over a year by the time Deus Ex came out, so it would have been intended to be used by default, unless someone was still using an older card like the first Voodoo, which didn't support it.

As for whether multitexture causes rendering bugs in DE, I don't think that the comparison screenshots in Kentie's article show that this is the case. While the reflection in the intro with multitexture seems too bright and distinct, the freezer room looks better with it on, as otherwise the mist blends very poorly with the reflective floor.

It probably is the case, as Kentie writes, that Unreal Engine's renderer wasn't sufficiently revised to incorporate the feature without causing some things to look wrong, as we can see in case of the skies in Unreal Tournament.

The release dates of Vooodoo-based cards available on Wikipedia are a bit inconsistent, but it seems that Deus Ex had entered development proper just before Voodoo2 came out, but it lasted for close to a year and a half still after Voodoo3 had been made available. Multitexture was added to the Unreal Engine around the same time. Incidentally, for Direct3D, the game requires DirectX 7.0a, which was released in March 2000, so up-to-date technology was being targeted. Given such a time-line, even apart from the changes made by Epic, Ion Storm had to work without multitexture initially, but then had enough time to make use of and implement it.

I imagine the technique was very useful for performance and it was a standard feature of the very popular Voodoo2 and 3 cards, so I doubt the game could have been intended not to use it. At most, some things just weren't corrected for its operation, but that's just something that has to be accepted. Unfortunately, it's something that occurs fairly regularly when it comes to engine updates.

Maybe one thing worth testing for reference is how the game looks in software, Direct3D, and OpenGL in the original, unpatched renderers and with default settings. I don't know if OpenGL was really included as a fully-featured renderer, as it certainly wasn't on par with Glide in Unreal.

Nvidia's cards running in Direct3D were becoming a valid alternative at the time, but it would be helpful if someone who played games at the time could tell us where things stood, if Voodoo3 was still the standard-setting card for developers or such. After all 3dfx was finished less than half a year from Deus Ex's release date and Nvidia took over its assets.

The original Direct3D renderer can be tested with dgVoodoo, but I'm not sure if it's fully functional even with the wrapper—one obvious sign is whether the gamma or brightness can be adjusted. But from what I recall, the game rendered in it looks kind of bland. One advantage that Nvidia possibly had at the time was that its cards were already capable of rendering in 32-bit colour mode, but someone better informed should confirm this.

It should be possible to disable Multitexture in advanced settings for Direct3D and OpenGL, so as to test how the game looks without it.

The software renderer was definitely intended to present Unreal's visuals faithfully, but I don't know if that was still the case in later games.

Taking all that into account, the settings in dgVoodoo I'd recommend for Deus Ex are as follows:

— first tab: stretched aspect ratio scaling with the C.R.T. filter (or alternatively maybe a better one could be added using a shader injector);

— second tab: Voodoo2 or greater, values appropriate for Voodoo3; resolution Max (matches the monitor's native vertical resolution for 4:3); the gamma ramp should be left on;

— do the same in the third tab, if using Direct3D;

— right-click in the control panel and select the option to reveal additional settings; probably the fifth tab contains dithering settings and the 32-bit output needs to be disabled here; letting the application determine the type of dithering may technically be the more accurate option, but manually-set ordered 4x4 looks much better, especially when it comes to the skies; I doubt that dgVoodoo emulates the dithering performed by Voodoo cards that accurately anyway, as the later cards had multiple settings for it in their drivers and some screenshots of games from the time just look different (see Quake II); let the application decide if using Direct3D because of its 32-bit capability;

— if you have problems with the mouse being stuck in the top-right corner in the Direct3D renderer, tick a box relating to mouse behaviour in the fourth tab.

Now, for the game itself, the Glide renderer should be selected in the pop-up window on launching the game. There's also the matter of hardware-accelerated 3-D sound. The best option is owning a real A3D card, while the basic functionality of DirectSound and EAX can be emulated with Creative's ALchemy.

Once in the menu, press T, remove the ‘Say’ command, and enter preferences. This brings up advanced settings where it's possible to verify that Glide or Direct3D have all their features on, or that hardware sound is configured correctly (surround sound is for Dolby Digital receivers).

As for the resolution, judging by the scale of the HUD, 640x480 was the default, but there are promotional screenshots taken at a resolution slightly above 1024x768. Setting a low resolution in combination with dgVoodoo rendering the game at a higher resolution preserves the UI's proportions from lower resolutions for which it was designed.

 

[schru]

I had a chance to test for a bit after all. I have to say that the game does look pretty dark on Voodoo2 and later cards when multitexture comes into effect. The sky in the first mission suffers particularly as a result, and compared to running it on the first Voodoo, there is a bug where the moon isn't covered by the flowing clouds, which makes it stand out too much. Colour banding also seems worse on the later Voodoo cards or with multitexture.

If you saw those nice screenshots I showed in the screenshots thread in the past, they were taken with dgVoodoo set to emulate Voodoo Graphics (the first generation of the card) and dithering was forced to the 4x4 mode. Some things look much nicer this way, but then those artefacts in reflective surfaces like in the intro sequence do occur. Therefore, don't be surprised if the sky or other details aren't as pretty on Voodoo2 or greater:

Spoiler

Maybe multitexture was never satisfactorily implemented in the Unreal Engine, or maybe it arrived too late in the development of all those games.

 

[schru]

I suppose the GeForce 256 and 2 series cards may have been the preferred graphics hardware by mid 2000? They offered 24-bit and 32-bit colour modes respectively, and apparently they performed much better than the Voodoo cards. It's worth noting again that Deus Ex did support DirectX 7.0a, so it was keeping up with all the new offerings.

The sky in the first mission does look better in Direct3D 32-bit mode, but the problem is probably also that dgVoodoo doesn't accurately emulate a card like Voodoo3, which apparently worked with 32-bit image and dithered it to 16-bit for the final output, and the result was apparently close to 24-bit mode. This is probably why the game looks so ugly in Glide mode with dgVoodoo's emulation of Voodoo2 and greater cards.

 

[schru]

Some more observations based on Hong Kong streets and the freezer room in the bar by the canal:

Voodoo Graphics:

— the sky and shadows seem too bright without multitexture, when compared to the over-all balance of light and dark areas on Voodoo2 or later and Direct3D;

— the reflective floor in the freezer room receives a pronounced shadow from the air duct, while reflections are appropriately dim for a surface that isn't supposed to be a clean mirror, after all;

— some artefacts flicker in the reflections of walls in the floor;

— the suspended chickens and pigs are visible;

Voodoo2 and higher:

— the balance of light and dark areas in the streets seems better, but it's hard to say what the intended look might have been; the same applies to any other such area—were highlights from street lamps supposed to be strong and illuminate a lot of surrounding area?;

— the shadow cast by the air duct in the freezer room is barely visible, while the floor is excessively reflective, to the point that it seems valid to ask if this was intentional or what the designers were seeing;

— there's a lot more of artefacts from shadows in the reflections, surprisingly enough, to the point that the effect looks broken;

— the suspended chickens and pigs are visible;

Direct3D:

— the brightness is similar to that produced by Voodoo2 and above, as the main determining factor is the use of multitexture;

— 32-bit colour mode feels like it makes the visuals more bland, however, I don't have proper Voodoo3 screenshots for reference; 16-bit Glide output certainly looks more grainy and atmospheric;

— the freezer room's floor again has overly strong reflections and the shadow isn't very pronounced;

— some artefacts are showing in the reflections;

— the chickens and pigs aren't visible at all.


All in all, it would be nice to have screenshots taken on a real Voodoo3 or even Voodoo5 5500 for reference, as it's possible that dgVoodoo simply doesn't cover the functionality of these cards, while Voodoo2 was over two years old by the time the game came out.

On the other hand, judging based on the visuals alone, I'd say that the game looks better and has many fewer graphical problems on Voodoo Graphics, a card which which was nearly four years old at that point, which is quite strange indeed. Was increased performance all that the later Voodoo cards had to offer? Maybe the developers did much of the work on a version of Unreal Engine that didn't support multitexture and never addressed the problems its introduction created?

A satisfactory solution may be to adjust gamma and brightness manually in the graphics card's control panel and play the game on Voodoo Graphics.

One more thing worth trying are the fan-made updated OpenGL and Direct3D 9 renderers: https://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/newsarchive.html.

Maybe they do fix the problems with multitexture without introducing any changes to how the game originally looked.

 

[potatojohn]

Deus Ex was never about the graphics, so how it looks doesn't matter as long as you can see what's going on.

There's no canonical way to set up the graphics either, and anyone who says so is engaging in historical revisionism.

I played it with the ATI Rage Pro 8MB. It was a slideshow as I recall.

 

[schru]

Deus Ex was never about the graphics, so how it looks doesn't matter as long as you can see what's going on.

There's no canonical way to set up the graphics either, and anyone who says so is engaging in historical revisionism.

I played it with the ATI Rage Pro 8MB. It was a slideshow as I recall.

I think it does matter to the extent that there are subtle differences about the way various graphics cards and APIs rendered ihe game. Then there are outright rendering omissions and bugs (see clouds, how the moon interacts with them, and the reflections).

Then worse still, the way updated renderers handle things combined with high resolutions can easily make games from that period look quite ugly and bland, since they only improve the technical solutions behind the visuals or increase some limits.

But it's true that I didn't see the game on real hardware from its time, so I'm very much interested in hearing about how it was on the multiple APIs that were the standard for mid 2000.

 

[v1c70r14]

The software renderer was definitely intended to present Unreal's visuals faithfully, but I don't know if that was still the case in later games.

I've been testing the game out without messing around with wrappers per your suggestion and software mode is pretty busted in Deus Ex, at least on my hardware and setup, but I think it was always like this.

You can see what sort of hardware was supported in the first-launch setup in the release version.

Support

Basically it seems that OpenGL was only semi-supported, technically you could use it but it was highly experimental and probably doesn't look right, I didn't check it out.

As you can see they don't recommend using software rendering, gave it a go anyway.

Without any modifications and launching the game in software mode with the default settings the game did run surprisingly well, I remember there being a speed issue related to overly high FPS when I played it last time, I'm not sure why this isn't the case now.

Software rendering

I've upscaled the screenshot so that each pixel is turned into four, preserving what the game looks like without turning into a picture for ants.

As you can see objects don't fully render, and in this case there was texture warping too.

This scene just doesn't look right without the reflections.

I do kind of like the crisp textures without the texture filtering, but there are rendering issues like his collar not fully rendering.

Despite the issues the game is playable enough and it has that dithering I remember Unreal's software rendering mode having.

There's also a layering issue, that I remember from Unreal's software mode too, with objects not being rendered in the right order. So you'd have weapons being rendered on top of objects instead of behind them and stuff like that, or in this case the hand on top of the crowbar. If not for that and the fact that I don't have a CRT monitor to smooth out the jaggies I'd probably play the game like this.

Trying out the Direct 3D rendering in the release version did give better results.

Direct 3D with DirectX 7.0

Same deal as with the software rendering, I doubled the size of the screenshots for purposes of seeing what the game looks like.

I don't think the moon is rendered quite right though, shouldn't it be more behind the clouds?

At this resolution characters get pretty messy in conversations and you can barely make out their faces.

As you can see the weapon is rendered correctly, it's pretty impressive that there aren't more issues on modern hardware considering the game was released 2000.

Finally I gave 1024 x 768 a try with the Direct3D mode.

Higher resolution Direct3D

The logo looks nice and crisp even on a modern monitor.

The moon still looks off.

Conversations look much better now, and it's not a ridiculous resolution like 4k, 1024 x 768 seems just right for making things out without going too far.

The only major issue is that the UI clearly wasn't made with this resolution in mind, so it not only shrinks but it gets cut off when it was intended for the decorative parts to reach all the way to the end of the screen.

 

[v1c70r14]

Once in the menu, press T, remove the ‘Say’ command, and enter preferences. This brings up advanced settings where it's possible to verify that Glide or Direct3D have all their features on, or that hardware sound is configured correctly (surround sound is for Dolby Digital receivers).

This doesn't work in the release version since multiplayer was introduced later and there was no say command. You should be able to enable the console another way though, haven't gotten around to that yet. I'll be trying out Voodoo emulation following your instructions next.

The best option is owning a real A3D card, while the basic functionality of DirectSound and EAX can be emulated with Creative's ALchemy.

Are there even sound cards being produced anymore? Do modern motherboards have the slots for older ones? I did actually get to play video games with EAX and what they did to audio in video games after all that technological innovation was a travesty. How close can you get to the hardware with emulation?