Deus Ex GMDX: Deus Ex Advancement Mod v9 Released!

[ghostdog]

Ok, so I entered battery park with no lockpicks, no multitools and a single food item. I gave the food item to the boy at the start. Normally, I have a pick and a tool left.

I did everything else, rescued the hostages and let Anna kill the NSF in Castle Clinton. But I didn't find a lockpick or a food item, so I cannot go inside.

But, I checked a walkthrough, and there are two crates in the water, one with a medkit and one with a lockpick. Eh, there should be. But there's only the one with the medkit.

That leaves checking another walkthrough for the secret code for the stairs at the top.

IIRC You can go through the front entrance of Castle Clinton. There's a nano-key on a shelf that opens the door that leads down.

 

[Ash]

Correct. All is accounted for, the masterful original design is all still there, only improved and iterated upon, and the less than top-notch things, like stupid, unbelievable & incompetent AI being fixed, though in the original AI programmer's credit it didn't take much work to "fix" them and that code as a whole is definitely above my level, I just hacked the shit out of it to good results.

 

[Ash]

Oh, and it has been freezing for about a second on average each minute up to now.

What's this? There's a known bug that causes crashing sometimes when you die with the first person death perspective option enabled, but that's avoidable by just turning the option off so I haven't rushed a patch out despite having already fixed it. Other than it is reported as very stable across the board. Do I need to look into this?

Edit: Ah, I think you mean stuttering. Try configuring or changing the renderer, updating your drivers, the usual. Even vanilla DX used to do that from time to time on my old comp.

"I seriously have to change my play style."

This shouldn't be your mentality. If you're on a higher difficulty, it will be more challenging than usual no matter the playstyle. It is imperative people do not play on higher difficulties unless they specifically seek to be challenged. That is generally how it goes, after all.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I checked a walkthrough

checking another walkthrough

I seriously have to change my play style.

Yes, stop reading the walkthroughs. Finding stuff and figuring things out on your own is half the fun.

 

[AW8]

Just started my first GMDX playthrough. I noticed that quicksaving produces a new savefile every time, named "Autosave". Can't delete them in-game either. Is this supposed to happen?

Looks like this quicksave addict will have to use manual saving only!

 

[Ash]

Go into GMDX options and set a cap on autosaves/quicksaves (default = 10, perhaps a bit too many). any number from 1-20, or increase the cap further from gmdxuser.ini. Setting it to one slot will act like normal quicksaves. But you may want to set it to something like 3 - it will cycle through three quicksave slots, and quickload will load the most recent one, or you can load an older one from the load game screen. This will ensure the autosave upon level transition doesn't overwrite your most recent quicksave too, if you don't want that to happen for whatever reason (or you can just turn autosaves off). Honestly, I would make them entirely independent of each other but there's simply no need (except perhaps to avoid confusion, I guess), and it expands upon how quicksaves usually work by letting you have multiple user defined slots.

In my defense I didn't code the system either, I did have a modding partner at one point nearly four years ago now, great guy and props to him, though I did design it. However, he wasn't meant to throw quicksave into the mix but it worked out nicely because we can now have multiple quicksaves, or just one, and turn off autosave too, or play on hardcore mode for restrictive saving, all up to the user. Anyway, I should probably improve the system further to avoid confusion.

 

[AW8]

Thanks, the "autosave" title for the quicksaves made me think something was wrong with my installation when I simply hadn't checked the options deep enough.

Turned it down to 5 cycling saves, and cleared out all old saves in [game directory]\GMDX\Save - all new saves go to Documents\Deus Ex\GMDX\Save, presumably because I changed to Kentie's launcher (or some other change I made to get GMDX to work correctly) mid-testing, and the game could draw savefiles from both directories to make it extra confusing.

Now back to the game!

 

[Ash]

"or some other change I made to get GMDX to work correctly"

Seems quite a few have been having trouble with that, which Kenties launcher does indeed resolve. What version of DX you running, GOTY on steam?
I've tried to contact the guy who wrote the installer for GMDX but he's gone off the grid. Guess I'll have to learn another damn programming language to fix it myself.

 

[AW8]

GOTY on Steam indeed. This was back in December, but I think I followed all instructions on the ModDB page and still couldn't get it to fully work (Athletics named Swimming etc.) until I used Kentie's launcher.

 

[Heretic]

I finished a GMDX run on Realistic and I really have to commend you for your work. It was a real challenge and I liked pretty much all the changes.

- The new skills are useful, some perks change your options quite a lot - I especially want to try In Bulk (last Heavy perk), Knockout Gas (last Demolitions perk) and Wireless Strength for remote hacking in the next playthrough.
- For me as a min-maxer Lockpicking (and later Electronics) were the most useful/unavoidable skills. The efficiency jumps 5-10-15-50 are perhaps a bit too favourable towards the master level. I didn't mind it as I postponed combat skills and had to play more carefully for it. But perhaps a distribution of 5-10-20-50 or 5-10-20-40 could work a bit better?
- Architectural changes, especially in Hell's Kitchen, the Ton hotel and Paris make perfect sense, the maps are better than the original.
- I'm not sure about the extra Aug levels for Light and EUAS. Light is pretty much only a power efficiency upgrade, EUAS didn't do much for me, even upgraded to the max.
- I upgraded Stealth to the max but didn't understand/notice what the remark about transgenics means
- Ammo was quite scarce. Even though I never ran out I felt the need to switch my approaches to conserve ammo for favourite weapons (tranq darts, sniper rifle). Good.
- Headshot modifiers are a brilliant idea, was it in Vanilla too?

Overall you did a great job. Thank you for releasing a meaningful mod that provided me with a new challenge (been playing Vanilla on Realistic far too many times).

 

[Ash]

- For me as a min-maxer Lockpicking (and later Electronics) were the most useful/unavoidable skills. The efficiency jumps 5-10-15-50 are perhaps a bit too favourable towards the master level. I didn't mind it as I postponed combat skills and had to play more carefully for it. But perhaps a distribution of 5-10-20-50 or 5-10-20-40 could work a bit better?

5-10-20-50 has been a recent consideration of mine too.

- I'm not sure about the extra Aug levels for Light and EUAS. Light is pretty much only a power efficiency upgrade, EUAS didn't do much for me, even upgraded to the max.

EUAS' light levels (Light Gem) is really appreciated by stealth players. They're definitely not very good upgrade choices on their own, however the Synthetic heart aug boosts them both for free, so they have meaningful value there. There's no rival aug choice to them either so I don't need to be meticulous about balancing as I did with the others.

- I upgraded Stealth to the max but didn't understand/notice what the remark about transgenics means

If Stealth skill level == master, transgenics in combat mode can be distracted by nearby/thrown corpses they see, and will go and eat them instead of attacking. Good for a stealth player's escape. Else if Stealth level < master, Transgenics in combat mode ignore corpse bait.

Definitely gamey as all hell this being integrated into the skill system, but that is the primary nature of the skill system in general.

- Headshot modifiers are a brilliant idea, was it in Vanilla too?

On a smaller scale. Non-lethal weapons (well, the baton and prod) had lesser headshot multipliers than lethal, and some other things like that.

Overall you did a great job. Thank you for releasing a meaningful mod that provided me with a new challenge (been playing Vanilla on Realistic far too many times).

But challenge is only a small part of the experience! Or not a part of it at all on easier difficulties. It is meant to be Deus Ex 1.5 (everything better and in accordance to the vanilla design except plot, engine and soundtrack which are left untouched). I put way too much work into many aspects of design (e.g simulated systems, bug patches, user interface, audio design, level design, general gameplay extensions, difficulty level improvements so people can get an adequate challenge, or not much challenge at all) for people to view this as a challengefag mod. So, Heretic: challengefag mod or Deus Ex 1.5? Or maybe Deus Ex 1.3 to be more accurate as the mod doesn't do graphics work to the extent of HDTP or New Vision, though it does some.

Hmm. Maybe you should replay before you answer that, because like with the vanilla game you need to replay it at least once to see the full extent of the work and how different it can be depending on difficulty level, playstyle, build choices etc etc. there's so many optional mechanics, systems and events and I improved the vast majority.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Well, changing my play style, or at least changing the experience is the goal. I have played this game a lot, and while I first changed my play style and later started modding it, I always had a general idea about what would work. And now I don't.

Which is a good thing. It makes it very unpredictable, which is fine as well.

I think my major bummers are the improvements I expect, that aren't there or not accessible. Limited hacking, the limited destructibility of doors, containers and sensors, limited bot usage, limited ammo, limited crates, unusable augmetation containers, etc. It makes me feel impotent.

And part of why I like Deus Ex is because I can become super human.

Isn't that what the majority of players wants from games?


I would like intellectual challenges even more, but there are very few games offering that. And the adventure games that have "challenging puzzles" mostly go for: "try to use and combine everything on everything, no matter how unlikely". That's not intellectual challenging.

Ok, back to the game

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Btw, if I would replay it, I would improve lockpicking, hacking and electronics to the max, before anything else.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

And now for something completely different:

In real life, the kinetic energy transferred by various weapons (best case) is like:

Wrist crossbow: 50 Joule, but good penetration. In game: 25.
10MM pistol: 800 Joule. In game: 8 or 11.
7.62x51 NATO bullet: 3300 Joule. In game: 3. (!) (Although .223 would be a more realistic caliber, which is 1000-1900 Joule, depending. Still stupid, though.)
30.06 bullet: 4000 Joule. In game: 28.

That's why I tend to mod that.

Edit: the same is true for the size of the magazines.

Edit2: the sniper rifle actually resembles a Barrett .50 Sniper rifle, which has an energy transfer of 15,000 Joule. Go figure.

 

[Ash]

Anyhow, good timing. I've been stupidly doing more work. Bear in mind the below is WIP: [...] Hunger (also shows whether you are hungry or satiated (not pictured))

That it is dumb that candy bars restore health have been mentioned in the thread, I assume(hope) this means that food will instead grant nutrition?
If that's the case, is hunger going to be a purely "cosmetic" stat like heart rate, or have an affect on gameplay? I hope the former, it wouldn't make sense to be implemented as an actual mechanic since missions don't cover significant periods of time. Food being solely flavour items seems like the prefered option if it's between that, introducing a survival aspect which doesn't fit Deus Ex, or sticking to how retarded it originally was.

Candy bars restoring health wasn't retarded. Deus Ex is equal parts gamey as it is realistic (perhaps slightly more leaning into realism).

The hunger system was implemented for the following reasons:

As we can now use some objects in the world where they stand (a concept inspired by Arx Fatalis and results in deeper simulated gameplay, realism and convenience), this opens up one minor problem where players scarf down every food item in a trash can, raid all the fridges, and so on like a food-crazed maniac much like in Bioshock, even while your inventory is full. Note this doesn't negate the value in carrying food items either as you can only use the object where it stands. The reason this wasn't a problem vanilla was because it was simply inconvenient to do so, especially when your inventory was full; it was a pain in the ass to drop something, pick up the food item, eat it, then pick up your item again.
The hunger system adds a psuedo-realistic limitation on scarfing everything down, and also enforces new strategy regarding what food shall be eaten and what food items shall be left, especially as I've altered some of the values and benefits of what a food item provides. So, again, the result is equal parts gamey as it is realistic, but most importantly the actual problems are resolved and we got the great new object interactivity that enables us to use objects in the game world where they stand, which is a massive plus for realism and simulated control.

tl;dr: two new psuedo-realistic systems, new smidgen of additional micro-management strategy, and a patch up to a problem created by introducing the most relevant of these things.

And now for something completely different:

In real life, the kinetic energy transferred by various weapons (best case) is like:

Wrist crossbow: 50 Joule, but good penetration. In game: 25.
10MM pistol: 800 Joule. In game: 8 or 11.
7.62x51 NATO bullet: 3300 Joule. In game: 3. (!) (Although .223 would be a more realistic caliber, which is 1000-1900 Joule, depending. Still stupid, though.)
30.06 bullet: 4000 Joule. In game: 28.

That's why I tend to mod that.

So you modded it to make the assault gun deal 20 odd damage rather than 3? Realism should not take priority over gameplay, only be the elastic basis for it in a game like this. Those values are as they are for a reason e.g stealth pistol does less damage than the normal pistol despite using the same caliber ammunition for balancing and meaningful choice.

 

[Ash]

Missed this:

And part of why I like Deus Ex is because I can become super human.

Isn't that what the majority of players wants from games?

No. They want to be superhuman and intellectually engaged.

Have you ever played a game with God mode, Infinite ammo, all weapons and so on all enabled? So basically superhuman that nothing can contest. The whole experience fall apart, potentially even the story, realism and atmosphere, for example in a horror game you don't take the scary demons seriously as threats, and the spooky atmosphere and plot is not reflected by the things you experience in the gameplay because you're mindlessly gunning everything down with your all weapons + infinite ammo + god mode.

But hey if you don't want to be intellectually engaged in the greater gameplay of GMDX, pick easy mode! It's probably easier than easy mode was vanilla.

It makes me feel impotent.

You are impotent.

Between perks, extended weapon modding, extended augmentation functionality, extended skill system, extended UI functionality, extended simulated systems, new control input mechanics and more there's more choice and freedom than there ever was. and you're whining about a resource crate or a INF door being added here and there for the sake of better game balance For gods sake, you can pick up and throw the damn crates at peoples heads to kill them now, or you can set a fire extinguisher trap by setting it down and shooting it as an NPC runs past, or you can throw your weapon at them in a last desperate effort because you ran out of ammo, or you can use the new secondary weapon system to have more choice at any one particular moment, you can find new routes through a level with mantling, you can sabotage alarm units to electrify an unsuspecting MJ12...the depth and freedom is exponentially greater in GMDX.

Anyway, you'll reach your superhuman status eventually as you get more skills and augs etc, but the intellectual engagement across the board never goes away (on higher difficulty modes), and that's how it should be.

Have a read so you know what new stuff is actually available to you, though it's all realism based so most of it should be easy to discover on your own with logical experimentation: http://genericname112.wix.com/gmdx#!features/cnec
Alternatively, the tips in the GMDX options screen explains some new mechanics.

 

[Ash]

"the depth and freedom is exponentially greater in GMDX"

Well, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, as Deus Ex had a shitload of freedom and depth, and to be exponentially greater is probably not even achievable on modern day tech but yeah, the point was there's a lot more freedom and depth.

 

[Naraya]

As GMDX unfortunately lacks borderless full screen, I'm playing it in full screen mode. Is it normal that after alt-tabbing out and back in, all textures are gone? The only way to fix that is to exit the game and start it again.

 

[Ash]

Not normal. Definitely a rendering problem. Try changing (DX10, DX9 or OpenGL recommended) or configuring current renderer.

Edit: probably need to flush the cache. Pressing Esc does that. Not sure if this will help your specific problem, graphics rendering is not my field.

 

[ghostdog]

Naraya, just use this: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/WindowedBorderlessGaming

 

[KlauZ]

Just finished it. Great job overall, while I still want muh spying with spydrones and emp hands, it really brings up gameplay on a different level.
Last stretch was a bit of a drag because i`ve burnt most of my resources in Ocean Lab, stupid Synthetyc Heart is probably to blame.


Still have a few nitpicks. Karkians in Hong-Kong. WTF? I could believe one running away from the lab and going under the radar, but a whole bunch of super-secret genetic crocodiles just swimming in the river? In a populated area, patrolled by police? And how do you even supposed to fight them underwater without cheesing?

Also for me a real dealbraker stopping gmdx from being must-have mod is HDTP. Holy crap, it looks so much worse than vanilla.

 

[Ash]

Still have a few nitpicks. Karkians in Hong-Kong. WTF? I could believe one running away from the lab and going under the radar, but a whole bunch of super-secret genetic crocodiles just swimming in the river? In a populated area, patrolled by police? And how do you even supposed to fight them underwater without cheesing?

Local NPCs speak of Karkians in the canal, and there already is a bunch of Karkians vanilla in the flooded tunnel (which is connected to the canal).

I'll consider getting get rid of them anyhow. They do feel a bit out of place.

Also for me a real dealbraker stopping gmdx from being must-have mod is HDTP. Holy crap, it looks so much worse than vanilla.

What in particular? HDTP with the character models disabled is must-have imo. I'm not too fond of the sniper rifle and stealth pistol but you can't please everyone. Only GMDX can do that...if players pick the darn difficulty level suited to them

 

[KlauZ]

What in particular?

Almost everything, really. Overall graphical fidelity is just too low for hi-def textures, in most places they look too clean and sterile, even when they try to paint rust and all that. To rev up the game`s visuals you first need to rework lighting, level geometry, propmodels, add additional props, rework animations. After all that, maybe, one can begin to make new textures. So Revision kinda had the right idea, but... yeah.

And even if you close your eyes to overall visiual cohesion, HDTP is just sloppy. A lot of textures aligned badly to the models and do not fit each other.

Not the worst case i`ve ever seen, but still not a good one.

 

[Naraya]

Not normal. Definitely a rendering problem. Try changing (DX10, DX9 or OpenGL recommended) or configuring current renderer.

Edit: probably need to flush the cache. Pressing Esc does that. Not sure if this will help your specific problem, graphics rendering is not my field.

Thanks for the tip - I changed renderer to OpenGL and the problem seems to have disappeared Pressing Esc disn't help in my case though.

EDIT: Played some more - OpenGL definitely feels much more stable than DirectX for me. I can alt-tab to my heart's desire and everything is fine. When using DirectX, I also had problems with my desktop switching to 16-bit colors sometimes (which minimized the game). For the record, I'm using Win7 x64.

If only there was a way to increase font size for HUD stuff. It's so tiny in 1920x1080...

Naraya, just use this: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/WindowedBorderlessGaming

Yes, I've used this tool in the past but to be honest it's not very reliable. For now I'll just stick to OpenGL.

 

[Dev_Anj]

Almost everything, really. Overall graphical fidelity is just too low for hi-def textures, in most places they look too clean and sterile, even when they try to paint rust and all that. To rev up the game`s visuals you first need to rework lighting, level geometry, propmodels, add additional props, rework animations. After all that, maybe, one can begin to make new textures. So Revision kinda had the right idea, but... yeah.

You know, you're not alone. Someone else posted something similar too. I won't reveal where he did it since he's my acquaintance and I would like to keep his privacy safe, but it's an interesting read anyway:

The elaboration is that simple, they're not crafted with respect to the original design because:
Quote:
For the most part, the only things that aren't 1:1 high-res updates here are the signs.

Which means that in doing so the design choices in stylization and simplicity to allow for re-using assets are completely thrown out the window - every fine detail that's noteworthy on one item now appears on every single item. Adding more pixels kills the stylization and adjusts the player's expectation. Because I don't have the game to make high definition screenshots to compare to each other - I have the game to play.

No, it's not, it's really not. For starters, Jaime Reyes now has a certificate of award for the construction contract in his office (much authentic) and I couldn't help look at it because it was there in high detail (and it's a real certificate basically lifted from a real company's web site). Orange and Lemon Lime are now nowhere near each other on the vending machine.

Painstakingly faithful would have kept in mind that Anna Navarre had a glow of life in her face, representing her rosey attitude towards the future and her capacity for deception when compared with her grey golem companion Gunther, nor would it have killed the red in Gunther's eyes that made it so easy for them to shift him from threatening to pathetic with a change of the camera angles. Thrown out the window in the name of more pixels and more grimdark.

In 1998 they made a shot for shot remake of Psycho (1960) with the assumption that it would be great because it'd be Hitchcock's genius combined with colour and high definition and clearer sound. The film is considered a complete waste of resources, was considered lackluster by critics and has fallen into relative obscurity. Part of their problem: They never considered that Hitchcock had the option to shoot in colour, but chose black and white deliberately because he wanted to use tricks that work in black and white and don't carry across in colour.

The same sort of considerations need to be made when you reduce the level of stylizing anything - and they haven't been made. This is without going into the problems that occur when you haphazardly mix low-def and high-def and the significance this lends to things when you're playing the game.

I don't like the new design of the standard issue pistol - if it was supposed to look like a Glock it would have looked like a Glock in the original. It was supposed to be bulky and shiny to convey that it was the clumsy and brutal alternative to to the crossbow. Now it looks all sleek and stealthy and refined - the opposite of how it's supposed to come across.

I don't like that the flares now have "FLARE" written across them like there's a chance someone is going to mistake them for a suppository. I don't like that every time I point my gun at a model that didn't get the hi-def treatment it looks like I'm about to shoot some pixel-peasant from another world. I do not like that crates no longer read clearly because they're faded stains on wood texture instead of clearly marked. I do not like that now many levels consist of randomly clean and randomly grimey items because asset recycling had to happen so often.

I do not like them on a boat. I do not like them on a goat.

They break the visual narrative, change what draws attention and what seems important and the pace of how you read visual information. That's the part that should be painstakingly worried about first and foremost. Add to that Revision forcing them all in at once makes it such a mess of visual shifts that it's hard to tell which mod does what, why and if I'm supposed to find it significant or just ignore it.

Are they great for people who've played the low-def version to death and want some novelty and something fresh? Probably. I mean lots of people seem to like them. Are they authentic and true to the game? Nope.

That being said I do like some of the work New Vision and HDTP did but I admit that the problem of having to account for the stylization adpoted with low res textures and assets is commonplace and occurs with many high resolution texture packs for games.