Author Topic: revisiting old games  (Read 69202 times)

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Offline BloodEagle

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i wonder if system shock 2 ever got a graphics upgrade like freespace did? surely someone must of modded the polygons and changed around some of the texture files from 128 to 512 at least!.

http://shtup.home.att.net/

http://www.moddb.com/mods/system-shock-rebirthhigh-poly-pack

http://www.strangebedfellows.de/index.php/topic,25.0.html (bug/gameplay fixes)

 

Offline CP5670

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It's a worth a try, although the respawning thing they describe doesn't work. I used both no_spawn and also made the probability of spawning very small, but it seemed to have no effect on anything either way.

 

Offline Al Tarket

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i guess they missed one bug on ss2, when on recreation near the morgue and going past the kitchen and what looks like a briefing room, their is a small garden and a huge window looking into space. you actually move as far as you can towards the wall where that window is, your head will go through the glass :P.

as for the other links, one mod at ddb is abandoned clearly and the other is still in the works. no deal unfortunately.
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Offline BloodEagle

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Maybe the spawn rates only work in single-player mode, or maybe everyone has to have the same rates set in their configuration files. :/

I added your ICQ, by the way.

  

Offline CP5670

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Well, I haven't gotten it to work in singleplayer either. I tested it out briefly at one point.

If you're referring to my ICQ, I haven't used that in at least five years. No idea if it still works. I generally use Skype or Google Talk to chat during games, but only leave them open if something has been arranged in advance.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Well, I haven't gotten it to work in singleplayer either. I tested it out briefly at one point.

If you're referring to my ICQ, I haven't used that in at least five years. No idea if it still works. I generally use Skype or Google Talk to chat during games, but only leave them open if something has been arranged in advance.

No_spawn doesn't work entirely.  You're actually better to use the other respawn command that decreases the chances of a respawn - that you can set low enough that you rarely have anything regenerate in an old area... except deck 3 for some reason; that one seems to constantly spawn midwives and shotgun-hybrids.  It's quite odd.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Chaos Theory is an outstanding game, both in terms of the gameplay as well as the story and presentation. It also has an excellent dedicated co-op campaign that is almost as long as the main singleplayer one.

Many people didn't like Pandora Tomorrow, but I didn't think it was bad at all. It wasn't as good as the original but the plot was still generally realistic and there were some cool missions, like the train one. Double Agent, on the other hand, should be avoided like the plague, at least on the PC.

Chaos Theory is the best in the series - it's too bad Double Agent took a step backwards.  It wasn't awful, but certainly it moved away from the model and Chaos Theory set the bar pretty high.  Worst things about Double Agent were the fact that there were daylight stealth missions (daylight at the JBA HQ, sure... daylight during the stealth missions?  Give me a break) and the penalty to stealth rating for knocking people out.  Come on.

The thing that drives me crazy about all the SC games is how omniscient the AI is - you alert one guy but knock him out before he can yell or radio yet somehow everyone else in the level has suddenly also been alerted.  And that got worse with each successive game.

And I miss knocking people out with sticky cams to the back of the head - the original was great for that.
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Offline CP5670

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Quote
No_spawn doesn't work entirely.  You're actually better to use the other respawn command that decreases the chances of a respawn - that you can set low enough that you rarely have anything regenerate in an old area... except deck 3 for some reason; that one seems to constantly spawn midwives and shotgun-hybrids.  It's quite odd.

Have you actually gotten it to work at all? Maybe I did something wrong then. It's been a while since I tried it.

Quote
Chaos Theory is the best in the series - it's too bad Double Agent took a step backwards.  It wasn't awful, but certainly it moved away from the model and Chaos Theory set the bar pretty high.  Worst things about Double Agent were the fact that there were daylight stealth missions (daylight at the JBA HQ, sure... daylight during the stealth missions?  Give me a break) and the penalty to stealth rating for knocking people out.  Come on.

The thing that drives me crazy about all the SC games is how omniscient the AI is - you alert one guy but knock him out before he can yell or radio yet somehow everyone else in the level has suddenly also been alerted.  And that got worse with each successive game.

And I miss knocking people out with sticky cams to the back of the head - the original was great for that.

Did you play Double Agent on the PC or one of the consoles? On the PC it was indeed an awful game, and it was not due to the game's content as much as its stability. You need to have tremendous patience to complete the game since it crashes and glitches all over the place. I must have encountered around 10 game-blocking glitches, each of which needed a different workaround, and there were also numerous random CTDs throughout the game. If it had been properly programmed and tested, it would have been a pretty good game although easily inferior to CT.

 

Offline BloodEagle

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If you're referring to my ICQ, I haven't used that in at least five years. No idea if it still works. I generally use Skype or Google Talk to chat during games, but only leave them open if something has been arranged in advance.

 :eek:

Well, just let me know (through e-mail, IM, etc.) when you'll be ready.
« Last Edit: August 21, 2008, 10:12:22 pm by BloodEagle »

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Have you actually gotten it to work at all? Maybe I did something wrong then. It's been a while since I tried it.

Yeah.  As I remember, it's just a simple plain text file.  It's been 2 or 3 years since I last played through the game, but it worked.  You should use it in conjuction with the config line that reduces monster spawning chances to an infinitesimal level though.

Quote
Did you play Double Agent on the PC or one of the consoles? On the PC it was indeed an awful game, and it was not due to the game's content as much as its stability. You need to have tremendous patience to complete the game since it crashes and glitches all over the place. I must have encountered around 10 game-blocking glitches, each of which needed a different workaround, and there were also numerous random CTDs throughout the game. If it had been properly programmed and tested, it would have been a pretty good game although easily inferior to CT.

I played it on the PC less than 2 weeks ago.  With the patch, it wasn't atrocious.  I only ran into one game-blocking glitch - in the Mexico mission, the elevator doors stayed shut on some save-loads, and you couldn't open them.  There were a few collision detection problems with vents too (failure to crawl into them).  As for crashes - I didn't have any crashed until probably 2 levels from the end of the game - and all of them resulted from trying to quickload a savegame in which I had the Quick OPSAT displaying the satellite map.  If it was turned off, no crash.

But the menus and savegame ordering sucked horribly.

As it was I only paid $10 for it so I wasn't all that annoyed.
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Offline CP5670

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I played it on the PC less than 2 weeks ago.  With the patch, it wasn't atrocious.  I only ran into one game-blocking glitch - in the Mexico mission, the elevator doors stayed shut on some save-loads, and you couldn't open them.  There were a few collision detection problems with vents too (failure to crawl into them).  As for crashes - I didn't have any crashed until probably 2 levels from the end of the game - and all of them resulted from trying to quickload a savegame in which I had the Quick OPSAT displaying the satellite map.  If it was turned off, no crash.

But the menus and savegame ordering sucked horribly.

As it was I only paid $10 for it so I wasn't all that annoyed.

You seem to have gotten very lucky. I ran into a lot more trouble than that and from looking over Ubisoft's forums back then, my experience was fairly typical. I played the game on 1.02 and as far as I know, that was the last patch released for it.

The major bugs included things like certain NPCs in the JBA base getting stuck somewhere and preventing the game from proceeding, and some save checkpoints in Kinshasa where the game instantly crashed upon entering them. I was only able to pass them by going into the game's ini files and binding a key to the Unreal engine's ghost command, so I could fly around them.

As for entering vents, you basically need run at top speed to perform this and many other actions in the game. This was obviously the result of a direct port from the 360's analog stick. :rolleyes:

Quote
Well, just let me know (through e-mail, IM, etc.) when you'll be ready.

I'll send you a PM soon. I probably won't have time to play it for an extended period until early next month though.

 

Offline BloodEagle

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Well, just let me know (through e-mail, IM, etc.) when you'll be ready.

I'll send you a PM soon. I probably won't have time to play it for an extended period until early next month though.

10-4.

 

Offline Al Tarket

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i just played SOASE and to honest it gets repetitive when the ai keeps shifting colonies to different systems every time you strike one, another rises. the only way i can see around this problem is to keep a few ships on standby in case these colony ships head back through. it works alright, to be honest i thought this would be campaign based...

still by far the best space building game in my opinion is ig2 :P.
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Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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I was playing Raptor just now. Did you know that pressing (and holding) the Backspace key gives you Deathrays at the cost of all your credits?
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MP-Ryan
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Offline Stormkeeper

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I'm trying to get my Hostile Waters to work. I love the game, but it doesn't seem to work on Vista, not even XP. The words are all missing. Makes it so irritating to play.
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Offline Androgeos Exeunt

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Have you tried compatibility mode and DOSBox, if it's a DOS game?
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MP-Ryan
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Offline Stormkeeper

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No, it used to work on my old desktop, which was running XP as well. And yes, I've tried running in compatibility mode.
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Offline BloodEagle

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I'm going through Ogre Battle 64 at the moment. It's one of those games that would be excellent if it were multiplayer, and lacked a story. Because, seriously, that story is awful.

 

Offline Roanoke

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I'm trying to get my Hostile Waters to work. I love the game, but it doesn't seem to work on Vista, not even XP. The words are all missing. Makes it so irritating to play.

You Lose.

 :p

 

Offline CP5670

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I was playing Raptor just now. Did you know that pressing (and holding) the Backspace key gives you Deathrays at the cost of all your credits?

Yeah, that's a well known cheat. You can press it repeatedly to get several deathrays and then sell them all for a lot of money. There is also a certain combination of buttons you can press in the mission screen that makes the enemies into cows and monkeys.

I have kept using my original pilot for this game and must have played through it at least 30 times over the years. I've racked up so much money that the last digit no longer fits in the display in the store, so I can only see the true amount of money during the game itself. :D