Reply With Quoteits so good it seems unreal
ss 2 playthrough imminent
Earlier today, DrK found something on a French forum: yesterday, "Le Corbeau" posted two patches - one labeled "System Shock 2.4", the other "Thief 2 1.19". These are unofficial patches with a very, very long changelist, including graphical upgrades, bug fixes, a replacement for old LGVID.AX, removal or relaxation of lots of previously hard-coded limits, and a huge number of improvements to DromEd and ShockEd. There were also two demos posted (which I haven't tried, but which I think are just the official TMA and SS2 demos with the patches applied). These patches do not appear to be based on any existing patches like ddfix or tafferpatcher.
His original thread is here (in Thief General), and there's another thread in The Editor's Guild which is more focused on the editor improvements.
Various people (including me) have now tried it out and it appears to be on the level - it's virus free, and the listed changes, both to the main game and the editor, appear to work fine. I have to say it's pretty nice being able to play SS2, in 1680x1050x32, with working, widescreen cutscenes, with no need to taff about with codecs or core affinity.
As nice as this is as a player, from what I'm seeing in the Editor's Guild thread, the real meat of this patch is the editor improvements; people are already talking about how much this opens up in terms of Thief and SS2 FM creation. Modding is also apparently much easier thanks to things like built in support for DDS textures.
Sadly, thanks to school I don't have the time to do a complete playthrough of SS2 using this...but once I do, I'm definitely doing so, and I can't wait to see what the FM community does with this.
Here are the download links, taken from DrK's thread:
thief 2 V1.19 :
http://www64.zippyshare.com/v/33869454/file.html | md5 : 131cd0a1d9e626ee90e569571e8d0d01
System Shock V2.4 :
http://www64.zippyshare.com/v/89847252/file.html | md5 : 907489eccafe1cab55b01386f17a8efd
And 2 demos for it :
Demo Thief (Bafford's manor) : http://depositfiles.com/files/9qzqrf7mu | md5 : 6f297e85577c6faa89f62805e00fbc74
Demo System Shock 2 (Med/Sci deck) : http://depositfiles.com/files/q50s53phw | md5 : 062a84c68c4ff2b759f0820aedfa6d2f
Mirrors
Thanks Briareos H :
Thief 2 v1.19 : http://anodal.org/thief/t2_v119.zip
System Shock 2 v2.4 : http://anodal.org/thief/ss2_v24.zip
Thief demo : http://anodal.org/thief/Thief_Demo_HD_t2_v119.zip
System Shock 2 demo : http://anodal.org/thief/Shock2_Demo_HD_ss2_v24.zip
Thanks Brethren :
http://www.southquarter.com/downloads/2012/t2_v119.zip
Thanks Kolya :
Bittorrent Magnet
And, from the included documentation, an abbreviated changelist:
Renderer:
- Added windowed mode
- Added single display mode option - no resolution change between menus and game
- Added ingame support for all common resolutions, including widescreen
- Added support for 32-bit color
- Textures can now be automatically promoted to 32-bit, improving quality and effectively eliminating the palette limit
- Added UI framerate cap option to avoid GPU fan spinning up in UI
- Added DDS/PNG image support
- Added full 24/32-bit TGA/BMP image support
- Increased the maximum number of frames allowed in animated textures from 20 to 99, and increased the allowable filename length for animated textures (before the underscore) to support more than 7
- Animated texture rate can now be specified via a material file for that texture
- Fixed a bug where Transparency property didn't (correctly) apply on objects that contain transparent polys
General:
- Replaced video player lib with an FFMpeg based one to play cutscenes. LGVid.ax or other codecs are no longer required
- Option to use OpenAL (if available) instead of DirectSound. Includes support for audio effects in Windows 7 without an EAX-enabled driver (e.g. ALchemy)
- Added "head_bob" config var to control amount of head bob
- Added mousewheel support to options menu
- Fixed player ground contact tracking when walking off an object (caused footstep sounds to get "stuck" on previous material)
- Fixed sound cap per schema type bug and upped max sound channels to 48
- Changed screenshot output format to BMP and also added support for PNG screenshots
- Changed mouselook sensitivity to be resolution independent
- Added check to avoid trying to open files with reserved system name like com ports
- AIs now breathe from their head instead of their stomachs. They will no longer drown when up to their waist in water.
- Lowered player crouch height by a tiny fraction so he's less likely to get stuck on 4 unit tall spaces
- Added better support for binding actions to the mouse wheel (can bind wheel up and wheel down as separate actions, with modifier key support)
- Fixed star rendering
- Added "log_player_pos" command that dumps current player pos to log file (when enabled)
- Added the ability to detach from ladders by crouching
- Improved mantling a bit and added optional new mantling algorithm with lower failure rate
- Fixed a bug which limited number of sound channels to 16 even if more were selected
- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused doors to float away into infinity
- Fixed (or at least greatly improved) a bug with edge triggered OBBs sometimes failing to detect collision (in particular for slow moving objects)
- Fixed framerate dependent speed issue for camvators/moving terrain (with collision type: none)
- Added "fixed_star_size" option for resolution independent star size
- Fixed some bugs when attaching to a ladder from water.
- AIs who are facing very close to a wall will no longer turn to face south when the game begins
- Fixed a crash when the "current" folder is missing (it will now be created)
- Added an option to only use a single binding file, eliminating the "broken use/shoot mode" bug once and for all
- Added option to have the quicksave save to a proper slot (now defaults to last regular save slot), complete with proper name (as opposed to "crouchhold")
- Removed four junk lines at the bottom of the map window
- Fixed gun jitter
DromEd:
- Added support for full game mode backup/restore
- Lightmaps are now properly displayed in the editor 3D view
- Added support for HW rendering in editor viewports
- Increased the maximum number of visible on-screen terrain polies from 1024 to 20480
- Increased the maximum number of visible on-screen objects from 128 to 1280
- Added some safety checks to object scaling operations to prevent objects with 1.#INF scale
- Fixed a crash when computing pathfinding with an improperly linked moving terrain object in the mission. An ignorable assert is thrown and the object is skipped gracefully instead of crashing.
- Prevented a crash if you apply a model of one creature type to an object assigned a different creature type
- Fixed "Attempt to mark from invalid room id 0" assertion to actually show the room id that is invalid, instead of always showing 0.
- Integrated csgmerge tool into editor exe
- Added support for 32-bit lightmaps
- Fixed the bug where cloning a multibrush with particles would duplicate every object in the mission
- Fixed a bug where the game would crash when deleting a large multibrush
- Added fallback check to find Motiondb.bin in resource paths
- Fixed resource lock errors when loading TGA images (for object textures and distance art)
- Fixed solo view editor issues when going back to edit mode from game mode
- Added ability to change the brush colors in DromEd via values in DromEd.cfg.
- Added light-based transparency property
- Vast improvements to editor dialogs, including crash fixes and improved functionality
- Increased brush limit from 7068 to 16384
- Increased rooms limit from 1024 to 4096
- Increased ambient sound limit from 256 to 1024
- Increased cell limit from 28672 to 32760
- Increased the maximum number of sides in a cylinder from 10 to 26.
- Increased automap location limit from 64 to 256 locations per page
- The texture rotation control can now interpret negative values
- Fixed a crash while generating reports
- Added a warning dialog when attempting to save one filetype (mis/gam/cow) as another
- Added new Windows-style texture palette (which also supports more than 256 textures)
- Added support for all editor window sizes
- Added Pendulum (/sinusoidal) curve type to tweqs
- Added DetailAttachement link type
- Added Distance Alpha property
- Added Bitmap Color property for custom modulation color on bitmap objects
- Added "Face camera (axial)" setting to Bitmap Worldspace
- Added color param, additive blending and spotlight cone falloff support to coronas
- Added "Editor Comments" property
- Added "show_vhots" command for debug visuals of vhot placement and numbering on objects
- Manually deleting links in the link view dialog no longer deletes attached object for ParticleAttachement/DetailAttachement links
- Added the ability to place graphical decals on book pages
- Corpses with Contains links no longer count as pickpockets
- The Auto-Multibrush property no longer crashes DromEd if the .vbr file was not found.
- The stimulus on existing receptrons can now be changed
- The intensity for sources is no longer reset when changing the propagator
- The receptrons list now correctly shows the max intensity value for existing receptrons
- Meshes can now be scaled with the Scale property
- Scaled objects now cast properly scaled shadows
- Objects can now obscure coronas
- Bitmap Worldspace objects can now be locally lit
- Precipitation will now collide with OBB objects as well as terrain
- The brush_to_room command can now be given a negative number, to be interpreted as an absolute size instead of a percentage (e.g. brush_to_room -0.1 would create a room brush 0.1 units larger than the selected brush.)
- It is no longer necessary to explicitly add the Hidden property to a secret object for the secret to be properly counted
- Added numeric keypad input support
- DromEd will no longer stop working after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038
- Added "scroll here" option to the right-click menu for solo views, similar to the "teleport camera" option for non-solo views
- Fixed some issues with calculating which room cells are in (which might have caused problems with precipitation and fogging or elevable objects)
- Increased the time range of Tweqs to 0-65535
- The same property can no longer be added to an object multiple times
- Fixed a crash when adding the Texture Anim Data property to a concrete object
its so good it seems unreal
ss 2 playthrough imminent
This is amazing news. My #1 game of all time has just gotten better and now I must depart for it is calling me home.
Must. Play. Now.
Interestingly enough, after just finishing Black Mesa last night, I decided I was going to play SS2 again, for the first time since '99...I haven't played it yet, I've only installed the game, the SS2 Mod Manager, the SHTUP beta6 Mod (by the way, thanks ZylonBane), and DDFIX...All this was done only hours before finding out about the 2.4 patch!...After all these years it's going to feel almost like a new experience again, as I have only vague recollections after 13 years...I'm really excited about this...
Any mod suggestions before I get started?
Bloody hell. Looks like now I have no choice but to put out another version of SHTUP.
AwesomeOriginally Posted by ZylonBane
The good news is that I'm pretty sure you can now just feed the game a big pile of PNG or DDS textures and it'll Just Work.
edit: Yeah, there's a section in doc/modders_notes.txt:
There's another note further on about making non-destructive map and gamesys changes using DML scripts - if I'm not misreading this, this opens the door for having multiple mods that change the missions or gamesys coexist, without needing to manually merge them in ShockEd! So you could, for example, install Straylight's unofficial patch (if it were converted to DML format), and then on top of that install a gamesys mod that (say) makes bots hackable, and they should both work.Aside from the new image formats, the priority (which type can override another) has been slightly adjusted.
The priority order is as follows, where the first has the highest override priority:
.DDS
.PNG
.TGA
.BMP
.PCX
.GIF
.CEL
Another change, to make texture overrides work seamlessly with objects and meshes, is that the image type specified
in the object/mesh files is disregarded. For example if object ARROW.BIN uses a texture named ARROW.GIF, the game
will search for any image named ARROW, starting with ARROW.DDS, then ARROW.PNG etc. until it finds an existing
file. Consequently it's a bad idea to create another object (usually for an FM), that uses a different image with
the same name but different image type. For example if you create a new object that uses an image called ARROW.PNG,
then the original arrow object will use that image too instead of ARROW.GIF.
I may need to test that at some point.
Should look better than ever......but, I'm not going to wait that long.
So...2.4 patch + SHTUP beta6 Mod = All I need?
Should be, I think. Have a quick look through the config file (cam_ext.cfg), too - in particular you probably want to check out ui_scale_mode (upscale the HUD for higher resolutions) and, if you have a widescreen monitor, crop_movies (crop the letterboxing from the movies so they fill the whole screen).Should look better than ever...
So...2.4 patch + SHTUP beta6 Mod = All I need?
YES!!! Please sir, may I have another!
I may actually cry
And it's so nice to see so many members coming together once again in celebration. God bless us everybody !!!
Tiny Tim, is that you?I may actually cry
And it's so nice to see so many members coming together once again in celebration. God bless us everybody !!!
Well, I'll be darned. Looks mighty impressive. And quite unexpected too, to say the least...
EDIT: Now someone go and make one for Drakan :Order of the Flame too please.Might make me reinstall 3DSMAX again just to fool around with weapon models. Then again, just playing the game again might take priority.
Last edited by Assidragon; 26th Sep 2012 at 05:26.
Simply awesome!Runs smoothly! What a perfect news after months of Ir0NiXdark-only mumbling
It's not working for me on Win7 64bit.
I installed the game, patched it to 2.3, installed mod manager and mods, patched to 2.4, and it crashes as soon at I start a new game.
I also tried patching to 2.3, then to 2.4 and then installing MM and Mods. didn't work either.
I would be so grateful if someone could help me run this on my system again.
I finished a SS2 playthrough last month, but I'll definitely give this a go next weekend.
Maybe this time I'll be able to get the cutscenes working in Win7 64.
And later on I'll have to (finally!) post a news item in sshock2.com (not dead yet!), but so far I have no idea of whom to credit for this. All I have is that someone nicknamed Le Corbeau posted a thread with the links in a French forum, and then disappeared as misteriously as he appeared
try this: http://www.systemshock.org/index.php...45551#msg45551
until the new version of ss2 tool is out.
Holy crap, that's awesome.
By the way, is it possible to use SHTUP and Rebirth with this patch? I haven't had time to fully test this, but at least using the old instllation process for these mods doesn't seem to work.
I've already got a job for you if you're interested...Well, I'll be darned. Looks mighty impressive. And quite unexpected too, to say the least...
EDIT: Now someone go and make one for Drakan :Order of the Flame too please.
No idea about Rebirth but I've unzipped the SS2 patch into an installation I'd previously installed SHTUP into and although I haven't gone farther than the training area the textures definitely included the SHTUP enhanced ones.
You're right, it is using the SHTUP textures. But the Rebirth models don't seem to work. Which is weird, furthermore because the demo does show them being used.
Already posted this in the main Thief forum thread, but this bears repeating--
There's some buried gold in the new cam_ext.cfg file. I found a "d3d_disp_scaled_2d_overlay" setting that lets you set the HUD overlay to any "virtual" resolution you want. So now you can set the game to modern resolutions without having to bust out a magnifying glass to read the HUD text.
Here's an example from SS2:
Also, screenshots now go into a "screenshots" folder. And the PrintScreen key actually works for taking them. Neat!
"Hold on 'becca! I'll be there soon! Luv, Tommy"
No idea of what happened before, but a clean install of SS2 solved my problem with Rebirth.
And now I even have the cutscenes back, which was a problem that I could never solve, even with all the help that Kolya tried to provide \o/
Now time to install Thief Gold and Thief II.
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