Die4Ever

@Die4Ever@programming.dev

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Die4Ever, (edited )

Tomorrow Deus Ex is turning 24 years old, and DXRando is turning 4 years old!

Biggest Changes Since v2.0

  • You can now pet the dog! And other animals too. With bingo goals.
  • Way more goals randomization
  • Mirrored maps
  • Installer program
  • New game modes:
    • WaltonWare mode - A quick option to get into the game without the time commitment of the full game! You start in a random mission and win by completing one bingo. As New Game+ keeps making it harder, see how fast you can complete them or how many you can complete!
    • WaltonWare Entrance Rando - both modes combined!
    • Zero Rando - great for first-time Deus Ex players to benefit from the bug fixes, QoL improvements, and balance changes we’ve made, without any randomization.
    • DXR Vanilla Fixer: This one is for the purists. Use our new installer program and it will do compatibility fixes for the vanilla game (Kentie’s Launcher, D3D10, DXVK, Engine.dll fix, and more), then just run DeusEx.exe as normal and the gameplay will be unchanged but with high frame rates and resolutions!
    • Randomizer Lite - randomizes some things without interfering with the immersion and mood of the game. Great for players who haven’t played Deus Ex in a long time, or if you’re intimidated by the full Randomizer.
    • Randomizer Medium - similar to Randomizer Lite but with more randomization features enabled by default. Remember you can tweak the settings in the Advanced menu to play with any randomization level you want.
    • Serious Sam mode - same as the normal game but with 10x as many enemies. The player has increased health and takes reduced damage to compensate.
    • Speedrun mode - speedrun with fewer resets while still being able to enjoy higher difficulties. And a built in splits viewer!
    • As well as the old Entrance Randomizer mode and Horde mode
  • Enemies overhaul with more variety, augs, helmets, face shields to protect from tear gas, and randomized patrol routes.
  • Now up to 337 bingo goals
  • Randomized music, continuous music, and support for Unreal and Unreal Tournament music
  • Auto augs to reduce fumbling with all your F-keys
  • Many more possible locations for items, datacubes, nanokeys, crates, and enemies to appear.
  • Loot refusal system.
  • Reduced pixel hunting
    • Datacubes/nanokeys/medbots/repairbots now glow
    • Crates that become emptied now turn into cardboard boxes so you know from a distance
    • Training mission improvements including explanation of some of Randomizer’s features
Die4Ever,

are you asking from a technical perspective or a gameplay perspective?

Die4Ever,

Technical perspective first…

This is Unreal Engine 1, which used UnrealScript programming language. It was extremely flexible, and you can extract the original UnrealScript code (including comments) from the game. This means it’s nearly an open source game, except for the native code. But pretty much everything is controlled by the UnrealScript anyways. Including the GUIs, HUDs, conversations, most of the AI stuff, damage calculations, keyboard key bindings, etc.

On top of this, Deus Ex released their SDK tools (I think in 2001, around the time of the multiplayer patch). Which is their version of the UnrealEd map editor, conversation file editor, and UnrealScript compiler/extractor.

Die4Ever,

Gameplay perspective…

This game is really open, there are many approaches to every situation. Which means when things get randomized, it tips the scales of balance and you have to reconsider every option for every seed.

Even just choosing a melee weapon, you’re thinking about knife vs baton vs crowbar vs sword vs eventually the dragon’s tooth sword. On some seeds the knife does a bit extra damage and then you gotta think if it’s better than the baton and crowbar because of its speed, and it only uses a single inventory space. On some seeds you might get a weak and slow dragon’s tooth sword and it might not even be worth keeping!

And then you’ve got all the different paths through the levels, and you’ll be rethinking routes based on random start locations, random goal locations, or random enemies in different spots, or items or medical bots. Or maybe a door was randomized to need more lockpicks and your lockpicking skill is worse than vanilla, maybe you need another way around or you choose to find the key to save lockpicks for later. You won’t be doing the same thing every playthrough like vanilla where eventually you figure out which approaches you like best for each spot. The randomizer gets you to rethink it all and adapt.

The ability to do anything also means you can always progress, you don’t get stuck just because you’re missing a password or low on multitools, there’s always another way. The randomizer really forces you to adapt.

I think any game with good replayability is a good target for a randomizer, it just amplifies that replayability.

Die4Ever, (edited )

Thanks! Yea everything shown in that trailer is in UnrealScript aside from the creation of the mirrored map files, and the installer obviously, both of those were done in Python. The death markers and other online features (which are all optional and opt-in, disabled by default) use a TCP connection in the game written in UnrealScript to make HTTP requests, the backend is a Python Flask server. We even wrote our own JSON parser inside of UnrealScript (it’s not perfect but it does enough for us). Technically it’s possible to add a DLL module to the game for stuff like JSON parsing but we haven’t needed to, and technically this keeps it more easily portable (like if SurrealEngine even gets to a more completed state).

We had to write our own PRNG function to work inside UnrealScript, because the provided one doesn’t allow seeding.

Die4Ever,

And dogs, rats, greasels, karkians, and fish if you’re standing (the game doesn’t have a use animation while swimming), and grays too but you’ll take damage when you do it

Die4Ever,

0.19.5 has passed 0.19.4 now, with 86 vs 85

I’m surprised 0.18.4 has more instances than 0.18.5, considering 0.18.5 was the simplest update ever with just a small hotfix for federating moderation actions (which is a really important bugfix) and it didn’t have any changes to the database or configuration or dependencies

Die4Ever,

I need to try a DSVania rando some day, I loved Dawn of Sorrow

"Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy [...] The software is downright frustrating to work with" - Can any other instance admins relate to this?

After a year online the free speech-focused instance ‘Burggit’ is shutting down. Among other motivations, the admins point to grievances with the Lemmy software as one of the main reasons for shutting down the instance. In a first post asking about migrating to Sharkey, one of the admins states:...

Die4Ever,

there was a discussion about this same post before, I’ll just copy paste my comment…

That post complains about not being able to view/manage images hosted by your instance, but v0.19.4 already fixed that last week? So that kinda disproves them saying the Lemmy developers didn’t want it to be possible. Also the post complains about the amount of storage used by caching images but that was also fixed/improved in v0.19.4

Castlevania ReVamped Blends ‘Classicvania’ And ‘Metroidvania’ Together -- Retro Gaming News 24/7 (www.retronews.com)

Lv4 Games, a team of dedicated Castlevania fans, has created a fan-made game called Castlevania ReVamped that aims to bring together the nostalgic aesthetics of the NES-era Castlevania games with the modern, non-linear gameplay of Metroidvanias. This blend of classic and contemporary elements results in an impressive mix that...

Die4Ever,

ReVamped is such an obviously good name lol

Die4Ever,

Honestly after reading the headline I expected the average difference to be 1-3%, 7% is kind of amazing lol

Die4Ever,

I haven’t heard of that one before, looks like more of a strategy game than this one, seems cool!

Die4Ever,

SimAnt is a classic game

Die4Ever,

I haven’t heard of that one before, looks like more of a strategy game than this one, seems cool!

Die4Ever,

I think most retro games were hard enough as it is, considering limited disc/cartridge space and because you were generally expected to spend more time with a single game back then. But I agree with the people here saying Pokemon lol, romhacks are better.

Die4Ever,

Mario World probably was a bit too easy, but I think SM64 difficulty was good especially if you wanted to get all 120 stars

Die4Ever,

Wait how does a kart racing game have a half hour tutorial? Lol

Die4Ever,

for an explanation on why this is impressive: “Doom’s Oldest World Record Was Finally Beaten!” www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOSvxhzoLS0

Die4Ever,

For those thinking it may be due to Steam Deck with SteamOS, it’s unlikely, at least not directly. StatCounter gather their info from web traffic across over 1.5 million sites globally. I doubt all that many browse the web regularly on Deck.

But also Steam hardware survey shows Linux at only 2%, and Steam Deck I think was only half of that? So these numbers for desktop usage are higher than what Steam is seeing.

Die4Ever,

It’s there now, the crawler found you. Congrats!

Die4Ever, (edited )

Phantasy Star Online for sure, Sonic Adventure 1, and Grandia 2

oh and Gauntlet Legends was also on Dreamcast!

Die4Ever,

one day I’ll probably play Blue Burst again, had a lot of fun on private servers

there are 2 Lemmy communities, but they aren’t active

!pso

!pso

Die4Ever,

Streetpass was fun, maybe someone could clone it as a mobile app

Die4Ever, (edited )

pretendo.network

pretty cool, but I feel like it would be unlikely to meet anyone else on Pretendo’s Streetpass? Or maybe Streetpass was entirely peer to peer anyways?

Die4Ever,

I’m a big fan of their The Walking Dead games. For a long time I thought the final season would never be finished, but I think it was like a couple years later and it was bought out and finished, and miraculously it was actually good too.

Die4Ever,

When Doom was 5 years old we got Half-Life. When GTA2 was 5 years old we got GTA San Andreas. When Quake was 5 years old we got Halo. Pretty crazy.

What game do you recommend someone who likes the mechanics but not the setting of Baldur's Gate 3?

I saw people going on about how great BG3 is on this site, so I thought I’d check out a let’s play to see what all the fuss was about. I immediately fell in love with the graphics and the mechanics, such as the classes, races, spells, dice etc, but I disliked the emphasis on gore/horror in the game, and I know I wouldn’t...

Die4Ever, (edited )

Ok I actually haven’t played BG3 yet lol, but I’m gonna suggest Freedom Force. It’s a superhero RPG with some cool character building. The game is on Steam and GOG but I see some people saying the GOG version works better out of the box for modern Windows.

It doesn’t have dialog trees though just combat. But it’s not violent, you said you didn’t like the violence. And it takes very little storage space.

Played and beat A Link to the Past for the first time! (lemmy.world)

As a big Zelda hater as a kid, I skipped the series completely. I’ve been going through to experience them all in order now. I really enjoyed the first two games of the series so I expected to like this one too. What I didn’t expect is was that it really is one of the best games on the Super Nintendo if not one of the best...

Die4Ever,

Definitely check out Zelda Minish Cap, I think it’s up there with Link to the Past

Die4Ever,

Yeah this game is amazing and barely anyone has played it

Die4Ever,

I like how the cracks in the monitor extend beyond the glass lol

Die4Ever,

Their donation links go straight to the charity, PayPal clearly tells you who you’re sending money to

Die4Ever,

I mean isn’t that how it’s supposed to be done? You post to all relevant communities? Lemmy even has a feature to deduplicate posts in your feed that have the same link URL, to reduce the repetition in your feed

If it’s still annoying then maybe the software needs to handle it better, because I don’t think only posting to a single community is good. Everyone else gets left out, especially when you consider some communities will be on defederated instances.

Die4Ever, (edited )

I think keeping the comments separate is probably still a good thing. There might be another way to improve it

I think once we get a system for multi-communities or grouping communities, we could revisit this issue

Die4Ever, (edited )

the best game of all time!

full intro here youtu.be/ULiskaGXVsc

we have a community for the series here !stauf_mansion (The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour, The 13th Doll, The 7th Guest VR, the board game, and the other 2 games from Trilobyte/Aftermath Media are welcome too: Clandestiny and Tender Loving Care)

Die4Ever,

This game was amazing, and it still is. Use the PC version “Blue Burst” to play on a private server

Die4Ever, (edited )

There is a literal DOG doing a speedrun of Gyromite on Tuesday

youtu.be/IvShUE5zIXE?si=uWRhqoiiCXvIu14g

Also any Doom game is always worth watching! Also Donkey Kong or Sonic games

And the awful games block is always hilarious, I think starting Wednesday night / Thursday morning with Beetlejuice, and running all the way to Skator Gator 3D, I know Virtual Hydlide is a funny one in there, and Skull Island: Rise of Kong is one of the newest games ever featured in an awful games block

The schedule is a bit easier to read and Ctrl+f here: horaro.org/agdq/2024

Die4Ever,

Worms speedruns in the past have been really cool, definitely looking forward to that. And Mario 2 is always amazing.

Die4Ever, (edited )

they really need to remaster/rerelease Panzer Dragoon Saga, such a great JRPG that barely anyone has played

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