Koki on 17/5/2005 at 20:04

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Replayed Deus Ex in last few days. Always wondered, though... you send nuke to Area 51. A nuke. And then you come and there's just few buildings slightly damaged. How so? Considering that there is low/no radiation I presume it's H-bomb... there should be just a nice little crater there. Or at least leveled buildings.

Ahhh, while I'm at it... there is not much traffic here it seems. Anyway, I got the Thievery Mutator mod and wonder how it works. Sure, it renders you less visible with the shadows... but that's already implemented? It does it better or something?
And one more. With SDK, can I edit core game stuff? Precisely I'd like to dispose of the item limit. I was doing some flare-hunting and couldn't finish it :)

Marecki on 18/5/2005 at 00:22

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Nuke: as far as I can tell it definitely looks as if the entrance area had been shielded somehow from the blast, because the only element of the zone which is significantly damaged is the top of the guard tower - i.e. the part that wouldn't be as well-shielded as anything below.

Thievery mutator: it measures the amount of light, the player model's position and speed etc., mapping them into the model's translucency; the effect can be seen very well in death scenes or switching to third-person mode. Unfortunately it does tend to break things which are seemingly completely unrelated, but important enough to make the game unfinishable.

Item limit: I'd say it's possible to remove it (or at least make it very high), as The Minimalist Mod for T:DS does the opposite. You might want to ask NewHorizon how he did that.

Hope this helped...

Jonesy on 18/5/2005 at 20:47

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Personally, I find it hard to believe that there would be so little damage. Even taking into account of the hill, and using Hiroshima's 14.5 KT as the strength of the bomb, there wouldn't be much left of any structures above ground. Check and see if they bothered putting broken glass in the map, if they didn't, then either they never checked up on the effects of a nuclear blast, or the Unreal Engine couldn't handle the complexity of the scene (which I find hard to believe.)

The reason why I bring up broken glass is due to the overpressure of such a blast. Glass can only take up to 4 atmospheres of pressure if it isn't specially treated, and in a nuclear blast, the pressure is many, many times greater than that. Most people don't die as a direct result of the blast, they die as a result of the overpressure blowing the glass in their car windows in, or via fires set (which are hard to extinguish when the plumbing structure is ruptured.)

But I digress, I've looked into this subject a little too much. ;)

Edit: I checked up on Wikipedia, and this is what they said:

Most buildings, except reinforced or blast-resistant structures, will suffer moderate to severe damage when subjected to overpressures of only 35.5 kilopascals (kPa) (5 pounds/square inch or 0.35 Atm).