zombe on 8/3/2013 at 22:46

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Saw the SS2 let's play thread and it made me wonder whether my current system can run SS1 (it was unplayable for the last half decade because of major performance issues due to dosbox needing to basically interpret the machine code to run under 64bit OS) - well, the latest SS1 Portable WORKS (with a bit of fiddling)!

Big thanks to everyone involved with it and its sub-parts that made it possible. Cheers.

Only problems i have is:
* mouselook is pretty fucked up in cyberspace and normal keys do not work at all for some reason (specifically "x" which in normal-space is bound to toggle headlight).
* mouse speed outside mouse-look is very slow ("..mousemul 1").
If anyone has some ideas ...

Anyway, just about to reach the last level and ... damn, this game is still as good as i remember it. The fact that i had not played it for a long time also helps - in the sense that there was stuff i have forgotten and had to figure out again (mostly: where/what weapons to use, what weapon and when to ditch, security blocking, what is connected to what in level 7).

Speaking of weapons and their targets ... made a .ods table (~excel) for it today. In pfd form: (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19090066/SS1/ss1.pdf) (.odf for odf version of it)
Notes:
* every enemy has two calculated numbers shown per weapon/ammo: (1) How many hits are needed to kill with it. (2) How much time it takes to kill with it.
* all damage goes through 33% penalty (*0.67) that comes with the highest combat difficulty.
* damage types and vulnerabilities are used in calculations.
* gray = does no damage. Bad damage type and/or can not penetrate armor.
* red = terrible. (1) Uses more that 80% of the clip. (2) Takes longer than 5 seconds.
* white = fine, aka not terrible nor good.
* green = good. (1) Uses less than 30% of the clip. (2) Takes less than 2.5 seconds.
* got the base data from I.C.E. Breaker - hopefully with not too many errors :/ ... sounds about right tho.
* clip size for melee/grenade/etc weapons is ... made up to get reasonable colors (all the colors are from "conditional formatting") in regards of hitcount/time.
* ammo line for sparq/etc is ... well how much of the player's max energy (255) the shoot will take.
* ammo line for grenades/etc is the explosion radius.
* clip size for sparq/etc is floor(max_player_energy/shot_per_energy) given min/50%/max setting (No overload. No 50% option for Sparq and Blaster as their energy usage is fairly low even on max setting).
* refire delay is my judgement by firing/using the things ingame ... the ones underlined and in italic i did not specifically test yet - just guessed.
* does not consider +-10% ... as in average it should not matter.
* does not consider criticals ... as the weapons that are that much better than the target die fast enough for it to not be particularly interesting.
* the (2) line for grenades/etc is the same as (1) with 50% damage reduction to simulate non-perfect hit.

Hits needed:


Something obvious or not so obvious wrong with any of it (the vulnerability and damage stuff is quite ambiguously defined, like what happens when there are multiple vuln/damage matches)?

Notables:
* (1) and (2) often disagrees whether it is good or not - which is good as one values them differently in different situations: ammo usage is more important than time if your shooting position is fairly safe (or you might be faced with multiple enemies in a lovely clusterfuck) and time is more important than ammo usage when you are likely to be jumped.
* Armor/Penetration is fucked up ... no enemy has armor over 55, yet there are weapons that have penetration values way over it. Most notable screw-up that surprised me most: there is essentially no difference between a Gas Grenade and Frag. Grenade (the 5 armor for the few cyborgs one could reasonably use Gas against makes no real difference) - except that Gas Grenade sucks as it does not damage a lot of stuff that Frag. Grenade does.
* High level Grenades are surprisingly weak compared to Frag. Grenade ... well, none of them do much damage to anything really in comparision of how hard they are to use. :(
* Would like to add "overkill" color, but it seems i can not use more than 3 conditionals per cell :/ ... well, every "1" is either overkill or sufficiently close anyway.
* Flechette is the best "explorer" weapon ... even better than i thought. Used it quite efficiently now even against mobs i always assumed are too tough for it (one of the reasons i decided to make the table).

Something else:
Would love a mod that would add another difficulty setting for loot (is the a workable disassembly around?):
0) no change
1) 25% less
2) 50% less
3) 75% less (ammo/patches/'nades/batteries/medkits removed from world/chests/dead-containers ... not removing anything else nor ammo from weapons)
... i am absolutely swimming in the stuff every game :/ (i never use the Rapier - just way-way too overpowered for me) - there is just too much ammo and supplies everywhere.