A dozen articles back I wrote a lengthy piece on designing FPS games for lower end machines.
The number of machines still operating with roughly a p4 and under 1g video ram is actually staggering. Just because everyone in the cafe has an ipad, doesn'r mean that's the norm.
Speaking of the tablet style computer,
the morons designing them still think we are happy with crappy graphics, so they are actually not very high powered and games designed with techniques I described in the earlier article still apply well to them. IMHO a tablet should have 4 gigs of ram and a 2gig vid card.
Recently I finally was able to get the original Deus Ex running and modded with the HDTP and New Vision texture packs. I later added the Nameless Mod to my configuration and was able to keep editing so they are all compatible, as well as the 2047 mod.
Deus Ex was almost unbearable to play at first,
the original textures and models were terrible
but it is another of those story driven games like System Shock with an RPG inventory managemet system and skills.
Since it is running on a modified Unreal 1 engine it uses the UnrealEd editor in its first incarnation. Which is actually very stable, just extremely limited in file formats and import capabilities.
If you read the previous article, you know I was settled on the unreal tournament 2004 engine.
It has excellent 32 bit texture support, bone and mesh importing, particles, etc.
Its very hard to edit the UT2k4 gui and games system for an RPG style game however,
so if you are not making a team based killing machine game, or a flashy eyecandy walkabout, then it suffers from a lack of many RPG game elements that a story driven game requires.
Once youve modded Deus Ex with HDTP and New Vision you can add their texture/system/model packages to the Deus Ex.ini and incorporate those into your own game in the Deus Ex sdk.
If you can't install the SDK because it is choking on the "version" of your patched 1112fm sp patched deus ex the use 7-zip to open the file as an archive and extract its contents, then you can install con edit (the conversations editor) and the example mission and text files and the tools by hand.
When you work with Deus Ex, it is the complexity of the story and character interactions that will be your focus, not the action part. You could, of course, but some other engine is better for action modding because of the limitations of the engine. Meshes are extremely difficult to import for a newbie, and the quality is low, the textures are, even modified, BAD.
It really looks bad.
BUT.
If you build it and install the sdk (worry about the mods later for more textures and better weapons) then you have a very complex set of information and inventory gui items you can use to help your character solve the mystery or find whatever it is you have deviously hidden.
Working with Deus Ex requires a bit of coding exploration, as importing a texture, sound, image, or model, generally requires writing a small amout of code to reference the files and then using the included compiler.
There is no drag and drop of any media in the editor. Its from like 1999 or something.
Many things cannot be imported without creating a class and compiling a package, like meshes with uv mapping for instance.
Why would you?
Well,
its actually very easy to make a new class of object and give it properties
so almost any object can have a use action, and information can be given to the player from picked up books, computers, public computers, newspapers, datacubes, notes, and goal information can be triggered with mission text added automatically to your journal.
Even more sophisticated and simple is the conversation, choices, transactions, and "barks" (random comments generated by nearbt NPC's in response to events). Looking at the examples in the SDK is exhausting but rewarding. The option syntax is simple and the capabilities of the system are very complex. Mouths aren't synced well, but it doesn't matter, the amount of information you can impart and the logical choice/consequence triggers are essential to a person making a game based on dialogue and not on flash.
So maybe that's you.
You like to write dialogue and quest style games in a pseudo regular world. It may be a good choice.
I recommend not even trying to build any models for quite a while, it really is a pain to get texture mapped meshes in it. Trying to import a mesh in this makes the Half life 1 procedure look like a haiku. You will notice on playing that most objects are actually simple brush objects, not static meshes. Get used to it.
Textures are simple 8 bit PCX or BMP with a masking color like gifs use for transparent bits.
You can make 32 bit stuff in photoshop and convert to indexed 8 bit. 8 bit, not 24. It is VERY picky and likes PCX more. Mirrors are easy to make, as well as shiny semitranslucent tiles, those two things alone can make a huge difference in world believability, and the transparent PCX textures actually work just fine for things like fences.
If you are more interested in creating an RPG game with books/notes/computers/text/conversations/finding items/quests/missions/info/newspapers
it may be a better tool for that kind of story.
Pen on paper, excel spreadsheets and text files, layout or diagramming software
The first rule of working on something in a previsualization game design is:
don't reinvent wheels or anything else if you can copy paste it or make some kind of prefab or reuseable class of the object.
The story that is in Deus Ex is a very interesting nano augmentation/man made plague/conspiracy story, and if you even play through the first half of the game you get a feel for how the system enables a large number of factions/gangs/organizations/and alliances to be portrayed. Any NPC can have alliances and interactive conversation sequences with branching logics and triggers, and early in the game you are faced with the fact that you may be working for the wrong side against humanity's interests. The inventory system is very robust, the 2027 mod adds a lot of new weapons for the gun ppl, but the core game is filled with enough standard items you can use to tell your stories. It is also a game where you can create your own objects for inventory, like findable quest items that can be used.
All of the books, datacubes, notes, papers, computers can be filled with information, and with the new vision mod some of these items get multiple pages.
While the core game uses these things with short sentences, for writer's looking to make games with mystery or other information gathering adventures, this could be a great build environment for you.
The code is simple unrealscript, which is based on quakec which is in turn based on object oriented c++. Its really very simple to work with. I you have the ability to read some amount of programming an can search the programming contents it is really very easy to create and tweak your own classes so that when the character looks at your new items they will get hud info about it. Wotgreal will extract packages, Unreal Package Tool and UTX gaffer work, editing classes can be done with uncodex or notepad++, and source can be exported from the editor as well as there being some source available online in zip.
I have played all 3 Deus Ex games for extremely long periods now. They are not graphics driven, they are story driven, and the computer hacking, nanoaugmentation, and NPC interactions are the focus. Almost every level can be played in a stealth/non lethal way. The second Deus Ex suffers a bit graphically, but the augmentations are significantly increased in their useablity and the story is great. The 3rd, Human Revolution, is really fun to play, but requires fairly decent hardware to deal with the much larger firefights containing up to 20 enemies in a space. Neither the second or 3rd installments have an SDK.
If you need fast action and landscapes, full particle physics and every whiz bang, its not a good dev environment. As I have been playing and building in it tho I have come to see it as my favorite dev tool at the moment, since I have always personally been interested in games where information and story is more important than graphics. I can live with the fact that importing an animation is harder than cloning a human. I spent 2 days figuring out static mesh import, then decided I would only import a mesh as the last resort, and focused instead on using the vast amount of objects and items that are there.
I am also looking at whether or not unreal 1 monsters can be imported in, since the Actor class object is derived from the original unreal. But that is just an experiment.
If you are short on space, the core game with SDK comes in at just under a gig installed, with the 2047, New Vision, HDTP, and Nameless Mod installs it becomes about 4G. The mods don't add much extra functionality, mostly just textures, some new objects, and a few tweaks.
If you use Deus Ex to build your game, you can be pretty much assured it will run on mostly anything. I can't get it or the editor to crash without doing domthing really dumb, and I don't get any freezing like I do with some DX10 games. Deus Ex can use OGL or DX8 as well as having DX10 support with the NewVision Mod. I am running it on a celery with 512 ram and an integrated 64 meg vid card. Ancient tech, but it runs fine for this game.
Deus Ex is $6 on GOG.com. You can find a torrent with all the mods described here fully installed and configured with additional renderers if you look.
