Sunday, October 27, 2013

System Shock 2: No Respawn

"Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?"
Perhaps my favourite quote from a computer game.

Just bought System Shock (from 1999!) on Steam. Time to remember some settings which makes the game more enjoyable to me. For all settings check the(?) System Shock page.
  • Monster Spawning:
    If you've killed everything in a given area, and you wait around long enough, you'll notice that more monsters are spawned to keep you busy. To minimize respawning, use the configuration variable:
    • no_spawn
    System Shock 2's ecologies look at how many monsters are in a given area. If a defined minimum number of monsters are present, there is a chance that a new monster will spawn. The variable:
    • lower_spawn_min n
    reduces the defined minimum monster count on all ecologies by n.
    • raise_spawn_rand n
    lowers the chance of a monster randomly spawning by changing the random chance from 1/i to 1/(i+n).
  • Gun degradation
    The config variable:
    • gun_degrade_rate
    is a multiplier for the rate at which your weapons degrade. For example, to completely eliminate weapon degradation & breakage, set the value to 0. To tone it down, set it somewhere between 1 and 0.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Gender neutral names now and then

Now:

  • Jordan
  • Dakota
  • Payton
 Then:
  • Chris
  • Pat
  • Tracy