Every once in a while, we troll through the official ION Storm forums to pull out what the development team is posting. Take a look, and be sure to read the entire thread if you see a topic that interests you, since we don't copy everything. Today our main players are Deus Ex multiplayer programmers Chris Carollo and Alex Duran.
(Alex) We originally had cloaked people slightly visible. It made cloak useless. If cloaked people were at all visible they were spotted almost instantly. The blurring effect with motion is a nice idea, but I suspect that you'll find the cloak to be fairly balanced overall once you get used to the counter measures for it.
and
If you're not playing on a game with all augs, then turrets are often a handy anti-cloak counteragent. Cloaking does not stop turrets from seeing you, and so if you hear a friendly turret going off near you, look around for the enemy. In a game with all augs, many cloaked people also have radar transparency. Turrets are still helpful, as many people don't turn on radar transparency until they hear the turret start to spin up and aim at them. Sure the turret won't take them out in that case, but the fact that it made noise is an indication of an enemy coming up on you.
(Chris) The problem with having Cloak be opposite Run Silent is that no one will ever take Run Silent -- Cloak is just a vastly more useful aug. Roughly as useful as, say, Vision. :-)
I'm typically vision-targeting-ads guy, and I rarely get smoked by a cloaked guy sneaking up on me. It's definitely a good way to take me out when I'm on a good streak, but it's not overpowering.
Again, I think this is a case of Cloak being easier get the hang of, so relatively new players tend it use more effectively. Vision requires lots of paying attention to sound, looking over your shoulder, and keeping track of how people can get to you. As people get more comfortable with Vision, I bet it'll balance out. That's been our experience, anyway.
I think we're going to be releasing a brief "Guide to making MP DeusEx Maps" sometime fairly soon. Stuff like how to set up spawn points properly, how we set up cameras/turrets, standard hack strengths.
Not that you can't deviate from that, but if you want to adhere to the ISA "standard" you can (since that's what we tuned the game for).
If you wanted to start with more skills, and not lose any when you die, the server could raise the initial skill points and set the skills per kill to 0. That would have this effect.
Napalm If I want to host a game and appear on the server list, what ports do I have to allow through and what ip? From what I gather, it's 7790, 7791, 7792 and 27900 but is that it? Do I need udp or udp and tcp?
Alex I believe that all except 7790 are UDP. But I'm not absolutely positive. If that doesn't work, you might just open them all up combined.
Make sure the following lines are in your deusex.ini
Under [DeusEx.DeusExGameEngine]
ServerActors=IPServer.UDPServerUplink MasterServerAddress=master0.gamespy.com MasterServerPort=27900
Second, under
[DeusEx.MenuScreenJoinGame]
MasterServerAddress=master0.gamespy.com
and finally, under
[DeusEx.UdpServerQuery]
GameName=deusex
If you did a clean reinstall of the patch from a clean reinstall of Deus Ex, then the appropriate lines will have been wiped from your deusex.ini. They should come back if you run the game once as a server (you can quit out immediately). It just hasn't saved that info to your ini again. Does this fix the problem?
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