Linux Demo and Achievements Update
almost 8 years ago – Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 01:08:09 AM

Hi everyone! Jason here again. I have some cool news to share, but before I get into that, I wanted to give folks a preview of some things coming next week: 

• PayPal donations are getting set up and should come online early next week.
• We’re going to get more active on Twitch in the upcoming weeks for some neato dev streams. 
• Another patch is being worked on for the pre-alpha demo which should help performance and crash issues 

 And now onto the meat of this update!

Linux Demo  

Due to popular demand, we’ve put some time into getting the Linux version of the pre-alpha demo ready for all of you (well, the Linux users out there). We’re doing this before we hit the stretch goal for Linux as a gesture of good faith, but please understand that the Linux demo does not guarantee a Linux version of the final game unless we hit the stretch goal. It took quite a bit of time to get it all working on Linux, as well as a bit of internal testing. Launching on other platforms takes time to adequately support and deploy, which is why the stretch goal is vital.  

You can download the Linux demo via Steam, but you’ll need to install the audio library separately as per these instructions from Audio Kinetic's site.

Note: The Wwise Unity Integration for Linux needs libSDL2 installed on the machine to work. Without this, a "DLLNotFoundException" message is displayed when launching the game. To install libSDL2 for Ubuntu 12.04, do the following:

• sudo apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev
• wget http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL2-2.0.3.tar.gz
• tar -zxvf SDL2-2.0.3.tar.gz
• cd SDL2-2.0.3
• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install
• sudo ldconfig

Note: The requirements may vary depending on the machine's configuration. Refer to libsdl.org for installation instructions on other setups.

Achievements Update 

That brings the Mission Points from 5 up to 8, which unlocks: 

• Closed Beta given to all tiers $50 and above. 
• Gender choice added for player. 

Well done! 

Also, a few days ago, we noticed that the achievements list wasn’t the correct one. It was using the ordering from an old draft of ours before we balanced the point system. The order you see now is the correct… and it was pretttty hilarious when Jonathan saw the tattoo goal so high on the list (spoilers, he’s the tattoo volunteer :-p )

 - Jason Fader, Project Director

Achievements & Pledge Addons
almost 8 years ago – Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:46:46 AM

Hey all! Jonathan (audio) here again with a couple of updates - this time all related to the campaign! Let's go ahead and get started:

Achievements

We are excited to announce our achievement system for the rest of the campaign! The achievement system is pretty simple: You backers have “Missions” that you can take part in, and when certain levels of these missions are achieved, you guys collect points. These points add up across the board and unlock bonus rewards for backers, like livestreams, in-game easter eggs, and even a team member (probably me) getting a System Shock tattoo. Check out some of the ways you guys can go and earn points!

Backer Kit

We will be working with Backerkit for the rest of the campaign and beyond! Backerkit is a crowdfunding fulfillment software solution that is going to help us manage the Kickstarter, so that we can better focus on things that will help the game. Backerkit does a handful of things for us. It’ll allow us to survey our backers, so that we can have a better way to gauge what our players want. Backerkit allows us to give backers “add-ons” to give you guys more options and flexibility when it comes to what kinds of rewards you want to purchase and help support the campaign! It’s going to help us to answer communications much more efficiently and quicker (our small team has been *stacked* with questions from you guys!).

tl;dr: Backerkit will help us to be more effective in managing the backing for System Shock, and allows us more options to give backers more choice over what they want!

Art Book

A lot of you have been asking if you can add the Art Book to your pledge tier.  Thanks to Backerkit, you'll be able to (once the campaign ends).   If you'd like the art book, add $25 onto your pledge to prep for the addon, then you'll be able to select it within the BackerKit website when we have everything set up.  If your pledge currently doesn't include a physical reward, keep in mind that there will be shipping costs involved on top of the $25. Those of you already with physical rewards should have a notice that shipping is not included.

Giveaway

We are still holding our giveaway/raffle for an awesome System Shock Limited Edition Screen Print Poster & T-Shirt. It will continue throughout the rest of the Kickstarter, and you can continue entering every day! So continue entering and help us to spread the word to continue to make this game awesome!

To enter, please click here [Facebook link]

Alternate link

 - Jonathan

Thank You!
almost 8 years ago – Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 01:04:48 AM

When Nightdive started in 2012, it was a one man operation with a singular goal- Recover gaming's lost treasures and make them available again for all to enjoy. As operating systems and video cards become more complex, we lose the ability to go back and replay many of the games we grew up with. I wanted to do everything I could to breathe new life into these forgotten classics.

  

The journey started with System Shock 2 and the reception/support I received allowed me to seek out other like minded individuals who would help locate and revive more lost classics like: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Wizardry, and The 7th Guest series to name a few. As we continued to grow in team size, so did our ambitions. With the release of The Original Strife: Veterans Edition and Noctropolis we were able to restore the games and add additional features. We fixed original bugs, included unfinished games mode, added support for widescreen monitors, and implemented OpenGL to update the visuals. Next was Turok, followed by System Shock: Enhanced Edition and an even greater desire to take our mission to the next level.   

We had done everything we could to make the Enhanced Edition more accessible to a modern audience but it reached the point where we began discussing a remake from the ground up. We started with a core team and a simple prototype to see if we could capture the look and feel of the original game.

Pleased with the results we then brought on Robb Waters to help us re-imagine the enemies, weapons and other memorable props and items from the game, and to create a common thread between the remake and the original game. Robb concepted the original game, he should be the one to revisit the remake.

A few more team members were brought on to take our prototype and develop it into the pre-alpha demo we would eventually release with Kickstarter. Our campaign began with a tremendous surge of support and in less than two weeks we've been completely funded...   

There's no possible way I could convey how grateful the Nightdive team is to the 14,000+ backers who put their trust in us - we're having a lot of fun remaking System Shock and we owe it all to you! 

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! 

Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios

Patch #1 and Art Book
almost 8 years ago – Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 01:02:08 AM

Hello Kickstarter Backers! 

My name is Daniel Grayshon and I am a Producer on System Shock. I have been working with Nightdive for a number of years and have been involved with the re-releases of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Strife: Veteran Edition, System Shock: Enhanced Edition and many others. 

This is my first post to you all and it comes with some great news! We have all been working very hard since the release of the Pre-Alpha Demo and today, we are happy to release a new $100 reward tier alongside an update to the demo!

New Reward $100 Tier Added

We have added a new tier to the Kickstarter. The $100 Tier contains all of the goodies that can be found inside the $75 Tier (a physical copy of the game in a Steel Case, Closed Beta Access and Digital Copies of System Shock 1 and 2) with the addition of a great Artbook, put together by our friends at Arms and Anchor!  

If you would like the Art Book by itself, we will have a system in place to purchase addons for your pledged tier in the upcoming weeks.  

Here are some concept images for your viewing pleasure! The final look of the Artbook is subject to change at any time as we go along.

 

 

 

 

Pre-Alpha Demo Patch #1 Patch Notes

This patch, which is now live on Steam, contains the following fixes and improvements:

New Things

• Texture filtering has been applied. The textures around the station will appear smoother and less pixelated. Let us know what you think about this change as we would like your feedback on it.  
• Visual effects have been improved and as well the addition of explosion visual and sound effects. 
• Fragmentation grenades can now be thrown by the player. Right-click on the grenade from your inventory to throw or assign it to the hotbar and throw with the press of 1, 2, 3 or 4 on the keyboard. 
• “Staminup” patches, “BeserkBooster” patches, and Battery packs can now be used by the player by right-clicking on them in the inventory. 
• New melee attacks animations have been added. The Hacker will recoil when hitting a surface with the pipe. 

Fixes

• Reduced the swing delay of the pipe. 
• Shortened pickup animations. 
• Music alterations applied to the backing music around the station. 
• Fixed a bug with game settings causing controls to lock when reloading the game. 
• Item descriptions have been improved for the items around the demo. 
• Various performance improvements.

If you want to compare the patch to the previous build of the game, you can do so on Steam. The original released has been placed into an old branch on Steam which you can access at any time by going into the Demo’s properties on Steam and in the Betas tab, choose the version of the demo that you’d like to play.  

Oh and if you like competitions, you can enter to win a very limited poster and t-shirt combo on Facebook. The details are below.

System Shock Kickstarter Giveaway  

We are currently holding a giveaway/raffle for an awesome System Shock Limited Edition Screen Print Poster & T-Shirt. It runs until the end of the Kickstarter, and you can even do things every day during the raffle to keep entering. And by entering more times, you’re helping us to spread the word to continue to make this game awesome!

To enter, please click here. [Facebook Link]  

Alternative Link [Direct Raffle Link]

 

I am very excited to be working on this project. I have been a huge fan of the System Shock series for many years and this is a dream project for me to be involved in. I’m really looking forwards to seeing where the team takes the game and watching our overall vision evolve into something truly awesome! I’d like to thank you all for your support and we’ll be in touch again soon!  

Daniel Grayshon

Common Questions and Patch #1 Preview
almost 8 years ago – Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 12:55:57 AM

Happy 4th of July!  Jason here again.  What an amazing week this has been!  Thank you all so much for your continued support.  Once again, you folks are great! :-D 

As most of you have seen, the volume of feedback we’ve been getting has been HUGE. We’ve all been reading through a lot of your questions and concerns, and we’re doing our best to keep up with all of it. In case we missed your question or comment, please go to our Reddit forums and post there if someone hasn’t already asked your question. That’s the best place for us to organize and respond to feedback right now:   https://www.reddit.com/r/systemshock/

Common Questions

Before getting into patch stuff, I’d like to quickly answer the biggest questions I’ve been seeing:

• Pixelated / low-res textures - In the current demo, some textures look “pixelated” up close. This actually has nothing to do with their texture resolution. Before video cards became commonplace in the late 90s, textures did not get filtered. We’re doing the same thing to have a bit of a retro touch. In the next demo update, we’ve switched from no filtering to trilinear. Some screenshots are below in the patch preview section
• Orchestral vs. electronic music - We’re going to have an audio update written by Jonathan, our audio engineer and composer, to go over this stuff in more detail some time this week. Until then, the short answer is that the final score will definitely be more cyberpunk than just straight orchestral. Also, the full orchestra stretch goal will not change the music style. It will make all orchestral elements crisper while maintaining the electronic pieces.
• Story / plot changes - We won’t be deviating from the main story or plot from the original. We will be rewriting most of the text (well, when I say “we”, I actually mean my good friend, Mr. Chris Avellone). The overall story will be the same, but we might change some details/wording here and there for the sake of consistency and pacing.
• RPG elements - We understand this is a pretty vague term and has been confusing to backers. The original System Shock was ahead of its time and introduced a lot of new elements to gaming. We want to preserve that innovation and present a game we feel modern gamers will enjoy. Our goal is to have the gameplay somewhere between System Shock 1 and System Shock 2, with sprinkles of BioShock on top (rich melee attacks and ranged weapons, vending machines, upgrades, and damage types). If there’s enough of a demand, we’ll add a “Classic Mode” to one of the stretch goals that disables all RPG stuff as an option.
• Engine - Our pre-alpha demo is in Unity, and that is the technology the team has been using for the past several months. However, we are familiar with other engines and are open to exploring options that make sense. Changing engines during a project is a pretty big risk and not a choice to be taken lightly. At the end of the day, we will use the technology we feel is best suited to deliver the highest quality game with the resources we have.

Pre-Alpha Demo Patch #1 Preview

In a few days, we’ll have a patch out for the demo. Here are some things you can expect:

Trilinear-filtered textures

As mentioned above, the current version of the demo is using point-filtered textures. In the next patch, we’ve switched this over to trilinear to see what our backers think. Here are some before/after shots:

 Here's an album with higher-res images and more comparisons.

Grenades and items

All consumable items should be usable in the next patch. The item that looks the most interesting to use is the grenade :-D

We’ve also improved the responsiveness and feel of melee combat.

On top of that, we have lots of fixes and some performance improvements. We’re hoping to get the patch out within a few days. Once it’s out, we’ll post another update with some patch notes.

Kickstarter Launch Party

Stephen, Corey, and several other members of the team in the Portland area threw a Kickstarter Launch Party with our fans.  They had the demo on a huge projector and even had a fan drawing contest!  Here are some photos from the event.

I think that’s it for now! Let us know what you think about things. We’re always looking for feedback and want to make the best System Shock game for you folks! :-)

 - Jason