There’s been lots of updates to the layout and styling, as well as a dark theme! And we’ve also got it redirecting to a cleaner domain name now. randomizers.debigare.com
I would suggest against GMDX for a first time playthrough, it changes A LOT. From the aesthetics, to the gameplay, to the sounds, the mood, the feel of the game, and the viable approaches in each level, there’s so much that’s changed it just isn’t the same game anymore.
You’re much better off with the Vanilla Fixer tool, Transcended, or Zero Rando (I’m the dev). You could also use Revision and toggle every setting to vanilla, but make sure you also disable the HDTP models, and disable Shifter and Biomod too, and definitely set the maps to vanilla.
I agree about some gimmicks like 2 players 1 controller, or playing games with a dance pad or whatever, they seem difficult but still feel like gimmicks to me
4-way races are ok if you’re familiar with the game and speedrun already, but otherwise hard to watch
And dogs, rats, greasels, karkians, and fish if you’re standing (the game doesn’t have a use animation while swimming), and grays too but you’ll take damage when you do it
Thanks! Yea everything shown in that trailer is in UnrealScript aside from the creation of the mirrored map files, and the installer obviously, both of those were done in Python. The death markers and other online features (which are all optional and opt-in, disabled by default) use a TCP connection in the game written in UnrealScript to make HTTP requests, the backend is a Python Flask server. We even wrote our own JSON parser inside of UnrealScript (it’s not perfect but it does enough for us). Technically it’s possible to add a DLL module to the game for stuff like JSON parsing but we haven’t needed to, and technically this keeps it more easily portable (like if SurrealEngine even gets to a more completed state).
We had to write our own PRNG function to work inside UnrealScript, because the provided one doesn’t allow seeding.
This game is really open, there are many approaches to every situation. Which means when things get randomized, it tips the scales of balance and you have to reconsider every option for every seed.
Even just choosing a melee weapon, you’re thinking about knife vs baton vs crowbar vs sword vs eventually the dragon’s tooth sword. On some seeds the knife does a bit extra damage and then you gotta think if it’s better than the baton and crowbar because of its speed, and it only uses a single inventory space. On some seeds you might get a weak and slow dragon’s tooth sword and it might not even be worth keeping!
And then you’ve got all the different paths through the levels, and you’ll be rethinking routes based on random start locations, random goal locations, or random enemies in different spots, or items or medical bots. Or maybe a door was randomized to need more lockpicks and your lockpicking skill is worse than vanilla, maybe you need another way around or you choose to find the key to save lockpicks for later. You won’t be doing the same thing every playthrough like vanilla where eventually you figure out which approaches you like best for each spot. The randomizer gets you to rethink it all and adapt.
The ability to do anything also means you can always progress, you don’t get stuck just because you’re missing a password or low on multitools, there’s always another way. The randomizer really forces you to adapt.
I think any game with good replayability is a good target for a randomizer, it just amplifies that replayability.
This is Unreal Engine 1, which used UnrealScript programming language. It was extremely flexible, and you can extract the original UnrealScript code (including comments) from the game. This means it’s nearly an open source game, except for the native code. But pretty much everything is controlled by the UnrealScript anyways. Including the GUIs, HUDs, conversations, most of the AI stuff, damage calculations, keyboard key bindings, etc.
On top of this, Deus Ex released their SDK tools (I think in 2001, around the time of the multiplayer patch). Which is their version of the UnrealEd map editor, conversation file editor, and UnrealScript compiler/extractor.