Like a few people it seems, I recently bought the Pathologic download after reading the RPS write-up.

I've been playing it slowly over the past week and am up to day five, and after some initial misgivings, I'm loving the game. I'd just like to echo some of the sentiments others reviewers / writers have mentioned. I love the way it fundamentally challenges what games are and how you should relate to games. It's such an unsettling experience, the bleak sensibility and oppressive atmosphere work really well - it's the closest I've seen games come to generating that sort of atmosphere the same way good books can.



I've got a couple of questions though. I have this in-built instinct to fiddle with games, and those vfs files call to me...

I've played with the concole, but I can't find a full list of console commands (beyond the 'cheat sheets' posted here). Does anyone know of any others?

Also, is it possible to edit the contents of the vfs files? If anyone's managed it, I'd appreciate some suggestions... The config file is pretty limited.

I don't want to do a whole lot, but I'd like to be able to extend the draw distance if anyone has any suggestions?
The fog works well on grey, rainy days, but the pop-up gets a bit atmosphere-breaking. Also, it's a shame that the Polyhedron and abbatoir don't loom in the skyline more. They're such dominating structures, and a more constant presence would be great.

I'd also like to play with the lighting system if possible. The shadows at night could be a bit more stark. Though the grey, flat, days are pretty morose, I have the voice of my art instructor 'contrast, contrast'...

So, any suggestions as to how I might go messing about would be appreciated.

(also, any update on the widescreen patch ?)

Firstly, welcome to the forums! We're a small yet friendly community.

Use this unpacker application to extract the contents from the VFS files. Some of the stuff is quite obvious - you'll be able to easily change textures, sounds and texts.
http://mor.gstrategy.ru/files/mor_converter.rar

As for console commands there's quite a long list here: viewtopic.php?t=4453 - use Babelfish for basic translation and ask if anything is unclear. I'll help.

Not sure if you can change the render distance through the config though.

As for lighting and shadows - the game uses static lighting only via vertex and lightmaps. I think shadows can be tinkered with though.

You can launch the game in widescreen - the only problem will be with the interface - it'll be taken from 800x600.

Really? I'm surprised. The lighting at night, especially in areas like the theatre, looks very good.

For the OP: You could try one of these hacks for the shadows thing:
http://boris-vorontsov.narod.ru/index_en.html
None of them are, of course, specifically designed for Pathologic, but they tend to work unsupported (and often with graphical bugs) on games they weren't intended for. For the newer game versions it's also only designed for Geforce 8's, with anything else unsupported.

Thank you!

I've wanted this utility for a long time. The first mod is already 2/3rds complete:
I've made it so that the infection bar doesn't start working until it is 1/4 of the way full (after that it works normally). This plays on the players psychology - allowing them to suspect, to hope, but not to be certain until they start showing symptoms!

Thanks once again!

Doesn't the infection start showing symptoms straight away, by causing your screen to pulse then blur for a short while whenever it advances?

I think a worthy addition to the concept would be to make the status bars take longer to appear onscreen; the exhaustion bar for example appears onscreen when it's 3/4 full, but the remaining part will take hours to complete so it's needlessly onscreen.

And here you can find more console commands (big green-colored list at the bottom of second post).

Those links to the details of the vfs packs were useful, as were the console commands. I can't seem to find an easy way of expanding the view distance, though - it seems to be hard-coded, but I'll have another gander tomorrow.

Many thanks

You're welcome

So far, I've only managed to modify the bars for the "person" status display and the "sleep" display. The "Hud" display is still beyond me. I have had success removing the midnight success/failure script and music.

What I can say is that it is amazing how little I want to change and that the overall layout of the files is elegant (which bodes well for how pleasant it will be to work in Turgor/Tension)

This is my current understanding (mainly from exploring - I'm not done reading the link):

So far, I've only managed to modify the bars for the "person" status display and the "sleep" display. The "Hud" display is still beyond me. I have had success removing the midnight success/failure script and music.

What I can say is that it is amazing how little I want to change and that the overall layout of the files is elegant (which bodes well for how pleasant it will be to work in Turgor/Tension)

This is my current understanding (mainly from exploring - I'm not done reading the link):

We can:
- Edit textures
- Modify some elements of the User Interface and menus
- Make the player more or less vulnerable to disease
- Change some stats regarding movement and hit points and some detection values
- Modify fire appearances, the calling by the engine of some sounds and scripts
- Modify prices, the effects of prestige on merchants, the different types of stores, which children will barter what
- Modify the facial expressions of NPCs
- Swap 3d meshes (probably) and fonts (probably)

We can't:
- Adjust a bunch of engine related values (eg. enabling view distance)
- Adjust the position and number of objects in the game world
- Modify the actual scripts (which control most behaviours)
- Modify text trees
- Add new items

S!

Mind posting a short guide on how/which files? Do you think you can alter the stats of items (such as making food heal more of the hunger bar), or behavior of status bars (such as making hunger increase slower or changing the overall value of the bar)?

[quote=Avimimus]We can't:
- Edit non-user-interface textures (to my knowledge)[/quote]

We can) I've tried to make Pathologic more Tension-like (I'm not an artist and my work is far from perfect)

Put this file in the data/textures directory:
http://whitewind.sibnet.info/deva_DXT1.tex

Actually, *.tex files are *.dds.[/quote]

.....

There are definite limits. I've so far found no value showing the effectiveness of a food item or the rate of hunger increase.

What could be done is to make all vendors sell foodstuffs and adjust the prices. If we could edit scripts (which we can't) we could have small gifts of food from the major families etc. You might also use the console commands as a cheat if you must. Anyway, I personally prefer the near starvation conditions.

As for the tweaks that I'm exploring ...In a few days I'll upload a couple of examples (I want to run more tests).
I've updated the original post.

Tested and confirmed. It turns out that all that is necessary for a mod to work is to place the files in a correctly named sub-directory. This makes adding a mod very convenient.

The example needs a bit of work, eh? The thing about Tension is that the models are within the realm of the anatomically possible. I always had issues with the mesh used and it becomes even more freakish in the repaint.

I was wondering if could modify horror3_gray.tex so that it has 90-99% transparency? I've always wanted to see what the game would be like if the clouds were a bit more subtle.

Thanks,

Yeah, the meshes is the most hard thing to mod in games...

So if there's a folder with the right name, and a replacement file in there, the game loads the file in the folder instead of the file within the vfs, rather than having to extract the whole vfs? That's good to know.

It's a shame about the draw distance. Even though my comps pretty old, I'm sure it could handle a greater distance. I've noticed that as things 'pop-up' they spend some time as sillhouettes; just grey textures. It would be so great if the Polyhedron and abbatoir were constant sillhouettes in the sky...

Has anyone tried loading higher-resolution textures? I might try a simple swap of the sky textures with similar high-res creative commons pics this weekend as an experiment.

The game never extracts whole vfs, it extracts only needed files. But game will work faster if you unpack all VFSes (especially sounds and scripts) and delete lines such as "StringsType = VFS" from data\config.ini

But make sure that you do not overwrite files created by patch (if any).

This had the exact opposite effect for me, making loading times up to 10x longer, especially for the initial load of my save game. O_o

That's really strange... Did you delete corresponding lines from config.ini?

Yep.
After that though, I reverted everything to the way it was originally.

Maybe The LxR can give any comments on that?

No-no-no, not until I get my beauty rest after developing Tension and making a patch for it.

(Actually, I think it's because data on your hard drive might be fragmented.)

Entirely possible, I've got just a teeny tiny HD and I'm down to my last 5 GB, so it's possible the files made from extracting the .vfs's went every which way.

I accidentally, "bumped" this post up when I was copying some notes out of it.

to change food item effectiveness you'll have to edit .bin files with a hex editor. for example in Scripts/item_dried_fish.bin the value is "0a d7 23 be". put that in reverse order ("be23d70a") and convert it to dec with this calculator and you'll get -0.1599999... or -16%

edit: oops. meant to edit not quote