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masterblaster221 wrote: »

i need help Inject NitroxPatcher into Assembly-CSharp:
Load up dnspy;
Find a suitable method that gets executed before the actual game starts(GameInput Awake());
Inject startup code: NitroxPatcher Main.Execute(). so how to i do this

As has been said before, the instructions are a sort of test. If you can't follow the instructions on your own, then you don't have the necessary skills to help code the mod. The mod is only in a coding stage, and the only people who get to do *anything* at all with the mod right now are the exceptionally bright folks who are giving of their time to help code this awesome mod. So, please don't ask for help. Instead, wait for the mod like the rest of us.

sayerulz wrote: »

And why do we really even want to save our main character? In story based games where you're all alone, you usually have a voiced protagonist, who also has a backstory. That too serves to tie you to the world. You feel for them, you want them to win. But with our totally faceless main character, the game gives us no reason to care.

That is a valid point, though I am reminded of Gordon Freeman from the Original Half Life games, he was more less mute with an equally shallow back story, though in that game there at least was about 20 mins or so of gameplay with the hero walking around the Black Mesa facility and interacting with NPC's and at least establishing the illusion he's a normal person with a likeable personality.

The game would of perhaps benefited some from a bit of gameplay onboard the Aurora pre crash, to make you at least care a little bit about the other alleged occupants. (Am I only one that finds it very creepy there's not a single hint of blood, bodies, or any remains of the crew?)

Just adding in some monologue for the main hero (Similar to Jason's from Far Cry 3) would go a long way towards making him feel more like a person and less like an automaton.

A cheap and easy way would be for the main hero to add his own personal journal entry notes next to scanned creatures and other pda entries, make him feel like more of a person and give us a way to relate to him and genuinely care about the guy.

"Stand fast. I'm going EVA to take a closer look."

I opened Gawain's hatch and swam out. Thankfully, the water temperature had dropped significantly as we moved farther away from the lava river. This area is a tolerable 18 degrees Celsius, so I won't have to worry about needing a re-skin after this mission. My polymer skin can handle temperatures up to 220 degrees, then nasty things start happening to the bits underneath. I unclipped the hand scanner from my harness and swam around Galahad. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. No loose panels or exposed cables. No obvious signs of physical damage. Nothing for it but to give the ExoSuit a thorough eyeballing; remote scanning doesn't tell me a gorram thing.

I almost missed it. There's something attached to Galahad's back, nestled tightly beneath the suit's power cell fairing. It's alive, and it appears to be feeding off the power grid. The creature is slug-like, about 300 millimetres long. Its dull violet skin is segmented into large scales, rather like a trilobite in its appearance. Its head has two stubby horns and tiny orange-rimmed eyes, which I suspect might be vestigial, considering the lousy ambient light levels down here. Can't see its mouth parts properly yet, so I'll attempt to pry it loose with a knife.

Jings! It's like trying to pull a pair of rare-earth magnets apart. I can't risk using a propulsion cannon with all those lava lizards nearby. Its concussion would get their attention in short order. There's nothing for it, my power-hungry little friend. Knife time. Best make your peace with Father of Tides.

"Power levels have stabilised, Captain." IANTO said. "As far as I'm able to determine, this organism drains electromagnetic energy from various sources by an induction process, diverting some of the energy to power an organic magnet surrounding an otherwise non-functional oral structure. Similar colouration around its atrophied eyes indicates that the creature uses a highly accurate version of electrosensing, rather than visual input. It's an extremely subtle and efficient parasite, Sir."

"I'll say it's bloody subtle. It doesn't show up on any of our EM sensors at all." I agreed. "Reckon it might emit a damping field of some kind? Something that masks its presence while it's feeding?"

"Insufficient data, Captain. I'll have to dissect one to determine the full capabilities of this species." IANTO replied. "Please place that specimen in a bio-sample container, Sir. I'll examine it later."

I'm simultaneously intrigued and deeply concerned by these wee beasties. One of them constitutes a minor nuisance. A shoal of them could bleed an ExoSuit dry in minutes. I'm unsure how they would affect an android, if at all... Our internal systems are EM-shielded of course, partly for stealth, but mainly because we're specifically designed for space travel. If it wasn't for the Faraday cages embedded in our synthetic skins, one decent solar flare would be quite enough to ruin our day. Permanently.

My brief examination of that 'Lava Larva' suggests that it might be possible to artificially reproduce some of its more remarkable traits. A number of Manannán's other life forms have a natural ability to metabolise metals or produce 'bio-alloys' for various survival applications. Tough dermal armour, electrical field generation, self-contained warp fields and so forth. I'm guessing that we can make some serious use of similar abilities once we return to Terra.

As a precaution, I checked all of our ExoSuits thoroughly. This has been an unpleasant wake-up call.

"Okay troops. Looks like we're all in the clear. Watch your power usage, particularly when we get close to the lava again. One more thing... Check your offsider's suit for those nasty wee buggers. We can't risk having a dead suit when we're this far down."

Chapter 2, Part I

Lackland, Krista B
Employee No. E-N7249830
Space Operations Division
Current Assignment: Executive Officer, ASV Aurora


By all rights, the alarm clock shouldn't be going off for another six hours, which is the second thing that makes Commander Krista Lackland want to pitch the damn thing through a wall. Its first sin is, of course, being an alarm clock in the first place. Of course, since the alarm clock is only a feature run by the ship's computer through the flatscreen mounted on the wall of her quarters, throwing it through the wall would involve first wrenching it off the wall, and that's just too much effort on only four hours' sleep.

Groaning, Lackland thumbs the pulsing icon on the flatscreen. It gives a soft chime and reverts back to normal operation, showing a digest of operating information on the Aurora. Engine output, life support and power generation status, a handful of systems that are generally less interesting than dirt, and the local gravity map. Everything is normal except, of course, the gravwell map. There's a deep one close aboard and getting closer.

She sits up on the bunk, stretching her spine. Alterra may be the ones writing the book on heavy-lift deep-space transports these days, but what they know about making a proper bunk would fit on an index card. With room to spare.

One advantage of starting a new day before the old one had finished cooling out of your boots is a quick morning. Fresh shipsuit and socks and Lackland was tugging on her boots, able - if not exactly ready - to get back to work.

As second shift, she's technically not on duty for nearly another seven hours, but Aurora is coming up on a critical moment in her flight, and even if the duty sheet didn't say she had to report, her sense of it nevertheless had her walking out her door.

The bridge is the captain's responsibility, and she knows that if Hollister wanted a hand up there he would've told her. So she instead heads for Engineering; a ship the size of Aurora doesn't have huge margins for error when it comes to pulling off a gravity-assist maneuver, so if something is going to go wrong, it only makes sense to have the command crew where they can do the most good; Hollister on his bridge, and her in Engineering. That way, no matter how catastrophic a failure might happen, at least one of them should be able to pull the ship out of danger.

"XO on deck!" The shout comes before the toe of her boot crosses the Engineering Control Room's doorway. If she didn't know better, she would've suspected Chief Åkerman had watched her make her way there on the camera feeds.

"As you were," she says automatically, waving the on-duty engineering staff back to their stations. With several megatons of titanium alloy hurtling toward a planet's gravwell, this is no time for the seat-jump-and-salute dance. Åkerman walks over to her and falls into step as she heads over to Bigboard.

"Didn't expect you, ma'am," he says as they cross the room, "Something wrong?"

"Nothing wrong, Chief, just here as a precaution. I don't like this maneuver coming up, so I'm not going to spend it in my bunk as a passenger."

"I hear that, ma'am," Åkerman says with more honesty than is generally wise where Alterra can overhear, "This would've been a lot easier if we'd just used the solar well rather than some mudball."

"Agreed," Lackland says as they step in front of Bigboard's data desk. The Engineering Systems Master Status and Operational Overview Display - usually simply called Bigboard for obvious reasons - is essentially the grown-up version of the digest display in her quarters. Rather than summaries, Bigboard trees everything out, allowing the Engineering crew to call up details on any system, calling attention to even the slightest setpoint drift, and generally being the obsessive-compulsive part of Aurora's brain. The wide touch-sensitive quasi-holo desk in front of them drives and augments Bigboard, giving the Engineering crew access to display details and diagnostics ranging from the routine to what would be embarassingly intimate if Aurora were human.

Scanning over the systems display shows nothing wrong to her eyes, but she asks Åkerman's opinion anyway. Åkerman rucks back his right sleeve to bare his forearm, the SECID embedded there coming to life. With a few finger taps, Bigboard shifts to a combined NAV/ENG display.

"Nothing particularly worrying right now. Engines are operating to spec, no drifts up or down the line. Squeezer sync is perfect - we had to compensate for local gravity, but the auto systems handled it without intervention. Bridge brought up maneuvering systems about twenty minutes ago and it was in hot standby up until three minutes ago when they went live. We're already rolling and yawing, so they're getting us into boost angle," he says, eyes dancing over the Bigboard display.

Abruptly, all of the engine displays shift: the four main engines shift into nav-fire mode, getting ready to ramp up from cruise to their higher-power course-adjustment output; the four aux boosters similarly shift from warm to hot standby; and the six emergency supplemental boosters come online.

"Looks like it's almost showtime," Åkerman observes.

"Yep," Lackland agrees, "Sooner done the better. Autonav handling this?"

"Uh..." Åkerman hesitates, tapping a few commands on his SECID. "No. Looks like they have it on semi-automatic only. Hideki's the navigator on duty; you know how he is about 'feeling the course' and all that."

"Very familiar, unfortunately," Lackland allows. Ishimura is an outstanding navigator, no doubt about it, but he definitely has to learn that the ship's systems are there because they're more precise than a human could be. When you're skidding several megatons around space, precision counts. When you're trying to flick those megatons through a planetary gravity well like a marble around a bowl, precision is mission critical.

Lackland nods at the board. "Good spool," she says. Sure enough, the engines are responding like the finely tuned machines they are, not so much as a hesitation or skip anywhere.

"We aim to please. Barring that, to wound," Åkerman says with a grin.

"Bjorn, you have issues."

"So the company psychs keep saying, ma'am."

Lackland rolls up her left sleeve and starts tapping commands into her own SECID. Bigboard's display shifts modes, apportioning ENG/NAV two thirds of the vast display and calling up a map of the Engineering spaces on the rest. Blue dots appear throughout the wireframe model.

"You pre-staged the drones?" she asks. Ordinarily, drones are kept parked on their charging cradles and only sent out on specific tasks or partnered with assigned crew.

"Yes, ma'am. It seemed...I don't know, prudent. If something goes wrong, we're not going to have enough time to wait while they get to a trouble spot. I figured if I spread them out, it'd improve response time if we do have a problem."

"I'm not criticizing, Bjorn," Lackland says quietly, "Just observing. It's a good plan; I was going to suggest we get them moving. You beat me to it."

"Just trying to anticipate points of failure, ma'am."

Krista closes the drone display, and ENG/NAV takes over Bigboard again. The ship is still yawing.

"Comin' up on course burn," Åkerman announces to the crew in the room. His usually calm voice has an edge to it.

The captain's chime sounds from the ship's 1MC, the master announcement circuit, a calm tone which contrasts too sharply with the words that follow.

"XO to the bridge on the double!"

"Bjorn, feed me information!" Lackland shouts, pushing off from Bigboard's data desk to give her a boost for the door. She's already at a full run for the door when the sound she doesn't want to hear starts. It's worse than an alam clock by miles; the rising-and-falling shriek of the collision alarm.

The heavy Engineering Control doors are sliding open just as the 1MC comes alive again with a single shouted order: "brace for impact!" Behind her, she hears Åkerman shout "Brace! Brace! Brace!" to his crew as she starts to make the right turn to head for the bridge elevator.

And in that instant, Kirsta Lackland's world comes violently apart.


Stay tuned for Part II...

Happy thousandth post, @Bugzapper!