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Editing hack tool difficulties

Matt Filer edited this page Feb 11, 2020 · 8 revisions

The Hack Tool Editor allows for customisation of the in-game door hacking minigame difficulty levels. These minigames require the user to put a marker within a specified "selection angle" using either their gamepad's thumbstick or mouse, and then match a series of randomly generated glyphs within an allotted time. A range of parameters can be customised to change the toughness of the minigames, and the tool's varying upgrade levels can also be modified to max-out at different difficulties.

The class of difficulty given to any hacking point in the game's maps is determined in its attached Cathode script. To work out what difficulties are used where, you'll simply have to play the game and look at what parameters you're presented with in your minigame. You can match these up to each difficulty configuration to figure out the difficulty of the door. Support for editing Cathode scripts is coming soon - so eventually this should be slightly easier to find/customise.

Tool Level Difficulties

This specifies what puzzle difficulties each hack tool version can access. For example, if you have upgraded to hack tool level 3 (acquired in-game later in the campaign), you will be able to complete the hack puzzles with a maximum difficulty level of 10 (by default). Changing these maximum difficulty numbers will allow you to access more or less puzzles with each hack tool version: so if you want to make all puzzles accessible to the default hack tool, for example, change all max difficulties to 99.

Max Difficulty For Tool Level 0

The maximum puzzle difficulty able to be solved by hack tool level zero (level zero being the default un-equipped state?).

Max Difficulty For Tool Level 1

The maximum puzzle difficulty able to be solved by hack tool level 1.

Max Difficulty For Tool Level 2

The maximum puzzle difficulty able to be solved by hack tool level 2.

Max Difficulty For Tool Level 3

The maximum puzzle difficulty able to be solved by hack tool level 3.

Min/Max Difficulty For Tool Level 99

The minimum and maximum difficulties able to be solved by any other hack tool variants.

Difficulty Settings

Difficulty settings specify how hard each hacking minigame should be depending on the situation. For example, if the door is a low difficulty (being accessed near the start of the game) it should have less glyphs to solve and a longer time to complete the minigame.

To edit the below settings, select a hack tool difficulty from the dropdown list and press "Load Difficulty". These difficulty IDs relate to the maximum difficulties in the "Tool Level Difficulties" section.

To keep your changes, remember to save before you load a new difficulty level into the editor!

Inner Selection Angle

The angle in degrees to determine the inside of the selection angle that the player must match in order to be able to take part in the minigame.

Outer Selection Angle

The angle in degrees to determine the outside of the selection angle that the player must match in order to be able to take part in the minigame.

Selection Angle Increase

When the player has found the selection range and has had the selector in that area for long enough, the first grace will be increased by this amount.

Number Of Rounds

The number of rounds in the minigame, the vanilla game only ever uses one, but enabling multiple would require multiple minigames to be solved in order to be counted as a victory.

Length Of Keycode

The length of the glyph combination to solve. The vanilla game never goes above five glyphs, however you can just about fit up to 6 on the hack tool's display (the sixth glyph suffers from a visual bug however).

Number Of Alarms

This is a seemingly scrapped feature that would have had a secondary alarmed code to solve in the minigame. Looking at the UI flash files it seems that although this alarm code is generated with a length dependant on this value, it is not used anywhere in the minigame.

Timer Countdown In Seconds

The time given to the player to complete the minigame.


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