Comments - SteveTack

I realize this is a massively late reply, but the soundtrack is available for free at Steve Foxon's website:
Sfsounds.co.uk

I totally agree that the story elements of ZODIAC could have been handled better as a stand-alone story; my thought process at the time was to re-use as many of the art assets as possible, but in retrospect I didn't really need original characters from DX.

Fun fact: if you've played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you may have noticed signs for Foxon Audio. Those *are* a reference to Steve Foxon, who did the music for ZODIAC and some other mods. He knows one of the writers (who has apparently played ZODIAC!).

I did create the air base level (well, all the levels I did) using a very bright monitor, so that makes sense. You should be able to compensate by bumping up the gamma level in the options.

Hmm, I don't remember a complex tunnel system. Generally I tried to make navigating through the levels pretty straightforward (mazes aren't fun).

This might be a mild spoiler, but as I recall, you won't have access to Henry's room unless you choose to do the "evil" ending during your encounter with Z-1.

That's probably because the author (me) didn't really remember the Deus Ex storyline all that well. :)

That's very strange; I've never heard of that happening.

You could try temporarily enabling cheat codes and when looking at the door, type "opensesame" to open it. (http://www.cheatscodesguides.com/pc-cheats/deus-ex/)

But it sounds like the right flags and mission objectives might not have gotten set, which means you could run into problems later. Like you might not be able to finish the mission or something.

You might be better off loading an earlier save game and trying it again.

Yeah, the reactor terminals can only be blown with C4. The idea is that you can find up to (I think) five C4 bricks throughout the level. One is behind a movable stone block in one of the stairways, one is on the shelf in the little store room in the human residence area, and there's two in a cabinet in the ZODIAC armory. As I recall, I think there's another one somewhere in the level (and it's even possible to have some left over from previous levels).

FYI, for anyone who gets stuck on ZODIAC, there are quite a few folks at the Game FAQ's Deus Ex board who know ZODIAC better than I even do: Boards.gamefaqs.com

Thanks for the kind words, everybody. Yeah, I'm the first one to admit that ZODIAC has some "warts" and I do agree with all of the comments about the dialogue and not fitting in super great with the original game. (part of the problem is that I didn't actually remember the DX characters and story all that well!) Probably the biggest thing going for it is that I somehow got Mr. Foxon to do a bunch of cool music for the thing. It's enough material to completely fill a music CD!

The other thing going for it is that you can actually get to the end. :) It was never really meant to compete with the other DX mods going on at the time; it's really too bad that more of them didn't get finished. I think part of the problem is that folks are so afraid of releasing something "warts and all" that they'd rather quit than release something that wasn't 100% perfect (which just ain't gonna happen).

ForgottenSloth, I agree about the dialogue. The dialogue in ZODIAC was my first stab at any sort of "creative writing" that I can recall. Plus I had my plate full doing the vast majority of the level design, mapping, modeling, scriptiong, texture creation, etc, so I'm afraid that deep character development and emotional resonance kind of took a back seat to the rest of it. :) Looking back, that was something I regretted, since a lot of what the NPC's talk to you about essentially boils down to how you can find the yellow key or whatnot.

Also, I admit that when I first played Deus Ex, I was more in an FPS mode and didn't really pay as much attention to the characters and story as I would have if I had known I was going to attempt a mod later!

If you're serious about a rewrite, I know some of the die hard fans would get a kick out of that. Since all of the character dialogue is in one 800k file, I could distribute an "improved dialogue" patch that was just that file.