If onlink is still on, i may have a few suggestions.
I have been playing uplink since 2004 and have played all the mods people made with the dev-cd such as FBI, VDPIN, MP3 PLAYER etc.
And albeit none brought to the table as much as onlink did when it first came out as a uplink mod, and despite it being a standalone game now it has features that uplink players never dreamed of.
Regardless, there is always room for improvement i believe.
Anyhow lets get straight to the point.
One of the features that i believe has been missing overall is
exploration and rewards, whilst the story line is awesome it is rather linear and does not allow much room for exploration and rewards for doing so. Hacker evolution by exosyphen rewards this behaviour and it included riddles and ASM codes that you needed to figure out what they did, and once you solve them it will lead you towards exploits and hidden sidequests and i thought it was so cool that
uplink (now onlink) needed to include this gameplay mechanic as well.
Hence the following suggested scenarios.
Porposed scenarios:
- First:You happen to trace another AI agent and you hack yor way around his PC and find that it has some interesting unnoficial software tool that you might as well get your hands on before you ditch him and his computer gets siezed by the feds.
- Second:You are hacking a big company and find out that they have in their link list, a lan or file server, where they have been working on some powerful tools and or malware. They may, in some rare instances, offer you these tools as payment for your services along witn some credits, or you just can steal the tool from them
Of course those tools
will not be essential to your game progress and are entirely optional, as a reward for curiosity and exploration.
Finding software in company servers that you can download and then execute from console, only to find out that it does absolutely nothing it is quite a let-down for exploration.
Moreover i have always thought that a way to open files and view their contents such as databases is what the game has been missing, you might find some usefull information by doing so, a
cat console command will be useful or perhaps a file viewer tool?
In addition the databases and software tools shall be packed, encrypted and/or hashed so that you do not access them early in the game and it turns unbalanced and overpowered.
They shall not break the game mechanics or storyline somehow.This will introduce new several branches and through them you can progress through the world not only by completing missions for contractors but also from exploring the game,
and all this without those branches becoming a new tree by themselves as they still remain within the main game trunk. They will be just alternate ways to deal with the game
Fingerprint and retinal security systems are other features that i think are missing, since it is 2020, access to personal devices such as a phone or a personal computer, or high security such as LAN and Mainframes can be done through biological ID.
You can hack into the administrator phone or PC and steal the hash for his fingerprint or the digital dump of the iris, and then use a fingerprint and retina spoofing tools. Not only this will give an extra layer of security to break, and therefore more fun, but also gives more purpose to phone numbers that otherwise would only be a mean to obtain the admin voice pattern, and since the voice tool v2 can save it to memory anyways, it pretty much devaluates their potential, since you cannot use them as bounce points, they become useless too early.
Well those are my ideas, if something is already on the dev TO-DO list please let me know, i have not seen any of this on the suggestion board though.
Greeting fellas, happy hacking! ![Twisted Evil :twisted:](./images/smilies/icon_twisted.gif)