DX RUST

The original Deus Ex, rebuilt in Rust on the Bevy engine and played with your own copy of the game.

DX RUST is a from-scratch reimplementation of Deus Ex (Ion Storm, 2000). It reads the game's own maps, textures, sounds, music, conversations and class defaults straight from your install, and reproduces the original's gameplay one-to-one:

• every mission, the three endings and the credits;
• AI, combat, stealth, skills, augmentations, inventory;
• conversations, infolinks, computers, keypads;
• saves and the original menus and HUD.

It runs as a native Windows program and on Steam Deck / Linux, with no old engine underneath.

You need your own copy of Deus Ex (Game of the Year Edition from Steam or GOG). No game files are included here or in the releases.

• The whole game. Every map of every mission (the game has 83 map files), every mission script, scripted set pieces and both training courses. Travel between maps keeps the state of hub maps, and the next map is read ahead.

• Faithful by default. The original rules, numbers and quirks, checked against the original scripts. Every modern change is an optional switch in Settings > Enhancements.

• Modern engine underneath.

  • A fixed-timestep simulation, so play is the same at any frame rate.
  • Resolution-independent, crisp UI.
  • No sound-channel limits.
  • Fast loading.

• Controller support.

  • Full gamepad play, with modern-shooter defaults that you can remap.
  • A radial aug wheel and D-pad aug pages.
  • Xbox and PlayStation button glyphs, and snap-to navigation in the menus.

• DualSense. Health on the light bar, adaptive triggers for each weapon class, and rumble. Over USB, also HD haptics and infolinks through the pad's speaker.

• Mod support. Point the launcher's Mods page at the folders of the community mods you have, and turn on as many as you like (see below):

  • the Lay D Denton Project (play as the female JC, with her voice, looks and conversations);
  • HDTP (high-definition models) and New Vision (high-resolution world textures), each with a switch in Settings;
  • Visible Attachments (scopes, lasers and silencers drawn on the weapons);
  • Augmentique (outfits for JC and the people of the world, and weapon skins);
  • GMDX: Augmented Edition (perks bought with skill points on the Skills screen, and its fixes and quality-of-life options);
  • Helios texture packs (repainted characters, items and world);
  • Precipitation (rain sounds and weather for the rain enhancement).

• Classic / Modern in one key. Press Tab in play and the screen wipes between the original look and a modern one, like the graphics switch in some remasters. Modern turns on every enhancement below at once and puts back your own mix the next time; Classic is the game as it shipped.

• A modern look (all optional):

  • remastered lighting: walls and floors relit per pixel by the lamps that reach them, with relief maps (the Parallax Occlusion Mapping addon's normal and height maps, shipped with the release, and generated ones for the rest), highlights on metal, glass and tiles, and glowing lamps, screens and signs - while every shadow the original baked stays;
  • real-time shadows from the map's own lights, ambient occlusion, soft shadows and bloom;
  • rain with splashes, ripples and lightning storms (with the Precipitation mod's sounds), volumetric night clouds and rolling fog, light shafts and haze;
  • modern water with waves, reflections and an open sea, mirrors that reflect JC;
  • a photographic city skyline, light halos and modern coronas, a modern night-vision view;
  • Helios repaints and HD textures, and enhanced particle effects, barrel smoke and bullet impacts;
  • skeletal characters: the Machine God team's rebuilt human bodies on a real skeleton, in the original skins, with blended moves and faces that lip-sync, blink and glance around; JC's own body (or Lay D's, in any Augmentique outfit) in mirrors, third person and under the view in first person; Helios repaints carry over to the rebuilt bodies, and HDTP's people step aside while they are on;
  • ragdolls (Avian physics) for the killed and knocked out, and for JC himself, fluid blood (droplets, trickles that run down walls and drip off their edges, bleeding wounds, pools under the dead, blood on your weapon at close range, bloodier gibs), wound marks, hurt poses and limps, and coat tails that ripple as people move.

• Modern play (all optional):

  • Modern Aiming: the aim sways within the accuracy cone (wide when untrained, steady when you master the weapon or hold still) and the crosshair and gun follow it, with aim-down-sights on guns (lined up on the original weapon models as well as HDTP's);
  • a diegetic rifle scope: the zoomed view is a live lens with a reticle in front of the eye, the world still around it, wandering under the reticle until you master the rifle;
  • a third-person camera (free orbit or over the shoulder), mantling, carried objects as cover, ladder grabbing;
  • Smarter AI (GMDX's tougher guards, sharper senses, suppressive fire, guards who call out and check on disturbances) with optional alert markers over their heads;
  • elements (shocks in water, spreading fire), bullet penetration, melee arcs, thrown-object noise and body alarms;
  • terminals and keypads used in the world: the camera moves in to the screen and you click on it;
  • diegetic healing: hold a medkit, look at the limb to treat and use it there; aug glows on JC's body;
  • better audio: smoother mixing, sound through walls, room reverb and a distant soundscape.

• Achievements. Fifty achievements in the style of the Remastered list, with their own page in the persona screens, an unlock notice in play, spoilers hidden until unlocked, endings that count for every character, and a main-menu screen showing which characters unlocked what.

• Smooth lip sync. Mouths blend between sounds and close gently, and people blink visibly. The timings follow Joe Wintergreen's lipsync mod, and there's a switch in Enhancements to turn it off.

• Optional extras:

  • dialogue hotkeys and Discord Rich Presence;
  • inventory auto-sort, and item rotation with a Pack button and Shift-click to the belt;
  • a Field of View slider;
  • keypad codes and logins taken from your notes;
  • using consumables straight from the floor;
  • ladder grabbing;
  • enemies that run out of ammo;
  • casings and blood that stay;
  • a debug menu with the original cheats.

  Every setting, the original ones included, is on one searchable list.

• Rotating autosaves on map changes and completed goals.

1. Install Deus Ex (Steam or GOG).
2. Download dxrust-windows.zip from Releases and unzip it anywhere.
3. Run dxlauncher.exe. It looks for the Deus Ex folder on its own; if it can't find it, click Game Folder....
4. Choose a display mode and resolution, then click Play.

1. Install Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition through Steam. Proton installs the files DX RUST needs, and you don't have to run the game.
2. In Desktop Mode, download dxrust-steamdeck.tar.xz from Releases and extract it, for example to ~/Games/dxrust.
3. Run dxlauncher once to check that it found your game. Steam libraries and SD cards are searched automatically.
4. Add dxrust.sh (or dxlauncher) to Steam as a Non-Steam Game to play from Game Mode. Use Steam Input's Gamepad template.

1. Download the mods you want and unzip each one into its own folder: Lay D Denton Project, HDTP, New Vision, Augmentique, GMDX (Augmented Edition), Visible Attachments, Helios and Precipitation.
2. On the launcher's Mods page, click Mod Assets Folder... and choose the folder holding them all (each mod in its own folder inside it), or click a mod's own button and choose its folder. Right-click to turn one off again.
3. For Lay D Denton, start a new game and use the portrait arrows: every other face is the female JC. Tick Original Morpheus? or Original Interactions? if you want the original versions of those.
4. HDTP's models, New Vision's textures and Helios's repaints can be switched on and off in Settings > Enhancements > Mods (and follow the Classic / Modern switch).

The mods' files stay in their own folders: nothing in your Deus Ex install is changed, and DX RUST includes none of them. GMDX's own copy of the game code isn't run: its perks are rewritten in Rust and read their names, numbers and icons from your copy of the mod.

You need Rust (stable) and, on Windows, the Visual Studio C++ build tools.

cargo build --release -p dxview                                       # the game
cargo build --release --manifest-path crates/dxlauncher/Cargo.toml    # the launcher
target/release/dxview "C:\path\to\Deus Ex"                            # or run the launcher

On Windows, BUILD_RELEASE.bat makes a shareable dist\ folder.

The whole game is implemented. Before 1.0:

• a full playthrough, with fixes for whatever it finds;
• tuning by eye (water, a few intro effects);
• more performance work on the render thread (Modern with every mod runs about 70 fps on a Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3050);
• Steam Deck tuning;
• save round-trip tests on every map.

Much of the v2.0 list is already in (the Classic / Modern switch, real-time shadows, weather, modern water, third person, Smarter AI, achievements, skeletal characters, ragdolls, fluid blood and remastered lighting with relief maps). Still to come: aim and head-turning layered on the skeletal bodies, and multiplayer, among others. Every item stays optional. Four performance passes so far: a GPU pass took Modern from about 32 to 47 fps on an RTX 3050; a CPU pass (for slower and many-core processors, where the game's own threads were the limit) took the default settings on a Ryzen 5 3600 from 72 to 98 fps; a GPU-driven drawing pass (bindless materials and multi-draw, GPU culling, rain and water moved by shaders) cut the draw calls by three quarters and took Modern with every mod from 41 to about 70 fps; and an allocation pass (mimalloc, per-system allocation counts, buffers reused instead of rebuilt every frame) cut the game's own per-frame heap allocations from thousands to a few hundred at most. If your frame rate sits at exactly 30, the frame is just over VSync's 60 fps budget: try turning off Vertical Sync (Settings > Display). On a CPU with many cores, also try Settings > Enhancements > Display: CPU Worker Threads.

The full list is in ROADMAP.md. Bug reports from playthroughs are very welcome: say which map you were on and what you did.

• DX RUST is an unofficial fan project. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Eidos, Square Enix, Embracer or Ion Storm.
• Deus Ex is a trademark of its owners. All game content (maps, art, audio, text) belongs to them and is read from your own copy at run time.
• The Lay D Denton Project belongs to its authors and is used with their permission. HDTP, New Vision, Visible Attachments, Augmentique, Helios, Precipitation and GMDX belong to their authors. No mod's files are redistributed here.
• The rebuilt human bodies, rig and animations in assets/rig are the Machine God team's, included with their permission (credit them if you reuse them). They contain no Deus Ex data.
• DX RUST's own source code is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 or later (see LICENSE).

• Ion Storm Austin, for Deus Ex.
• The Lay D Denton Project team, for the mod and permission to support it.
• The HDTP team, the New Vision team, the authors of Visible Attachments, Augmentique, Helios, Precipitation and GMDX (CyberP, and Sarge and the Augmented Edition team), for their mods.
• The Machine God team, for the rebuilt human bodies, rig and animations behind Skeletal Characters.
• The Bevy, egui, gilrs and hidapi projects, and the Rust community.