Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Black Griffon
Mar 12, 2005

Now, in the quantum moment before the closure, when all become one. One moment left. One point of space and time.

I know who you are. You are destiny.


ThisIsJohnWayne posted:

Metro 2033 in sandbox Chernobyl maps would probably be it for me. Got that same itch. Besides, how old are the games now? It's starting to look so dated and ugly it gets almost yaring.

I was kinda shook when I booted up CoP for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I remember SoC as a very pretty game, but this series is pretty fuckin ugly in retrospect.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Owl Inspector
Sep 14, 2011

I think they hold up very well with mods due to their great sound and atmospheric effects. But just looking at the graphics of the games unmodded, they are definitely very dated now. If you ever play escape from tarkov I think stalker will look jarring.

v1ld
Apr 16, 2012

my bony fealty posted:

Fwiw I'd recommend playing through SOC with just ZRP first, Autumn Aurora does change/add some gameplay stuff that makes the experience different. Repairing, sleeping, detectors aren't in SOC, and medkits work differently. AA is also just generally more difficult.

This is great advice. ZRP + textures for a first run every time.

AA2 is a great mod and in my top 3, but it changes mechanics and still has the unfortunate save corruption bug. Not a good first run mod. The detector mechanic alone almost guarantees you will miss the best artifact in the game since you won't know where to look and won't have a detector that can find it when you first pass through.

Great mod for a second run.

ThisIsJohnWayne posted:

Edit the actor values a bit. Give specific enemies a little less hp and you get more satisfying play while saving a lot of boring ammo tweaking.

Or lower piercing_resistence (bullet resistance) either in actors or their armour.

Nothing wrong with this or the original complaint, vanilla SoC is very bullet spongy. There is an optional mod in ZRP that fixes this. In general it's worth going through all of ZRP's docs, there's a lot of good stuff in that mod.

v1ld fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 26, 2018

Sininu
Jan 8, 2014

v1ld posted:

This is great advice. ZRP + textures for a first run every time.

AA2 is a great mod and in my top 3, but it changes mechanics and still has the unfortunate save corruption bug. Not a good first run mod. The detector mechanic alone almost guarantees you will miss the best artifact in the game since you won't know where to look and won't have a detector that can find it when you first pass through.

Would you like to tell me more about the detector mechanic?

Black Griffon
Mar 12, 2005

Now, in the quantum moment before the closure, when all become one. One moment left. One point of space and time.

I know who you are. You are destiny.


Digirat posted:

I think they hold up very well with mods due to their great sound and atmospheric effects. But just looking at the graphics of the games unmodded, they are definitely very dated now. If you ever play escape from tarkov I think stalker will look jarring.

Yeah, I think I remember the atmosphere very fondly, as I should. Blowouts are still scary, anomalies are weird and trading shots with mercs in desolate factories is tense and good.

Gobblecoque
Sep 6, 2011
One thing that STALKER absolutely nails is lighting and shadows, even compared to big budget games released today. I usually don't much mind low res textures and models but skimping on lighting can really kill a game's visuals.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord

Gobblecoque posted:

One thing that STALKER absolutely nails is lighting and shadows, even compared to big budget games released today. I usually don't much mind low res textures and models but skimping on lighting can really kill a game's visuals.

The other half of the equation seems to be sound design. Its nowhere near DICE as far as explosion, gunshots, and echos go, but all the little things of crickets chirping, the occasional blind dog howling in the distance, wind blowing when you crest a hill...its all really good. I feel like other modern AAA games have that and more, but I don't know why it works in Stalker much better? Maybe because you're actively listening for things that might creep up on you?

communism bitch
Apr 24, 2009
Sound design even in AAA can be really, astonishingly lazy. Wilderness sounds, for example, are typically just one stock track of like 3 or 5 minutes endlessly looping with all the bird and grasshopper noises repeating over and over - there is one particular stock forest audio track that I've noticed in about a dozen games (I think I first heard it in the Gothic games, then the Witcher Games, and a bunch of other RPGs) that is unmistakable once you learn to recognise it, and makes for a completely flat environment, because you know that the sounds don't mean anything in the game, they're empty.

It's been a long time since I modded Stalker audio, but I seem to remember that GSC's approach was basically to have a stock background environmental track and then a script that called random sounds from a list every now and again - so you'd have 20 different kinds of gunshots, the same for dogs barking, wind howling, distant explosions, etc., and it'd just pick one every now and again and layer it into the background. Even though the total selection wasn't massive it had effectively limitless variety in combining those sounds. It's a really neat trick, and works very well to create a believakle and dynamic environment. And even though those sounds don't relate to anything actually happening in the world their randomness can trick you into believing that it is.

I know how the sound in Stalker works, and it still manages to spook me and draw me into the world, where sound in so many other games feels dead and lazy.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Gobblecoque posted:

One thing that STALKER absolutely nails is lighting and shadows, even compared to big budget games released today. I usually don't much mind low res textures and models but skimping on lighting can really kill a game's visuals.

I'm really glad that Warframe is going down precisely this route. They updated the game's lighting engine a few months ago and I haven't noticed much of a change, but today they showed off a test area actually designed for said lighting engine and



It's hard to complain about a game that uses 1.5 gigs of ram that has lighting that looks that good.

buglord posted:

The other half of the equation seems to be sound design. Its nowhere near DICE as far as explosion, gunshots, and echos go, but all the little things of crickets chirping, the occasional blind dog howling in the distance, wind blowing when you crest a hill...its all really good. I feel like other modern AAA games have that and more, but I don't know why it works in Stalker much better? Maybe because you're actively listening for things that might creep up on you?

The sound design is insanely bad in STALKER, in some regards, because all the stuff like dogs howling and birds chirping is just randomly playing .mp3 files like most games have.

What really makes STALKER stand apart in sound is the fact that it uses OpenAL, which in turn means that it supports full 3D positional audio, something which I have never heard in any other game and it is absolutely mind-blowing when you get it set up correctly.

bongwizzard
May 19, 2005

Then one day I meet a man,
He came to me and said,
"Hard work good and hard work fine,
but first take care of head"
Grimey Drawer

ThisIsJohnWayne posted:

Edit the actor values a bit. Give specific enemies a little less hp and you get more satisfying play while saving a lot of boring ammo tweaking.

Or lower piercing_resistence (bullet resistance) either in actors or their armour.


v1ld posted:

Nothing wrong with this or the original complaint, vanilla SoC is very bullet spongy. There is an optional mod in ZRP that fixes this. In general it's worth going through all of ZRP's docs, there's a lot of good stuff in that mod.

Yea, I guess I should actually read all the docs, I skimmed them as I was eager to get stalking asap. I am playing on Master (or whatever the highest difficulty is) and I still feel like both myself and the bandits can take too many bullets.

I have really missed these games, I keep telling myself I will finish one of them someday, but I can never get past midgame, the urge to gently caress-off exploring tends to kill all my game playing time.

SocketWrench
Jul 8, 2012

by Fritz the Horse

Sininu posted:

I just installed Shadow of Chernobyl. What should I do now?
I would use the Complete mod, but I've heard lot of bad things about it plus that it's very out of date. I don't want ultra tedious hardcore survival mods, I want something that polishes mechanics, fixes bugs, perhaps adds upgraded weapon models and animations (I've seen videos showcasing really nice animations, but I heard they were hard to set up or something?) and doesn't need ton of tinkering with.

Fake edit: The second post that details the games and mods available for them was last edited in 2013 so might be outdated as well?

Once you've played through, if you can find it, try out the Oblivion Lost mod. It's out there, but you need to dig because it's fairly old and was removed from popular places by the creator when he released the 3.0 version (this version sucks. It's basically wanted to be what the Call of Chernobyl mod is and failed hard. If it says 3.0 or higher, don't, just don't).
It adds in some extra gear and weapons, but stays true to the original. It also adds cut mutants back into the game like Burers, zombies (non brain scorcher zombies), those bastard cats, and Fractures. You also get some fixes, and I can't remember if it was a separate mod I added or not that added repair abilities....I think it was part of the mod. It also doesn't end the game when you beat it so you can explore the places and continue to play. Adds new and cut artifacts and introduces a feature where you can mix artifacts or use anomalies to transmutate them into better ones

Sparkyhodgo
Jun 21, 2003
Long potato

turn off the TV posted:

What really makes STALKER stand apart in sound is the fact that it uses OpenAL, which in turn means that it supports full 3D positional audio, something which I have never heard in any other game and it is absolutely mind-blowing when you get it set up correctly.

What do I need to do to set up OpenAL correctly?

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Sparkyhodgo posted:

What do I need to do to set up OpenAL correctly?

Google it. There are several guides and I can't remember which worked for me, and it was complicated enough that I didn't understand the whole process.

staberind
Feb 20, 2008

but i dont wanna be a spaceship
Fun Shoe

SocketWrench posted:

Once you've played through, if you can find it, try out the Oblivion Lost mod. It's out there, but you need to dig because it's fairly old and was removed from popular places by the creator when he released the 3.0 version (this version sucks. It's basically wanted to be what the Call of Chernobyl mod is and failed hard. If it says 3.0 or higher, don't, just don't).
It adds in some extra gear and weapons, but stays true to the original. It also adds cut mutants back into the game like Burers, zombies (non brain scorcher zombies), those bastard cats, and Fractures. You also get some fixes, and I can't remember if it was a separate mod I added or not that added repair abilities....I think it was part of the mod. It also doesn't end the game when you beat it so you can explore the places and continue to play. Adds new and cut artifacts and introduces a feature where you can mix artifacts or use anomalies to transmutate them into better ones

This all sounds like lost alpha, i'm grinding through it again, after getting burned out the with the first iteration I played a while back, (3-4 years), I just reached Sakharov in a completely different and huge "Yanov", of course silly liberties have been taken with the story, but its gunplay and enviroment are pretty pure stalker. plus, even if you can get the trilogy for very cheap, its free, (does not need to be installed over soc or whatever) so that and c.o.c with a storyline mod, (has anyone made anything other than Dr .X's questlines mod?) and you are in gravy for a long time.
on the other hand, making a storyline that encompasses all the maps well would take a really long time, perhaps a super prequil, to a couple of years after the zone appears, with just the army, bandits and a few loners, places like the bar just getting started and nearer the end the monolith forming as well. make it more radioactive and have far more dynamic fields of anomalies and mutants, so getting around is far more chancy and down to whats happening at the time, with the possibility to be trapped in areas for a while till you can plot a path through weirdness. also, no entry/exits on the pda.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Okay, I have some more time on my hands so here's some instructions that look like what I used:

How to get OpenAL Soft working and updated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/5pjvb3/enabling_fully_3d_positional_audio_with_stereo/
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1fzonq/psa_for_games_using_openal_including_minecraft/

How to get an HRTF profile that matches your hearing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1fzonq/psa_for_games_using_openal_including_minecraft/cagd3lb/

Getting a good HRTF profile is the hardest part since there are a lot to choose from, but the end result is totally worth it. I recorded some gameplay in Agroprom underground about six months ago using it. It comes across a little strangely in the video, and I imagine doubly so if you have a different profile than me, but it should give you somewhat of an idea of what it's like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3Uuktg75c4&t=270s

SocketWrench
Jul 8, 2012

by Fritz the Horse

staberind posted:

This all sounds like lost alpha, i'm grinding through it again, after getting burned out the with the first iteration I played a while back, (3-4 years), I just reached Sakharov in a completely different and huge "Yanov", of course silly liberties have been taken with the story, but its gunplay and enviroment are pretty pure stalker. plus, even if you can get the trilogy for very cheap, its free, (does not need to be installed over soc or whatever) so that and c.o.c with a storyline mod, (has anyone made anything other than Dr .X's questlines mod?) and you are in gravy for a long time.
on the other hand, making a storyline that encompasses all the maps well would take a really long time, perhaps a super prequil, to a couple of years after the zone appears, with just the army, bandits and a few loners, places like the bar just getting started and nearer the end the monolith forming as well. make it more radioactive and have far more dynamic fields of anomalies and mutants, so getting around is far more chancy and down to whats happening at the time, with the possibility to be trapped in areas for a while till you can plot a path through weirdness. also, no entry/exits on the pda.

Nah, everything is mostly the same as the original. Story, goals, all that crap. It just resurrects some cut stuff and lets you modify artifacts, adds some weapons, etc. 3.0 OL went for kinda what CoC is, but was just miserable and the end quest for the new modified story was a slog of uninteresting poo poo with really no payoff. It's just a bunch of bullshit to "encourage exploration".



On another note I decided to play around with the debug system for CoC and started rezzing stuff from the physical list. Everything went fine till I rezzed a heli in the gates leading out of Rostock to warehouses. It trapped me in and nearly killed me. Rezzed some crates and hopped out. Got to a more open spot and rezzed heli_2 and it simply crushed me. My plan was to see if I could build a sort of fortified area since I had the game set on survival mode.
Also of note, don't use Azazel with Survival because it will eventually put you in a Monolith body, in Pripyat Outskirts, in the tall building over the underground lab that's loaded with zombified stalkers who the Monolith are neutral to. the problem being those zombified stalkers want to kill you and your "friends" don't give the slightest gently caress about you or them. Till one decides to walk into the crossfire to loot a corpse.

Sininu
Jan 8, 2014

I got a quest to find boar asses (hooves) and none of the boars out of about 15 I've killed so far have them? Heck? Also what's special about detectors in Autumn Aurora 2.1? Never got an answer to that. I've been finding artifacts quite easily with first and now the second detector.

Game runs quite bad though with first core almost always at 100% and I can't tell if it uses a second core or not. I'm getting frequent half-second long freezes that are very distracting and general low framerate at times. Will next two games utilize CPU better? I did play through CoP about 7-8 years ago and it ran perfectly without mods but I'm not sure if it was because it was better optimized or it just liked my dual core 2.6GHz desktop CPU more than my quad core 3.4GHz laptop i7.

Edit: More impressions: Enemies instantly seeing you through thick foliage after you took down one of their dudes with suppressed gun while those enemies were fighting someone else is annoying as heck. Also, they repopulate areas wayyy too fast.
Stashes always being empty unless I got a marker for them makes exploration kind of boring.
I assume this is mod issue, but ambient sounds (animals/gunfire) that seemingly come from relatively close distance are bad nonsense. They also start and end abruptly.

Another edit with another question: I got a task to kill a loner who had allegedly stolen an expensive artifact. So I did kill him and his buddies because I had no way to just kill him alone. That seems to have made all the loners mad at me? That doesn't make sense to me how would they know? Aren't loners like people with no leadership and no communication between groups?

Sininu fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Feb 2, 2018

NeoSeeker
Nov 26, 2007

:spergin:ASK ME ABOUT MY TOTALLY REALISTIC ZIPLINE-BASED ZOMBIE SURVIVAL PLAN & HOW THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL VIDEO GAME GENRE HAS BEEN "RAPED BY THE MAINSTREAM":spergin:
This game doesn't utilize multiple cores. It just uses the first one and only.

I think the reason why the graphics and audio still hold up is because it's such a stark style and everything is fairly uniform. They just did a good job nailing it. The atmosphere is the best in a game so far. I'd go so far as to say it's on par with silent hill 2.


Also the lightning storms and blowouts are still amazing.

aniviron
Sep 11, 2014


The game looks like an old Soviet photograph, imperfections included- it's washed out, grainy, and bleak, but it has a transcendent beauty to it. Fits the game perfectly, I think, enough that I don't care about the way the details get lost when you're too close to something.

Rock Puncher
Jul 26, 2014
so i started playing SoC and I'm up to dark valley again, which is where my original playthrough ended due to some gamebreaking bug and no save within a reasonable amount of effort. I hope this doesn't happen again. More manual and quicksaves this time for sure. One issue I am having is that every time I quicksave all the sound currently playing gets muted/paused for some length of time, so if it's raining it suddenly becomes extremely quiet and any chatter from nearby friendlies/enemies is also muted. I can live with it, but maybe someone has an idea? I'm using ZRP and the shaders, that's about it. I also did some openAL stuff that was posted in this thread (thanks for that, friend), but I think the problem has been persistent with or without that, I'm not sure.

Inside Out Mom
Jan 9, 2004

Franklin B. Znorps
Dignity, Class, Internet
Is there anything I need to know about modding this if I am using the steam version? I downloaded ZRP and am reading the guide. It says copy over the game data folder to the location of your own, but I don't see that in my install directory. Am I in the wrong location?


Also, should I still use the Shaders in the OP if I'm using ZRP?

Is there a mod to remove the head bob? Kinda gives me motion sickness :/

v1ld
Apr 16, 2012

Inside Out Mom posted:

Is there anything I need to know about modding this if I am using the steam version? I downloaded ZRP and am reading the guide. It says copy over the game data folder to the location of your own, but I don't see that in my install directory. Am I in the wrong location?

Also, should I still use the Shaders in the OP if I'm using ZRP?

Is there a mod to remove the head bob? Kinda gives me motion sickness :/

Steam works fine, as does GoG or any other version. There is no difference between then for modding, though folk tales say otherwise.

There's no gamedata folder by default, so just drop ZRP's in there and you're good to go. Add other mods to this folder, like the shaders. Yes, using the improved shaders is a good idea. If your machine is relatively modern and has 1.5 GB of video memory, also consider using the Absolute texture packs.

Head bob and a lot more can be controlled from ZRP. Be sure to run its configurator program after installing it, it has a lot of functionality for tweaking the game. All in the docs that come with it.

Inside Out Mom
Jan 9, 2004

Franklin B. Znorps
Dignity, Class, Internet
Thanks man. Working it out. Also that pack will be installed asap. Can't wait to start this tomorrow night

v1ld
Apr 16, 2012

Rock Puncher posted:

so i started playing SoC and I'm up to dark valley again, which is where my original playthrough ended due to some gamebreaking bug and no save within a reasonable amount of effort. I hope this doesn't happen again. More manual and quicksaves this time for sure. One issue I am having is that every time I quicksave all the sound currently playing gets muted/paused for some length of time, so if it's raining it suddenly becomes extremely quiet and any chatter from nearby friendlies/enemies is also muted. I can live with it, but maybe someone has an idea? I'm using ZRP and the shaders, that's about it. I also did some openAL stuff that was posted in this thread (thanks for that, friend), but I think the problem has been persistent with or without that, I'm not sure.

Never seen that behavior and I use OpenAL. Does it also happen if you do a ZRP named save via ESC s (escape to get to the menu then s when in the menu)? Which is the same as doing "save xxx" from the console, so you could try that as well.

Basically, you need to isolate whether it's something weird tied to your quicksave key, like say some overlay doing something, or something happening due to how your game is saving. So save by other methods and see if the problem occurs then too. ESC s is perfect since you have ZRP - it's bound to a key.

The ESC s feature in ZRP is great, I merge it into any SoC mod I play. It creates a new save named after the level you're in and includes a timestamp so the name is unique. Also drops you back in the game right away when you hit the s key, so a quick ESC s becomes second nature.

You do have to prune old saves once in a while, but that's not so hard. I have some code to keep just the last 20 such saves, which I find useful.

my bony fealty
Oct 1, 2008

Call of Chernobyl 1.5 teaser trailer

http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/videos/call-of-chernobyl-15-teaser

It, uh, looks like CoC with some more stuff added.

I'm kinda waiting for the Call of Misery Post-Release project before I dive back into STALKER but who knows if that's ever coming out lol

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

my bony fealty posted:

Call of Chernobyl 1.5 teaser trailer

http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/videos/call-of-chernobyl-15-teaser

It, uh, looks like CoC with some more stuff added.

I'm kinda waiting for the Call of Misery Post-Release project before I dive back into STALKER but who knows if that's ever coming out lol

Full A-life simulation is huge. If they're adding it in as a feature that probably means that literally the entire zone is running without it lagging. That alone would be worth a new update.

Also, they added in a literal lorebook that you can unlock over 100 articles for. And that video appeared to have a pilotable chopper at one point.

v1ld
Apr 16, 2012

The image below is the usual recommended Starter Pack and what I followed for my first run. I'd skip SWO, the weather overhaul, as it tends to overly dreary and dramatically gloomy weather.

SWTC Silver Edition is a better weather mod if you want to change that part of the game; don't use the Gold Edition, it has the same weather and changes other parts of the game needlessly. The /sg/ SoC repo has a copy of SWTC in the Eye Candy/SWTC folder. That repo is a good resource for mods in general, though it doesn't look like it's being maintained any longer and some stuff is out of date.

But vanilla weather is just fine and doesn't look outdated. SWTC just spruces it up a lot, it isn't required as much as the texture upgrades.



my bony fealty posted:

I'm kinda waiting for the Call of Misery Post-Release project before I dive back into STALKER but who knows if that's ever coming out lol
Me too. It's moving along nicely from what I hear. Lanforse is still actively working on it.

CoM A.R.E.A. is another mod that seems promising. It's based on the CoC 1.5 beta, merged in CoM and MLR 7.2. Adds some new features of its own. It doesn't seem to follow Last Day's excessive hardcore is everything direction either.

Sininu posted:

Would you like to tell me more about the detector mechanic?
Clear Sky, which introduced detectors, and Call of Pripyat, which followed it, both have fixed-location anomalous areas that are the only places you can find artifacts. They're even marked on your PDA map. There are also different classes of detector with the more advanced ones being able to detect more complex artifacts. So you go artifact hunting in those games by searching in known spots with your detector.

SoC has artifacts lying around in the open in fixed, but otherwise unmarked locations for the most part. You won't know when to pull out your detector if they're invisible.

For eg, one of the most useful artifacts in SoC, the Urchin (-30 rad and lightweight in AA2), is in an iconic location in the Agropom Underground that you are very unlikely to check. There is no anomalous activity in that location. Worse, you won't have a detector that can find it when you first go through there. It's obtainable in AA2 if you know it's there and come back for it later.

Not game breaking in any way, but will make the game harder. If you're going to play through just once, you can't go wrong with AA2.

v1ld fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Feb 6, 2018

Michaellaneous
Oct 30, 2013

How do people actually enjoy Misery. I am all for challenge, but when a single mutant in the first 5 minutes of the game takes 90% of your health, half your ammo and destroys 60% armor...i am not entirely sure how I feel about that.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Archonex posted:

Full A-life simulation is huge. If they're adding it in as a feature that probably means that literally the entire zone is running without it lagging. That alone would be worth a new update.

I'm curious as to what that is going to actually mean. You can already enable full zone simulation, so I wonder what they've changed about it.

Vorenus
Jul 14, 2013

my bony fealty posted:

Call of Chernobyl 1.5 teaser trailer

http://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/videos/call-of-chernobyl-15-teaser

It, uh, looks like CoC with some more stuff added.

I'm kinda waiting for the Call of Misery Post-Release project before I dive back into STALKER but who knows if that's ever coming out lol

I'm looking forward to this. I've been playing CoC recently and found it pretty enjoyable. I turned up the AI stalker spawn numbers to the second-highest level to help with activity/population and had unintended consequences - getting into a fight with Freedom in Army Warehouses or simply entering Dead City tends to result in a massive stream of angry dudes coming my way. The gunfight intensity is similar to SGM Alpha Squads but instead of 5-6 pinpoint-accurate tanks it's 20-30 guys who are individually slightly less threatening but there are 20-30 of them and at least 3-4 of those are absurdly skilled at sneaky breeki. I have been assassinated by a sneaky flank more times in 12 hours of play than I think I ever was in 2-3 full runs of various SGM iterations.

As an example, I set out from Rostok to the Brain Scorcher with a Tactical Helmet, PSZ duty armor, a SPAS-12 and an AK-74N. Everything had full 2nd tier upgrades, with ~80 shotgun rounds and 600 or so 7.62 rounds. I managed to mostly sneak to Radar without fighting.

I came back with 2 bars left on my armor, all broken weapons, a few rounds of looted ammo, and 79 Monolith patches. I'm somewhat terrified of what's waiting at the NPP.

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

turn off the TV posted:

I'm curious as to what that is going to actually mean. You can already enable full zone simulation, so I wonder what they've changed about it.

They've probably made it so it isn't a buggy mess, given the hundreds of bug fixes mentioned. I noticed I got a ton of crashes with it on at one point, which stopped when I turned it off.

One thing the Faction Wars guy suggested doing at one point is not turning it on since the second anything really deviated from the norm and you had real interactions going on it started to buckle on some systems.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Vorenus posted:

I'm looking forward to this. I've been playing CoC recently and found it pretty enjoyable. I turned up the AI stalker spawn numbers to the second-highest level to help with activity/population and had unintended consequences - getting into a fight with Freedom in Army Warehouses or simply entering Dead City tends to result in a massive stream of angry dudes coming my way. The gunfight intensity is similar to SGM Alpha Squads but instead of 5-6 pinpoint-accurate tanks it's 20-30 guys who are individually slightly less threatening but there are 20-30 of them and at least 3-4 of those are absurdly skilled at sneaky breeki. I have been assassinated by a sneaky flank more times in 12 hours of play than I think I ever was in 2-3 full runs of various SGM iterations.

As an example, I set out from Rostok to the Brain Scorcher with a Tactical Helmet, PSZ duty armor, a SPAS-12 and an AK-74N. Everything had full 2nd tier upgrades, with ~80 shotgun rounds and 600 or so 7.62 rounds. I managed to mostly sneak to Radar without fighting.

I came back with 2 bars left on my armor, all broken weapons, a few rounds of looted ammo, and 79 Monolith patches. I'm somewhat terrified of what's waiting at the NPP.

You can actually control smart terrain spawning, occupation and travel weighting in vanilla CoC. If I end up playing it again I might recreate the edit I made to those settings which made main faction bases, mutant lairs and routes into/out of the map the only locations where NPCs spawned. I made factions prioritize certain locations on the map, too, so they would frequently send squads out to various locations. Ecologists traveled between bunkers and anomalies, Mercenaries beeline for labs. The military focused on the edges of the zone and the NPP. Loners wandered, Bandits camped near roads, etc. It wound up creating a very chaotic feeling to the zone, especially towards the north, because you very rarely had a sense of who or what would be where or when. A lot of people didn't seem to like how transient most factions were, but I loved seeing things like a handful of Monolith guys in Red Forest on their way to X-16 get jumped by a Chimera that probably spawned half the zone away and just bumped into them. It really made the zone feel more like it was populated by various Stalkers and factions doing their own things, rather than an all out war like Warfare or completely static like the regular settings.

Archonex posted:

They've probably made it so it isn't a buggy mess, given the hundreds of bug fixes mentioned. I noticed I got a ton of crashes with it on at one point, which stopped when I turned it off.

One thing the Faction Wars guy suggested doing at one point is not turning it on since the second anything really deviated from the norm and you had real interactions going on it started to buckle on some systems.

Maybe I just don't know what full A-Life simulation means. If I remember correctly I was able to enable a setting that simulated movement and maybe combat throughout the entire zone, but I'm not sure if it was the same thing as I don't recall any stability issues.

turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Feb 6, 2018

botany
Apr 27, 2013

by Lowtax
who owns the STALKER franchise these days? i'm really hoping for a new game on an engine that is actually good. i'd kill for a singleplayer STALKER game on the tarkov engine :swoon:

drkeiscool
Aug 1, 2014
Soiled Meat

botany posted:

who owns the STALKER franchise these days? i'm really hoping for a new game on an engine that is actually good. i'd kill for a singleplayer STALKER game on the tarkov engine :swoon:

As of this moment, I think it's GSC Game World, who dissolved in 2011 and reformed in 2014. They published Cossacks 3 in 2016, and are still active as far as I know.

Also, the GSC twitter page keeps post STALKER fan vids.

drkeiscool fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Feb 6, 2018

Sininu
Jan 8, 2014

v1ld posted:

Clear Sky, which introduced detectors, and Call of Pripyat, which followed it, both have fixed-location anomalous areas that are the only places you can find artifacts. They're even marked on your PDA map. There are also different classes of detector with the more advanced ones being able to detect more complex artifacts. So you go artifact hunting in those games by searching in known spots with your detector.

SoC has artifacts lying around in the open in fixed, but otherwise unmarked locations for the most part. You won't know when to pull out your detector if they're invisible.

For eg, one of the most useful artifacts in SoC, the Urchin (-30 rad and lightweight in AA2), is in an iconic location in the Agropom Underground that you are very unlikely to check. There is no anomalous activity in that location. Worse, you won't have a detector that can find it when you first go through there. It's obtainable in AA2 if you know it's there and come back for it later.

Not game breaking in any way, but will make the game harder. If you're going to play through just once, you can't go wrong with AA2.

Thanks, I did accidentally notice 12 hours in that my second level detector did mark artifacts on minimap in places where I wouldn't ever had thought to check. Places that didn't have any anomalies close. It's quite weird. Now I just take the detector out from time to time just in case.
How did artifact hunting in vanilla SoC work without detectors?

I have played CoP to completion but never got further than first hour in SoC ~8 years ago. Bad performance and high level of jank in SoC is making sure current one is going to be my only playthrough. Still enjoying it quite a lot though.

Vorenus
Jul 14, 2013

turn off the TV posted:

You can actually control smart terrain spawning, occupation and travel weighting in vanilla CoC. If I end up playing it again I might recreate the edit I made to those settings which made main faction bases, mutant lairs and routes into/out of the map the only locations where NPCs spawned. I made factions prioritize certain locations on the map, too, so they would frequently send squads out to various locations. Ecologists traveled between bunkers and anomalies, Mercenaries beeline for labs. The military focused on the edges of the zone and the NPP. Loners wandered, Bandits camped near roads, etc. It wound up creating a very chaotic feeling to the zone, especially towards the north, because you very rarely had a sense of who or what would be where or when. A lot of people didn't seem to like how transient most factions were, but I loved seeing things like a handful of Monolith guys in Red Forest on their way to X-16 get jumped by a Chimera that probably spawned half the zone away and just bumped into them. It really made the zone feel more like it was populated by various Stalkers and factions doing their own things, rather than an all out war like Warfare or completely static like the regular settings.



Did I miss this in the settings or does it require directly modifying files? Your setup sounds even better than what I'm currently playing.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Sininu posted:

How did artifact hunting in vanilla SoC work without detectors?

Anomalies in SoC were significantly smaller so you could reliably just bump into one.

Vorenus posted:

Did I miss this in the settings or does it require directly modifying files? Your setup sounds even better than what I'm currently playing.

You need to modify a file with a text editor and change the values for any smart terrain you want to adjust. It is not exactly an exciting process.

SaltyJesus
Jun 2, 2011

Arf!

turn off the TV posted:

You can actually control smart terrain spawning, occupation and travel weighting in vanilla CoC. If I end up playing it again I might recreate the edit I made to those settings which made main faction bases, mutant lairs and routes into/out of the map the only locations where NPCs spawned. I made factions prioritize certain locations on the map, too, so they would frequently send squads out to various locations. Ecologists traveled between bunkers and anomalies, Mercenaries beeline for labs. The military focused on the edges of the zone and the NPP. Loners wandered, Bandits camped near roads, etc. It wound up creating a very chaotic feeling to the zone, especially towards the north, because you very rarely had a sense of who or what would be where or when. A lot of people didn't seem to like how transient most factions were, but I loved seeing things like a handful of Monolith guys in Red Forest on their way to X-16 get jumped by a Chimera that probably spawned half the zone away and just bumped into them. It really made the zone feel more like it was populated by various Stalkers and factions doing their own things, rather than an all out war like Warfare or completely static like the regular settings.

This sounds amazing. Would you mind posting it here if you ever end up recreating it?

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

I figured that these were deleted by now, but nope, the Mega uploads I made still work.

Version 1, where factions do not try to attack and capture each other's main bases:

https://mega.nz/#!Fhgm1CaJ!GJ9Z-8Ff3VsBP7jFxK3HHeBFlXW7mWjDSMhzZvzW6ek

Version 2, where factions do try to attack and capture each other's main bases.

https://mega.nz/#!ZsxUVKwA!u7_nm5qRUYIWnpK34WmOVN_ER9_ecpjs9aLb59mErA0

Both are probably extremely broken, but with something like Winmerge you might be able to copy values to a newer equivilent.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Jehde
Apr 21, 2010

drkeiscool posted:

As of this moment, I think it's GSC Game World, who dissolved in 2011 and reformed in 2014. They published Cossacks 3 in 2016, and are still active as far as I know.

Also, the GSC twitter page keeps post STALKER fan vids.

There was some interview somewhere with GSC World when Cossacks 3 came out that was basically "Is STALKER 2 still a thing?" "If we get the money to do it, yes."

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply