S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series Megathread: The Zone will stop the Russians - Games

[QUOTE=alundaio;44744604]Plus OWR 2, exclusive Variation mod and some other stuff.[/QUOTE] Is it terribly hard to manually remove OWR 2 in case I wanted to use the original models and animations ? Just asking whether it's overall feasible, not asking a step-by-step tutorial. But yeah, that stuff sounds very intriguing, I've been looking for a good CoP mod to permadeath in and this looks to be like the one I've been waiting for. [QUOTE=Saturn V;44745597]This is what LA shoulda been.[/QUOTE] I dunno, the community will make the freeplay mods anyway, but there isn't really a whole lot of people who'll want to go through the effort of making a whole new story from scratch so I can't really fault Dez0wave for wanting to put in a new story as default, even if said new story isn't delivered in an exactly stellar fashion.

[QUOTE=Beacon;44735840]LA's levels cannot be ported to CoP. The X-Ray 1.6 SDK can't handle them.[/QUOTE] lol Why are you so sure, do you have the source files already? I mean original LE scenes and original source objects?

[QUOTE=alundaio;44744384]Doing what? If anything, Don Reba actually agreed with me. I said it was silly to advise modders not to fix L.A. and to consider everyone a tester. These bugs are [i]at least[/i] 9 months old, go play the leaks if you don't believe me. The patch was only made possible by implementing fixes by community.[/QUOTE] Just for some clarification. This is what Tejas posted. [quote]Don Reba~ Can you do anything about this Alundaio forum member. He's back in the LA Forums and all he wants to do is complain, start fights and ridicule our efforts to fix things. He usually resorts to foul language you have to edit and freely advertises his hatred and contempt for Dez, Vintar and now me. We are all too busy to deal with this clown. I really don't want to waste the time and energy dealing with him but on the other hand I don't want him running his mouth every time I try to help others or make statements to the general community. It's like he is insanely jealous of Dez0wave, Lost Alpha and anything involved in it and he feels compelled to be an ass and cause trouble. Is there anything you can do please?[/quote]

Installing Misery 2.0 is a nightmare. The game crashes upon loading a new game. Im sticking to Call of Pripyat Complete, shit or not at least it works. I'll probably finish it on a different mod after. Suggestions?

[QUOTE=KennyAwsum;44745821]Installing Misery 2.0 is a nightmare. The game crashes upon loading a new game. Im sticking to Call of Pripyat Complete, shit or not at least it works. I'll probably finish it on a different mod after. Suggestions?[/QUOTE] Misery works perfectly from install. I'd hazard a guess to either the download being corrupt, or you are missing some patches or something.

[QUOTE=KennyAwsum;44745821]Installing Misery 2.0 is a nightmare. The game crashes upon loading a new game. Im sticking to Call of Pripyat Complete, shit or not at least it works. I'll probably finish it on a different mod after. Suggestions?[/QUOTE] I'd personally recommend something like Pripyat Reborn / MSO+AtmosFear 3 if you're not looking for a large gameplay overhaul but want more active A-Life and more hostility in the maps. They're not the epitome of stability, but I've managed just fine by keeping a good amount of save backups in case there's a crash. Sigerous Mod is also a pretty good overhaul, it has tons of new quests, weapons and features like bankers and hirable bodyguards. Not all of it's content is consistent but most of it is fine.

I found SGM for COP to be extremely stable. And a damn fun mod to play, but can be a total ball-ache at points if you haven't invested enough cash into getting the right equipment beforehand. Snipers in SGM are a must. At-least for my play style anyway. :v:

[QUOTE=RobberBaron;44745775]lol Why are you so sure, do you have the source files already? I mean original LE scenes and original source objects?[/QUOTE] Like I said, I'm going off what Dezodor told me himself the other day.

[QUOTE=Beacon;44746083]Like I said, I'm going off what Dezodor told me himself the other day.[/QUOTE] You sure that wasn't just Dez trying to persuade you to not try? No offense to him, I like the guy. But ya know...could be possible?

imo the story-telling in LA isn't bad at all, it's just terribly soured by the kitsch and stiff quality of the cutscene animations. although my perception may have been altered by putting hundreds of hours into Deep Shadows games, who knows. fun fact: Deep Shadows was formed by ex-GSC devs. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw6r3Vqq9y0[/media]

[QUOTE=Jamie1992GSC;44746142]You sure that wasn't just Dez trying to persuade you to not try? No offense to him, I like the guy. But ya know...could be possible?[/QUOTE] His reasoning sounded solid, considering how large the LA levels are and the optimisations they've done to their SDK.

[QUOTE=Beacon;44746225]His reasoning sounded solid, considering how large the LA levels are and the optimisations they've done to their SDK.[/QUOTE] To be honest. A lot of things were thought of as not possible. I understand they did a lot of changes to the source code. But I find it hard to imagine that the levels are incompatible with the 1.6 Xray SDK and such. Consider the fact that the COP levels are large and have a lot of meshes and polies within them. I'd imagine the latest carnation of the SDK even without the optimizations done for Lost Alpha would be able to cope with the larger levels made specifically for LA.

[QUOTE=KennyAwsum;44745821]Installing Misery 2.0 is a nightmare. The game crashes upon loading a new game. Im sticking to Call of Pripyat Complete, shit or not at least it works. I'll probably finish it on a different mod after. Suggestions?[/QUOTE] Normally I don't like to ride along on the complete hateboner band wagon but in CoP's case I've had a few bitter experiences, I used to play CoP complete and then my save corrupted (I had around ~30 hours on it, could not load any saves) and it put me off STALKER for a few months. What I would recommend is grabbing Atmosphear 3. It's a pretty good mod that enhances the weather. Complete doesn't really noticeably change a ton of stuff in CoP and just makes it unstable as all hell and there's much better graphics mods out there anyway.

[QUOTE=Everest;44746345]Normally I don't like to ride along on the complete hateboner band wagon but in CoP's case I've had a few bitter experiences, I used to play CoP complete and then my save corrupted (I had around ~30 hours on it, could not load any saves) and it put me off STALKER for a few months. What I would recommend is grabbing Atmosphear 3. It's a pretty good mod that enhances the weather. Complete doesn't really noticeably change a ton of stuff in CoP and just makes it unstable as all hell and there's much better graphics mods out there anyway.[/QUOTE] The Complete mods for all 3 games are unstable and generally just lower the difficulty of the game to a degree where its just boring. Not to mention they invoke so many new bugs that they just aren't viable.

Before video games were possible nobody thought it would be possible! [editline]7th May 2014[/editline] I really like Dooms mod merge although so far I've made one duct tape fix which I don't remember exactly, one fix I did just now with the g36 or whatever, and one optional but recommended fix is the zombie health regen.

[QUOTE=proch;44746381]Before video games were possible nobody thought it would be possible[/QUOTE] I meant more in the lines of things related to STALKER. :v:

[QUOTE=Jamie1992GSC;44746312] Consider the fact that the COP levels are large and have a lot of meshes and polies within them. I'd imagine the latest carnation of the SDK even without the optimizations done for Lost Alpha would be able to cope with the larger levels made specifically for LA.[/QUOTE] Well CoP levels, while being indeed large, are somewhat simpler than say, CS ones. Yeah I know CS is considered a retarded one of the three brothers, but aestetically in terms of both detail and visuals it just takes the cake. I can totally see how CoP's engine wouldn't be able to handle LA's levels unmodified. Plus X-Ray 1.6 is still X-Ray, I think all the A-Life scripting and the like can be rather taxing on its own. Attempts at porting levels from ChoC and CS to CoP are rather limited compared to vice versa, there must be a reson for that.

[QUOTE=Beacon;44746225]His reasoning sounded solid, considering how large the LA levels are and the optimisations they've done to their SDK.[/QUOTE] Well, he was wrong, and said something without testing. I already tried to open LA maps in the unoptimized SOC SDK LE, so i converted back some maps and opened them. It was a successful test, i had absoutely no problem to open them. :D COP LE is much more optimized stuff than SOC LE. Also, COP engine is much more superior than LA's SOC 1.0007+ engine.

[QUOTE=gudman;44746575]Well CoP levels, while being indeed large, are somewhat simpler than say, CS ones. Yeah I know CS is considered a retarded one of the three brothers, but aestetically in terms of both detail and visuals it just takes the cake. I can totally see how CoP's engine wouldn't be able to handle LA's levels unmodified. Plus X-Ray 1.6 is still X-Ray, I think all the A-Life scripting and the like can be rather taxing on its own. Attempts at porting levels from ChoC and CS to CoP are rather limited compared to vice versa, there must be a reson for that.[/QUOTE] Well from my recollection of putting the maps into 3D Max from all 3 games, COP levels had the most meshing and groups and a total higher poly count of the entire level overall. This of-course excludes all the separate meshes and objects that are spawned via script and all.spawn. The way they laid out the groups and meshes was a lot cleaner on COP levels. Which was something some of the SOC levels missed entirely. Like the fact that a guard rail would be attached into a single mesh to a wall on the entirely other side of the world rather than grouped as two separate meshes. Which from a model and design perspective didn't make sense to me for an Environment. I myself and many others I know whom also do this sort of work for a living found that quite baffling. And Pripyat from SOC was a total mess so that is a complete other barrel of fish as the saying goes. Although that could also boil down to the way X-Ray itself handled the worlds and levels themselves. I still find that though there may be issues due to not having the source files for meshes and textures and such to load those levels into the SDK or a modelling program such as Max, or Maya. I still think that it's less to do with compatibility as a whole and more to do with a lack of having all the assets to load those into the SDK or similar to begin the process of porting them to the latest version of X-Ray itself. I could however be entirely incorrect and the SDK can't handle the levels themselves. But Lost Alpha were given the SDK and Tools used to make STALKER (Not including the Source Code) before they were even released publicly to the rest of the community and then they got the actual devs of STALKER to help them create optimizations way later into development of Lost Alpha along with the source code. Either way. I'm not trying to discredit what Dez has said or the work they have put into Lost Alpha. But it is certainly worth trying and delving into rather than just take what is said at face value, still aren't the LA team releasing the SDK and such they ended up using to the public at some-point anyway? [editline]7th May 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=RobberBaron;44746670]Well, he was wrong, and said something without testing. I already tried to open LA maps in the unoptimized SOC SDK LE, so i converted back some maps and opened them. It was a successful test, i had absoutely no problem to open them. :D COP LE is much more optimized stuff than SOC LE. Also, COP engine is much more superior than LA's SOC 1.0007+ engine.[/QUOTE] I was pondering upon this myself. It didn't quite add up how it would be impossible for the COP variant of X-Ray and the SDK to handle those levels even though the SOC SDK can with and without it's optimizations.

[QUOTE=Jamie1992GSC;44746472]I meant more in the lines of things related to STALKER. :v:[/QUOTE] I know I was trying to be motivational ~

I'm not a believer type, and i don't believe what others tell me. So i try and try. LA's Cordon map opened in COP LE: [URL="http://i.imgur.com/BZprYI1.jpg"]http://i.imgur.com/BZprYI1.jpg[/URL] Don't care about snow (missing textures), i just wanted to show, you can open LA maps in any X-ray SDK.

[QUOTE=RobberBaron;44746767]I'm not a believer type, and i don't believe what others tell me. So i try and try. LA's Cordon map opened in COP LE: [URL="http://i.imgur.com/BZprYI1.jpg"]http://i.imgur.com/BZprYI1.jpg[/URL] Don't care about snow (missing textures), i just wanted to show, you can open LA maps in any SDK.[/QUOTE] So Dez is either assuming it can't be done because he never tested, or the most likely, saying it can't be done as to deter people away from trying. This is good to know. Thanks RobberBaron. :v: Well Beacon. Guess this answers yours concerns. :v:

[QUOTE=RobberBaron;44746767]I'm not a believer type, and i don't believe what others tell me. So i try and try. LA's Cordon map opened in COP LE: [URL="http://i.imgur.com/BZprYI1.jpg"]http://i.imgur.com/BZprYI1.jpg[/URL] Don't care about snow (missing textures), i just wanted to show, you can open LA maps in any SDK.[/QUOTE] Is it possible to compile the map, even?

Have they said if they are trying to Greenlight this or anything? If it was originally going to be published by GSC or whatever? Would be good for all the patches and shit if it was on steam

[QUOTE=croguy;44746782]Is it possible to compile the map, even?[/QUOTE] Good question. You can tear all the needed textures out from LA and put them into the SDK's texture tree. That would sort most if not all texture problems. Not sure how it would handle meshes and such that might be unique to LA but I'd imagine you could coerce your way around a lot of the problems and find a way to compile it. Ya might miss out on some base LA stuff, but I suppose if you are tearing the maps out of LA to use in another means then that isn't really a major issue. Correct me if I'm wrong here of-course. I've never messed around with any of the LA files yet.

[QUOTE=croguy;44746782]Is it possible to compile the map, even?[/QUOTE] I will try and try, but only if i will have time for this. Call of Chernobyl is more important for me. Maybe later.

I'm a firm believer that if anything, every mod should use a fixed up version of the beta cordon at least because it's just so god damned nice. Same with the garbage. I'm not sure why, but I've really grown to detest release cordon for some reason. On the topic of CoC, how's it gonna handle rewarding exploration? Hand placed loot? Dangerous encounters? Maybe randomly generated stashes that you can access by default? Also is it possible to expand on ShoC's random quests? It'd be cool if you could adapt them to wandering STALKERS and make them a little more expansive, like having more interesting dialog where it inserts the appropriate names, and having quests like rescuing certain STALKERS and shit.

[QUOTE=Bloodshot12;44746964] I'm a firm believer that if anything, every mod should use a fixed up version of the beta cordon at least because it's just so god damned nice. Same with the garbage.[/QUOTE] As you can see on the LE picture, the playable and explorable area on LA Cordon is surprisingly small, it is encircled with invisible wall (blue texture). [QUOTE=Bloodshot12;44746964] On the topic of CoC, how's it gonna handle rewarding exploration? Hand placed loot? Dangerous encounters? Maybe randomly generated stashes that you can access by default?[/QUOTE] Stashes are filled randomly at a new game start and you can grab stash pda marks, if you take prisoners and you can succesfully interrogate them. Dangerous encounters are always there, alife is random, and you have to prepare surprises. Every new game brings a new experience, no redundant things, squads change smart terrain often.

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about these answers. [img]http://i.imgur.com/MifzELm.jpg[/img]

[QUOTE=RobberBaron;44747094]As you can see on the LE picture, the playable and explorable area on LA Cordon is surprisingly small, it is encircled with invisible wall (blue texture).[/QUOTE] The level is fairly [i]long[/i], though. The point of the Cordon was that it always took an asston of time to reach Garbage. It never really was a square-like level.