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

[Ownederd]

didn't the AMK mod experiment with surfaces looking wetter after rain comes down?

[Lyokanthrope]

Many mods did. It was done by making the #small sky textures brighter to make the hemispheric lighting & specular more intense

[DanRatherman]

[QUOTE=Judqment8;45260904]SGM 2.2 is really good IMO.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks man, I knew as soon as I spawned where I did that this would be a good mod. Kudos.

[Intenso]

[QUOTE=Wulfram;45266871]I just watched the video for that and holy shit. The things people do with X-Ray.

Imagine if a competent game studio got a hold of it. Imagine the things that could be done.[/QUOTE]
I wish someone could optimize the engine so it doesn't run like fucking garbage. Even on decent rigs at medium settings, there's still annoying stuttering and frame-skipping. It's so jarring and immersion ruining, especially for a game like STALKER...

[Dub!]

[QUOTE=Wulfram;45266871]I just watched the video for that and holy shit. The things people do with X-Ray.

Imagine if a competent game studio got a hold of it. Imagine the things that could be done.[/QUOTE]

I always thought that X-Ray was shit. It's completely unstable imo.

[alundaio]

1.6 X-Ray is pretty good. It's only the lua that is bad. The engine itself is almost flawless.

[Judqment8]

[URL="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1577656602/areal/posts/897511"]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1577656602/areal/posts/897511[/URL]

So wait a minute... Is Alexei working for both West Games and Vostok?

[URL="http://vostokgames.com/en/news/meet-team-alexey-sytyanov"]http://vostokgames.com/en/news/meet-team-alexey-sytyanov[/URL]

[TheAlkaline]

[QUOTE=Judqment8;45271031][URL="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1577656602/areal/posts/897511"]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1577656602/areal/posts/897511[/URL]

So wait a minute... Is Alexei working for both West Games and Vostok?

[URL="http://vostokgames.com/en/news/meet-team-alexey-sytyanov"]http://vostokgames.com/en/news/meet-team-alexey-sytyanov[/URL][/QUOTE]

I think that Alexei would work for Vostok Games considering that West Games is receiving some negative backlash from the public.

[Starship]

[QUOTE=Judqment8;45271031][URL="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1577656602/areal/posts/897511"]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1577656602/areal/posts/897511[/URL]

So wait a minute... Is Alexei working for both West Games and Vostok?

[URL="http://vostokgames.com/en/news/meet-team-alexey-sytyanov"]http://vostokgames.com/en/news/meet-team-alexey-sytyanov[/URL][/QUOTE]

Asked Vostok community manager on FB, will reply again when I get an answer.

[img]http://puu.sh/9Tv47/b7c5d2436f.png[/img]
[img]http://puu.sh/9Tv5w/85bb5c3431.png[/img]

[Judqment8]

So he's a freelancer on Vostok? Also is that Joe Mullin the Vostok community manager?

[Starship]

[QUOTE=Judqment8;45271999]So he's a freelancer on Vostok? Also is that Joe Mullin the Vostok community manager?[/QUOTE]

Yeah PR/Community manager,Joe is the guy that got kicked out as Admin from the GSC facebook page when Sergei (or someone else) asked him to give admin rights to another person.
[url]http://www.twitlonger.com/show/iop2ak[/url]

You can also read of Joe & Vostoks take on Areal here: [url]http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/06/25/vostok-games-claim-areal-kickstarter-campaigns-use-of-stalker-assets-is-not-right/[/url]

[alundaio]

He is just a consultant; His title suggests he does not have a creative position. That doesn't mean shit. It means they call him up on the phone and ask him if something is a good idea or not. Whoopity fucking doo.

[Beacon]

speaking of Joe Mullin, I dislike how every other tweet the official STALKER/Vostok Games accounts make is basically 'follow my personal account if you want a Survarium beta key!'

[Starship]

[QUOTE=Beacon;45272776]speaking of Joe Mullin, I dislike how every other tweet the official STALKER/Vostok Games accounts make is basically 'follow my personal account if you want a Survarium beta key!'[/QUOTE]

Yeah Joe is a good guy but his tweets and some of his FB posts are quite bad at times.

[Loner]

Meanwhile in the world of [B]OGSE[/B]

NPC's using their PDA's

[t]http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/20/19185/5949890.jpg[/t]

[Ajaxial]

[QUOTE=LoNer1;45273222]Meanwhile in the world of [B]OGSE[/B]

NPC's using their PDA's

[t]http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/20/19185/5949890.jpg[/t][/QUOTE]

Damn it Loner, I don't think you should be posting porn in the stalker thread!

[StickyWicket]

It's so sad that LA was mostly just an average mod.

[Doom14]

[QUOTE=StickyWicket;45273947]It's so sad that LA was mostly just an average mod.[/QUOTE]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

The work they did on making those old and forgotten maps operation was beautiful. Even if they were desolate or otherwise useless, they were some -really- cool areas. I can't wait for other teams to rip it up and compile them into a mod that gives them proper purpose and some A-Life love instead of extremely fucking stupid barriers to entry like "logging in process."

[Muukkis]

[QUOTE=Doom14;45274022]Even if they were desolate or otherwise useless[/QUOTE]

I wouldn't really say that. All maps have [I]something[/I], be it things to explore, mutant squads that roam around the areas, sidequests or some basic A-Life activity. The number of NPCs per level is pretty much perfect for the lonely, desolate Build 1935-esque atmosphere they're going for, in that it doesn't feel like a clusterfuck, yet it isn't totally empty either.

The problem however, is that there aren't enough traveling NPCs and out of those few that do, only a fraction is hostile, which means that there's usually almost never anything human to shoot. The hostile camps are usually set up so that they're [I]really[/I] out of the way so that the player would have to go looking for them on purpose and if you do end up killing them, their respawners(if any) are set up in a way where they respawn right on the spot which means that there's [B]wayy[/B] less A-Life traveling that was in SoC, even taking into account that SoC's level hub was way smaller and the maps are toenail-sized in comparison.

Because there's not a whole lot of traveling stalkers, and the camps where the (predominantly neutral, unfortunately) stalkers huddle around are usually in secluded spots where mutants rarely travel, it results in a situation where the game's A-Life system doesn't really create all the unexpected, dynamically feeling skirmishes that the series is (kind of, at least around FP, I guess?) loved for. There are some skirmishes that happen quasi-dynamically I want to say, but most of the time this just doesn't happen, the fact that most, if not all, enemy NPC camps simply respawn at the same area than they're supposed to be stationed at, makes the gameplay appear more like Far Cry 1(which was a good game, I don't complain) than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Some of the reasons for this may be just Dez0wave's design for the game, but some people have pointed out, like one dude who ripped Lost Alpha's levels into the SoC level editor that the A.I maps for most levels are completely fucked, that they wouldn't, as is, support very good A-Life migration patterns or make it possible for NPCs to actually pathfind into some locations, hence they have to be directly spawned inside or not, but overall this weighs the game down a bit. Particularly the earlygame which feels really, really tedious due to having to go through sections like the Darkscape multiple times just to turn in some quests for a fuckbag you wouldn't even want to deal with the first time.

And that's my biggest complaint for Lost Alpha : The framework is there, you've still got roaming hostiles and enemy camps even if they're surprisingly few in number and you've got extremely well made and detailed levels with a lot of connections so you could have some variety in the A-Life, some tension that you're going to come across a bandit, monolith or a merc squad when traveling out in the boonies but Lost Alpha just simply refuses to make it happen, or when it [I]could[/I] happen, they make you actively look for them in the fringes of the levels, which is annoying when you go through an area once or twice, you'll know that nothing's going to ever happen in this part of the map or the other, you can't really get caught in the way of some migration on the way to a camp that was killed, you can read the game from one trip through the level, and that, in my personal opinion is bad for a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, especially when they could've simply either moved the respawners to level changers or something so that the system wouldn't produce shit like the Wild Territory level changer spawn, where everything on the level spawns through the same, extremely narrow gap and just murders everything in one tiny spot in the level but they either couldn't make the transition from the beta's "absolutely no A-Life" to the 1.3.0013 version's "some A-Life but very limited form of A-Life" better in time or they simply chose to cripple the A-Life in favor of focusing on the quests (which they didn't really do too hot of a job in, considering that many of the quests in the storyline break or are unfinishable).

[Judqment8]

[t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8512731/Stalker/xrEngine%202014-07-02%2022-11-17-71.png[/t]

:v: I'm not sure if I should even ask what he is trying to do...

[Starship]

[QUOTE=Judqment8;45274973][t]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8512731/Stalker/xrEngine%202014-07-02%2022-11-17-71.png[/t]

:v: I'm not sure if I should even ask what he is trying to do...[/QUOTE]

It gets lonely in the zone.

[alundaio]

Looks like a studio with some ex-S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers are making a game unrelated to the genre:
[url]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whalestudio/we-are-the-dwarves[/url]

[QUOTE]Whale Rock Games – the company of game developers from Kiev, Ukraine. Some members of our team participated in such projects as Metro: LastLight, Dragon Age Inquisition, The Elder Scrolls Online, CrimeCraft, Warface, Skyforge, [B]S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat[/B], This is Vegas, EverQuest 1, EverQuest 2, Darkened Skye and others.
‘We are the dwarves’ is the first independent project of the company.[/QUOTE]

[etcetera]

Turtle Rock and now Whale Rock...

Well, these guys have started off on the right foot by releasing alpha footage.

[alundaio]

Yeah. I like the genre so the money I was saving for Areal I'm putting on this. :)

LOL:

[url]http://crimestopperstt.com/safety-tips/[/url]

[Judqment8]

Looks pretty fun actually. So much great footage and information about the game. I hope they succeed in their Kickstarter project. And wow they got some great rewards too. Not this "You get an in-game character and a story line just made by you" crap.

Kudos to them : D

[Holt]

[QUOTE=alundaio;45276156]Yeah. I like the genre so the money I was saving for Areal I'm putting on this. :)

LOL:

[url]http://crimestopperstt.com/safety-tips/[/url][/QUOTE]

That link.

[🦇Pachira🦇]

I've been playing through Clear Sky again and I'm up to limansk hospital, and man, I forgot how fun the RG-6 is

[Danny.B]

So how is Misery after this new patch that supposedly made people not that bullet spongey?

[Hammer7]

Great news!
We'll get a gameplay video of [B]Frozen Zone[/B] at 23.07.14

[t]http://i.minus.com/ib2h4wcnXJUs0U.jpg[/t]

[StickyWicket]

Does anyone know if LURK 1.2 will have the ability to keep the default music? I know they're trying to make it custom and all but from what I heard it some how made me think more about Fallout 3 than it did STALKER.