S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series Megathread: "A Typical Day In The Zone"

[Creec]

Is there a way to make windowed mode in stalker act like normal windowed mode?
That way i could change it to borderless windowed, but for some reason stalker is saying fuck you when alt-tabbing even in windowed mode.

[Xerys]

Chernobyl Adventures - Episode 2: Spoilers? [I]Poppy[B]CoC[/B]k![/I]

I decided to give the Monolith start a shot and after a few hours I've made a bunch of observations.

Everywhere I go there's a lot of big and nasty mutants - huge Bloodsuckers, black Bloodsuckers, Controllers that like coming in two-packs, Pseudogiants out of every orifice and your friendly neighborhood Chimaeras. The dogs of all varieties aren't even worth a mention, they're just a nuisance once you get a shotgun - more on that below. Controllers aren't a big deal past a certain point, said point being getting your hands on a decent kind of assault rifle and having ammunition to spare, but the Chimaeras? They're hell. The extra large Bloodsuckers? Almost as bad, one-two hits and you're gone. The Pseudogiants soak ammo like crazy, and that's even with OWR3 on.

Getting a decent shotgun is surprisingly hard since none of the Monobros around Pripyat itself seem to be carrying one, ever. On the other hand there's plenty of RPGs. RPGs everywhere. Right now my main source of income is RPG-7 grenades looted from dead Monobros and the odd good-enough-condition launcher. These things can make for a lot of income with minimal effort.

I haven't managed to come across a single a Monobro in an Exoskeleton or a close-combat weapon when wandering the Underpass, the Outskirts and the Plaza. There's plenty of guys wearing Radiation Suits [I]- the Exo without the Exo parts -[/I] around with their SVDs, which would be one hell of a problem if you were to waltz into Pripyat as anything but a Monobro, but when playing as one it's one hell of a handicap since you can either get squad led by one of those, or a squad of guys in regular suits with ARs of the 5.45 variety whom can't exactly hold their own against the mutant hordes around either.

For the time being the Underpass, Plaza and Outskirts are relatively deserted. I hope that I can turn off the scorcher as a Monobro and liven the place up a little since the only thing I came across that wasn't Monobros or mutants were Zombies in the Underpass and around the Outskirts, a three-man group of Mercbros in the Outskirts - one of whom graciously handed his SPAS-12 to me so I had a proper shotgun for once[sp]and Uncle Yar I think it was in the Laundromat[/sp]as well as one group of Military who decided to waltz into the Plaza from the NPP.

The NPP's sourthern part however is interesting. There's a bunch of mutants and[sp]Military[/sp]going to be around, but it's also the area where you can find Monobro squads with Gauss Rifles or Terminators with Protectas. They usually come with a third guy in a Radiation Suit with a 550, which is neat.
[sp]Unfortunately surviving the trip there is a very hit-or-miss experience since the second you enter the NPP south from the Plaza, there's a good chance you'll run into a spawn of three or so Bloodsuckers and Chimaera, and even if you were accompanied by three regular dudes the chance is high that you will die. Once you're past that however you ought to be relatively safe, unless if there's a bunch of fog going on, in which case it's really easy to run into a surprise Chimaera / Controller / Pseudogiant. Or two.[/sp]

[B]SPOILER WARNING! DON'T READ IF YOU WANT TO EXPLORE AND FIND THINGS ON YOUR OWN.[/B]

[sp]However what makes things rather ridiculous is the amount as well as quality of the free loot that you can get your hands on early as a Monobro.[/sp]

1:[sp]Around the NPP's South itself, west of the Zaton transition, there's a small Military camp. Usually seven or so guys will be around there, but care must be taken since some of them will carry SVDs and you may get the odd ones in heavier armor armed with AS Vals to wreck face. With the OWR add-on, SVD > you. On the flip-side, there's a scoped AN-94 and an RPG-7 there, both in 100% condition, and the RPG-7 in particular is worth a lot of money. As an extra there's binoculars laying around which you can pick up, but which don't do anything. A nice touch.[/sp]

2:[sp]In the Sarcophagus, there's a free Exoskeleton in one of the hallways or whatever. There's also the optional passage that will lead to a room that looks like it's full of tubes. Around the entry of the room, to the left, there's a small alcove with a ladder. Down the ladder's a stash which when I visited it contained another Exoskeleton, a bunch of ammunition and a good load of medical supplies. However the entire interior's irradiated so you better pack some Rad-Away and Rad-X.[/sp]

3:[sp]Monolith Control itself will have a Military Armored suit and yet again an Exoskeleton, which makes three.[/sp]

4:[sp]If you can be bothered to do the trek north, the Monolith War Lab is a real treasure trove. While the layout of it can be a little confusing at first, fully exploring it will earn you an AN-94, OTs-14 Groza and a PKM, all three in 100% condition, and a grenade launcher attachment as well. There's also a huge load of medical supplies to be found as well ammunition of various sorts, including a nice stack of 9x39 SP-6 and three VOG-25 grenades. None of it counts as a stash and there's a ton of stuff around. Back on the surface I also came across another RPG-7, but I'm not sure if that was intended for pickup or an NPC's drop since it was at ~50% condition.[/sp]

5:[sp]The Unknown Anomaly yielded me two Pellicles for +15 Chemical Resistance each. Unfortunately when I equipped them they didn't have quite the expected effect and Fruit Punch could still kill me. Mind that the anomaly has a psi field going so good luck not getting your brain fried.[/sp]

6:[sp]I also used the Wish Granter. Three options led to a crash, one didn't appear to do anything, but one - Immortality - worked. It warped me to the rookie village in the Cordon. It took me a minute to notice that there was, in fact, something out of the ordinary going on. Turns out that my real name is John Stalvern, the Monolith said "No John, you are the demons." and then I was a Zombie. I thought this was actually really cool.[/sp]

[Ajaxial]

Did I miss something. People talking about CoC. Is it release? (I'd go through and read but I've been gone for a month except like two posts here. and there like 15+ new pages)

[Kimr]

Leak

[chenhonkster]

The leak is somewhat stable and enjoyable but quite buggy, 1.0.9 and it keeps having bugged jobs that you can't complete after doing them once

[Shirky]

CoC is really fun, I just wish it had Faction Wars though, because that would make it all the better when choosing a Faction. I would like to be able to be Military or Clear Sky and work my way through all the levels claiming each one. Would be neat to have an option that once you clear an area out of all one faction, that you now own that area and your faction respawns there, and that you can go as far as to pretty much wiping out an entire faction if you take over enough bases and kill enough guys.

[Rebi]

[QUOTE=LittleBabyman;48449416]The leak is somewhat stable and enjoyable but quite buggy, 1.0.9 and it keeps having bugged jobs that you can't complete after doing them once[/QUOTE]

I've noticed a pretty lame bug where reviving a wounded stalker takes up not a single medkit, but one of every type of medkit you have in your inventory. Also jobs from stalkers bug out far more often than not in my experience.

[naelstrof]

[QUOTE=LittleBabyman;48449416]The leak is somewhat stable and enjoyable but quite buggy, 1.0.9 and it keeps having bugged jobs that you can't complete after doing them once[/QUOTE]

I found out it's because it tries to reward you with a stash, but generating stashes aren't implemented yet (I think). You can fix this by changing the text in [I]gamedata\scripts\xr_effects.script[/I] around line 184 from

function reward_stash(actor,npc,p)
	if (p[1] ~= "true" or math.random() <= 0.5) then
		coc_treasure_manager.create_random_stash()
	end
end

To

function reward_stash(actor,npc,p)
        coc_treasure_manager.create_random_stash()
end

It allows you to complete the quest, but it doesn't seem to actually generate a stash for you to find. I didn't try very hard to find the stash though.

[editline]asdf[/editline]

For any other time the game crashes, you can check out the log at [I]CoC\_appdata_\logs\xray_username.log[/I]. Lua errors are usually quite easy to fix and if you post them here someone's bound to tell you what's wrong.

[alundaio]

[QUOTE=Shirky;48450673]CoC is really fun, I just wish it had Faction Wars though, because that would make it all the better when choosing a Faction. I would like to be able to be Military or Clear Sky and work my way through all the levels claiming each one. Would be neat to have an option that once you clear an area out of all one faction, that you now own that area and your faction respawns there, and that you can go as far as to pretty much wiping out an entire faction if you take over enough bases and kill enough guys.[/QUOTE]

I've planned maybe to add a new smart terrain ability that allowed a smart to spawn faction npcs depending on who took control last; even considering the actor's faction. It would be simple as adding faction_controlled = true to smart logic to trigger the feature.

[JLea]

Watched this and immediately thought of a blowout

[video=youtube;HfXmG3GdAig]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfXmG3GdAig[/video]

[Daemon White]

Except a blowout isn't an explosion of that nature.

From what I understand of it, a Blowout is the result of radioactive atmospheric pressure building until it can't be contained (Similar to a giant thunderstorm). Of course, due to the Zone's unstable conditions, the release of pressure is increased to a giant wave of nuclear energy released at once instead of drawn out like a thunderstorm can be.

Although, yes, that final explosion could be compared to a blowout.

[Lyokanthrope]

[QUOTE=Daemon White;48454782]Except a blowout isn't an explosion of that nature.

From what I understand of it, a Blowout is the result of radioactive atmospheric pressure building until it can't be contained (Similar to a giant thunderstorm). Of course, due to the Zone's unstable conditions, the release of pressure is increased to a giant wave of nuclear energy released at once instead of drawn out like a thunderstorm can be.

Although, yes, that final explosion could be compared to a blowout.[/QUOTE]
Well ACTUALLY. -adjusts glasses-
Blowouts, or emissions, are waves of intense anomalous and psychic energy released from the center of the Zone, created by the Generators near the ChNPP.
They were initially caused by [sp]C-Con using it as a self-defense mechanism against stalkers trying to get to the center of the Zone, eg Strelok and his group. See Clear Sky. After Strelok and Scar are indoctrinated and most of the Clear Sky group killed off, the blowouts became much less frequent, hence their relative infrequency in SoC. After the destruction of C-Con in SoC the generators became unstable, and the emissions/blowouts became much more common, see the events of CoP.[/sp]

[editline]14th August 2015[/editline]

Though, a lot of SoC mods choose to display them as like apocalyptic nuclear blast events or intense radioactive activity, so I can see where the confusion comes from.

[editline]14th August 2015[/editline]

[QUOTE=alundaio;48452376]I've planned maybe to add a new smart terrain ability that allowed a smart to spawn faction npcs depending on who took control last; even considering the actor's faction. It would be simple as adding faction_controlled = true to smart logic to trigger the feature.[/QUOTE]
That would be absolutely wonderful to see. I kind of hate the fact that no matter how many times I clear it out the military always control the broken bridge in Cordon, for example. I'd even be happy to see Bandits move in and control it. :v:
The military presence in CoC is insane.

[Gunner]

Atmosfear for CoP more or less makes blowouts what they're supposed to be (as shown in the clear sky intro, big ass waves of death) or otherwise actually cool to look at. Big waves of fuck you energy from the heart of the zone. The force in them is minimal, so all they really do is push dust around, thus the inciting radiation part. For the most part, it's psychic fuck you energy that fries the nervous system of what ever it washes over.

Also, all the base blowouts in the game just suck. A red sky, some noise, and you dying. No real visual elements.

[Marzipas]

so uh, in CoC i was just trading in the rookie camp at cordon, i walk out only to see that the entire camp bar wolf has been massacred by the military, and there is a fuckin helicopter above me constantly shooting me when i walk out a building. Is it possible to destroy it with small arms fire or am I fucked?

[Muukkis]

[QUOTE=Marzipas;48456815]Is it possible to destroy it with small arms fire or am I fucked?[/QUOTE]

I've heard that you can shoot it down with a PKM.

[Marzipas]

i've just been using all the guns lying around from all the dead military and rookies to shoot at it, it yells at me but its in russian so idk if its in pain or if he's just happy

[Ajaxial]

[QUOTE=Marzipas;48456901]i've just been using all the guns lying around from all the dead military and rookies to shoot at it, it yells at me but its in russian so idk if its in pain or if he's just happy[/QUOTE]

Supposedly you can disable choppers.

[QUOTE=Lyokanthrope;48418220]I disabled the axr_radio_in_heli scheme in modules.script[/QUOTE]

[Xerys]

Things about CoC that might need work:

The Helicopters can be rather overkill early on. There's a decent amount of cover around in the starting areas at the very least, but having to hide from random helicopters 24/7 without means of retaliating in the player's starting area can render the early game unnecessarily difficult in a not-so-fun way. Might want to not make them show up until some three days of in-game time have passed to create some buffer time at the start when the player starts as a Loner, Clear Sky or Bandits.

On the other hand, they never show up in the CNPP south even though the Military has a presence there.

It might be a good idea to make traders progressively unlock more of their inventory as the player does missions for them instead of their inventory being what appears to be extremely random and little else.

The ability to "recruit" any kind of squad from the get-go can make things too easy in certain circumstances. Getting two Terminators (Exo + Protecta) and a third whatever to tag along from the start can render a lot of early fights trivial. I've seen a three-man group like that take on three Chimaeras and a pack of dogs once and the only guy who fell was the non-Exo with a SiG 550. Might want to handle that like the trader inventory.

Monolith RPG-7 squads can't be recruited apparently, neither can Gauss Rifle squads, or at least not the ones around the CNPP. While I understand that being able to get RPG-7 bros to tag along could render things extremely silly while otherwise being of relatively little value, I don't understand the other part.

Suggestion is to change the Gauss Rifle squads to one guy in a Radiation Suit with a Gauss Rifle and two in regular Monolith Suits carrying some kind of 5.45 assault rifle as well as a heavy version of one guy with an Exo and Gauss and two in Rad. Suits and with higher-quality 5.56 or 9x39 ARs instead of the three regular Monolith suit dudes all with a Gauss Rifle each, and then giving the player the ability to recruit them.

Military squads appear weak later on. The regulars are fine in the Cordon, Swamps, Agroprom, etc. but you'd expect them to have the tough motherfuckers around the NPP 24/7 in Bulats and with their usual Val kit. Might want to make two additional types of elite Military squads that spawn there, 3x Bulat with 2x Val and 1x VSS and 3x Bulat with 2x Groza and 1x PKM on top of the regulars. An RPG-7 squad option for the Military having the possibility to show up in the CNPP area also wouldn't hurt given the amount of tough mutants there.

Might want to give the Military a presence in the Pripyat Outskits and CNPP north as well, especially the latter area is really fucking deserted. As a Monobro I just put on the running rocks and ignore everything when crossing there since it's usually just Pseudogiants out of every orifice in my way.

There's almost no Psy-Block anywhere. In ten hours of play, various factions, I've come across three, all when playing a Monobro. I'd understand if it was Anabiotics, even though I've found three of those as well, but Psy-Block?

Same with launcher grenades really, there isn't a whole lot of them to be found and NPCs don't appear to ever carry them, might want to change that.

Those "random" little stashes that contain stuff like one sausage or one bottle of vodka or - like the last one I had - an orange-condition Fort-12 are funny at first, but later on they're kind of silly. While I'm not for turning it into CoP vanilla where one could spend the first three or so hours of play collecting shit around Zaton and Jupiter and getting rich without a single fight, it wouldn't hurt to have some more decent CoP-style stashes around. There's a lot of maps and a lot of really good hiding places around where hiding decent stuff would be a nice way to reward the player for exploration. Especially maps like Darkscape could use some real work. The train bridge with those little nooks under the rails practically screams "PUT A STASH HERE SOMEWHERE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD." except there wasn't anything when I checked. Just as an example.

The Monolith start in general could use love. One one hand: You start in hell where there's powerful mutants in droves all around with little ability to take them on. I did some testing and I can't say I fancied standing at the trader only to have three Bloodsuckers show up in the room because everything else in the vicinity that would've qualified as a friendly green dot on the mini-map was dead.

On the other hand: You can get 150k+ worth of items - selling price, mind - from the get-go which can quickly turn things into something too easy. Especially if you don't mind losing the ability to sprint for a while and make sure to travel with some meat-shields at least.

It might be way too much work, but an idea would be to make the Monolith start with a Pripyat and CNPP and so on as if the Scorcher was actually disabled, so all sorts of factions have a presence there but the mutant population is relatively limited and make it the players' objective to actually re-enable the Scorcher and the Yantar thingy after getting some necessary plot-devices or two, which then would turn Pripyat and the CNPP into something resembling the current start while enabling further Monolith bases down the road.

In general the variety of NPC loadouts and squads is sort of underwhelming. Whenever I'm about to find me three new compañeros I mean pick up some homeboys I mean conscript some poor schmucks to die for me, it's like I have a choice between: Fodder, fodder, fodder, sort-of-not-quite-fodder and Terminators.

Terminators just waltz through almost anything and give no fucks, ever. Doesn't matter if I have to back-track and spend fifteen minutes finding some, I will always get me a couple Terminators when I can because they rock the world and don't die to stray mutants within the seconds before getting more than a couple shots off like the asshole with the SVD whom I keep having great expectations of but whom always tends to fall victim to some mutants just before we encounter anything human.

The AI behavior, aside from the odd silly moments, is nicely varied and fun however and turns the majority of the Zone into a lovely lively place full of things going on here and there, even if some of them are a little repetitive.

I'm sure that once CoC actually releases it'll be great, but it still could use some extra work.

[alundaio]

[QUOTE=Xerys;48456957]
I'm sure that once CoC actually releases it'll be great, but it still could use some extra work.[/QUOTE]

Maybe if we had a team. It's just Bangalore and I's work mainly on core game. We've had a lot of side jobs done by various people from time to time but that is about it. What you see in CoC is a tremendous amount of work for our tiny team especially when people making all these requests and quite honestly we want to release it and get the hell out of dodge.

[Ghost101]

I wouldn't worry, it looks like people are already starting to mod it a bit. I think the best thing a modder can do in the STALKER community is release a solid foundation for other people in the community to build on; it's been awhile since we've had anything like that which was actually quality.

[Doom14]

I agree with others here - get your foundation out and leave the feature creep to others. Once you have a solid, tasty base to work with, others are going to flock to it and you can leave it up to them for all the niche mods.

[Kyle877]

cant wait for OL 3.0 tonite

[Lyokanthrope]

Why are people hyped for OL 3.0 again?
I'm one of the hipsters that never liked OL2.2 to begin with, and I never liked Kanyhalos much (he always came off as a prick on the GSC forums, failing to credit people properly, got super abrasive when people reported bugs, etc) so maybe that's why I'm not seeing it...

[Cutthecrap]

[QUOTE=Lyokanthrope;48461216]Why are people hyped for OL 3.0 again?
I'm one of the hipsters that never liked OL2.2 to begin with, and I never liked Kanyhalos much (he always came off as a prick on the GSC forums, failing to credit people properly, got super abrasive when people reported bugs, etc) so maybe that's why I'm not seeing it...[/QUOTE]

It was somewhat one of the first mods that touched all the aspects except levels, as far as I know, in the west mod scene. For people like me who didn't have a clue about AMK or other mods, OL was THE mod.

[Lyokanthrope]

Eh, I guess that's also another reason. I was big into the Russian mods even way back when. I played AMK before I played OL (1.3.1 I think? with a really shitty translation - GOOD TIMES) and fucking loved it. OL just kind of felt like a hodgepodge of a bunch of other mods with really bad balancing :v:
In fact, I kinda wanna play AMK 1.4 again now...

[editline]14th August 2015[/editline]

I also remember playing OGSM too with NO translation. Heh. That was an adventure.

[editline]14th August 2015[/editline]

I miss [I]that[/I] feeling of playing SoC for the first time. That sense of wonderment and later on horror. :v:

[Heigou]

My first time in Agroprom Underground, never again.

[[Green]]

personally i found yantar the spookiest shit on my first playthrough. Agroprom? zero fucks

Yantar? ohgodwhatisthisjesuspleasesaveme

[Gunner]

Yeah Yantar really does it. The music is one of the best parts, the sudden cut offs really add to the atmosphere. It's a place where you just know something isn't right, compared to Agroprom where it's just dark tunnel with two blood suckers, some bandits, and military.

And for Oblivion lost, I tried 2.2 the other day, and uninstalled it within 30 minutes. The mod just felt wrong and it was too easy. Oblivion lost 3.0 is a complete rebuild and different mod supposedly, so we'll see if it's any good tomorrow.

[Jammymanrock]

Is there a definite way to get rid of the loud ass helicopters in CoC? I tried the no helicopters fix from the /sg/ fix pack and disabled axr_radio_in_heli but they're still appearing in cordon and darkscape

[Lyokanthrope]

I really like the alternate variant of the SoC yantar track, and I kind of wish it played, if only just once, in SoC.
[video=5aT13AbmqEI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aT13AbmqEI[/video]