S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series Megathread: Maybe someday mods releasing edition - Games

Is stalker 2 still a thing or what?

nope, rip too much pepsi was S2's death knell dw though you have freeroam call of pripyat with merges that make you want to carve your own eyeballs out and stitch a gasmask into your face seriously who the fuck thought controllers with 40 meter psychic damage auras were smart seriously who the fuck thought it was fine to put FOUR OF THEM INTO RED FOREST AT THE SAME TIME

Still better than misery where they have probably 100m range and aura it self kill you in less than 5seconds.... Good that this game is so unbalancedthat in less than 30min after start you can gather enough junk and stashes that you can afford nice armor, gun and lots of weed to protect yourself... Rest is just typical snipe->save->snipe->save tactic.... very entraining, immersive and new in Stalker world...

Actually, I'm playing with the Last Day add-on so that's exactly what I'm experiencing. Anyway, one of them alone wouldn't have been a problem it was actually kind of cool to try and find good sightlines outside the forest walls to snipe the damn thing because it sealed off the usual "I go in guns blazing and kill everything" vidya game approach. It just got tedious when there were four in the same like, square kilometer of area. Maybe I should reduce mutant spawns or something, idk.

jesus christ, im replaying stock soc with owr3 and zrp. and i forgot how fucking terrible the accuracy/hit chance thing is in vanilla even playing on master what do i have to change to fix this shit

By being more insane? Yep. By being good? Nah. Narodnaya Solyanka 2016 is the mod you're looking for.

Try the ballistics tweak from here: http://zhat.dk/stalker/ you might need to do some manual merging/use the utility provided hit probability isn't a thing for player bullets fyi

yeah i know thats why i asked

Edited the way the sun works at different times of day, improved some of the lighting effects, fixed up an old transparent inventory addon, and installed some high quality textures/models. Also you can see my reload DoF from my last post. Stalker is actually looking really good now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHlX9LpFbSA&feature=youtu.be I'm working on a soup. The prices of rifles, their upgrades, and their ammo is WAY more expensive than pistols. I'm also completely overhauling artifacts and quests so you cant abuse the escort quests to get easy artifacts, and you cant go artifact hunting without atleast decent gear. I'm also making it so you cant sleep while starving (red hunger) so you cant just do some repeatable quests, sleep 3 times, then do them again. Food is more expensive and rare and in CoC 1.5 hunger can be an actual problem. Ive also reduced the drop rates of any items that the NPC doesnt have on them (so it doesnt spawn in additional items for you, basically). This makes the game overall a LOT more hobo phase, but definitely not bullshit tier like Misery. The only way to have an actually PERMANENT hobo phase would to be either remove all the endgame weapons or choose to not use them.

so I haven't touched stalker in a long time... any progress on that big Gunslinger mod or not really?

Several months ago I finally came around to playing CoC+ several mods to enhance graphics & realism however I quickly lost interest. I was playing as a bandit and due to all the firefights quickly had a lot of weapons and ammo. Maybe a true sandbox isn't for me, and doing missions where you go two zones over to kill some guy isn't enough. They were fine side tasks to do in SoC after completing part of the main quest. Doing these kinds of tasks and just roaming isn't interesting enough to me. How did you guys deal with this?

There's a couple of mods to remedy that nowadays, DoctorX Questlines, Lost to the Zone and its addon Living Legend, the newly translated MLR 8.3, and another big standalone mod that adds complete storylines to multiple factions is being translated at the moment

I think there comes a point where you're just too good at the metagame to really get "stuck" unless a mod is outright broken these days. The gameplay loop is pretty much the same across the board, all they can really do is lengthen the phases. Misery keeps me at hobo phase a little longer, but it's still pretty easy to make money just from knowing the maps and how the AI works.

I guess I'll never 'get' the STALKER modding scene. It's like there's an artificial difficulty olympics and everyone's going for gold. What I want in a STALKER mod is more of the STALKER experience - story and exploring and artifact hunting and the dread of being stalked by a mutant that isn't going to kill me before I know it's there. I want new questlines, actual quests, not just "murder the randomly generated stalker on the other side of the Zone." I know you can make new maps and put them into the game with full functionality. I know you can make new items and NPCs with unique dialogue and complex quest chains. Why doesn't anybody do that? Who asked for all these mods that just make firefights tedious? Starving while you sleep even though you ate two hours ago shouldn't be the way an ironman run ends. Why don't any of these mods do anything interesting? I'm just tired of the same meta in every mod.

One day.

We all know that its just Crysis gamepaly :P (but seriously, its look damn nice, Im a fan of good amount of sun, flares and bloom, and nice contrast in games, so its joy to watch such footages) Problem is that most of non-russian modders dont really care about adding new missions because it dont look cool on screenshots and it take some time and actual work to do. No one give a crap about new maps, story or actual game features. Just look at russian mods like Золотой Шар. Завершение, Wind of Time, NLC7, Legend Return, variant Omega 2, UZI, they are focused more on new story. But no one really are interested in translating them to English. Just recently we got translation for Legend Return, but event this dont give any hype or push to make fabular mods or at least translate resto of Russian mods, Its translated just because its based on CoC. Sadly non-russian moders are more interested in another HD weapon mods or tweaking CoC, everyone spend months ""tweaking"" games in stupid ways instead of spending that time creating story modes or maps. Modding stalker is pain in the ass so its not for everyone, and people who have experience with it spend time doing literally bullshit work that from player perspective is just not visible at all. Its the same as Im talking about those HD gun mods. Who the hell need another HD models of gun when rest of game look like crap?! Modeling and dealing with SDK is hard, and instead of creating new, proper models for mutants, stalkers and world they spend literally years making mod guns that never see the daylight. Just imagine how game atmosphere and immersion would change if Stalker would have more natural and complex animations for mutants and stalkers. Like for example that one type of chimera/dog attack that is just really stiff jump animation that is repeated over and over again. Or that annoying stalker animation of eating/looting. Jesus Christ that looting animation and eating/drinking is just eyes bleeding and no one care... because we need more HD guns that are just ripped from other games anyway... The same is with maps. there is actually lots of new maps for Stalker made by few Russian/Ukrainian modders... but no one really use them. you can see them in just few russian mods, but rest of people dont care about it because they dont want to spend time merging it to their projects because they would need stop working on... HD weapon mods... All we really now beside older mods that we played from top to bottom, is another Misery that is crap-hole that give you nothing beside washed colors and idiotic damage balance making player anemic who cant hold the pistol when shooting. Its whole "hardness" is based just on unbalanced damages, not on "surviving". We have CoC that is just empty sandbox that get boring even after adding mission mods to it. We have CoM and LD, that, sorry, is nothing but CoC with all annoying stuff from Misery. Nothing really new, so there is no real point of playing it if you played modded CoC. Rest of mods on any list/site are just in stage of never-ending development that for most of time end in canceling work on it because after 5 years one of main dev get bored of it and rest dont know what to do with them self with that guy. Or just knock off of existing mods that are just compilation of addons that 90% of people already use. Overall there is nothing new on Stalker modding scene, unless you understand Russian language. then ap-pro.ru give you lots of joy, even if some of those mods are really hard or weird. But at lest they give you something new. If you dont understand Russian... well all you really have is few CoC addon compilation, few graphic mods and bunch of weapon mods that are not compatible with anything beside CoP so just to play with them you need to repeat CoP story once again(and probably most of players played it at least 5 times...)

Narodnaya Soljanka is the Russian name for People's Soup. The version you're better off playing is STALKERSOUP since it's about the more stable and English translated version of the same damn thing. It's insanely packed with stupid shit. That's about all I can say, buuuuut if you want an experience like none other play that or SGM 2.1 and drink a lot of vodka in preparation.

If Narodnaya Solyanka, only NS2016. Rest of versions like DMX and other crap is just annoying and stupid. You could seriously write a book about stuff that is messed up in those mods. NS2016 is most "polished" and "smoothened" version that is actually playable. It still have that idiotic cave map at the beginning and lots of weird bugs/features, but well, you cant have everything... In terms of game it self just imagine Call of Chernobyl that have story and its based on SoC not CoP. Lots of missions, lots of stuff, lots of weapons, lots of secrets and lots of gameplay time. Its literally mod for weeks, and if you want find all secrets and do "everything" its mod for whole month of non-stop playing. It of course is bugged as hell, you cant expect more from huge mod on barely breading SoC engine, and it dont look good compared to other games. As for installation: Get Stalker SoC. ( patch 1.0004 ) get mod it self: NS_2016.7z / Облако Mail.Ru (torrent: https://yadi.sk/d/9Z43dwuM3HVfs9) Patch: Фикс от 20.05.2017.rar Translation(Im not sure if its latest...): http://www.mediafire.com/file/69rz32dk6cv6f7f/People%27s+Soup+2016+Language+Pack+1.0.zip I didnt play with that translation, because I have Polish Repack with all patches, so I dont give 100% guarantee that it work/translate game properly. There is also repack made by user from GSC forum, but I dont know if there are any seeders for it: NS_2016.torrent — Yandex.Disk Original topics with more info(Russian) http://ap-pro.ru/forum/126-89946-23 Народная Солянка 2016

these fancy shmancy new avatar pic things are cool

Isn't StalkerSoup the best version of it?

You can tell you're playing a soup-based mod if after a day out in the zone you look like this https://i.imgur.com/vMVbt7v.png There's 10,000 different guns and you can seemingly carry all of them at once

Define "best". For me there is no such thing like "best". Especially in Stalker world. StalkerSoup is Narodnaya Solyanka. There is so many versions of it that its really hard to even say exactly with is with until you play them. For me, and for lots of other people NS2016 is most playable because it is not filled with 20000000000 items, weapons and artifacts(but still it have lots of zeros at the end...). It have least stupid missions and ""features"" where you need to break your wrists and brain to finish. It dont have idiotic damage balance. Missions are actually playable, there is lots of normal secrets and stashes. Its most stable(for me) and you actually can finish it without crying and beating the crap out of your keyboard when game crash/you get killed in some hilarious way. For first time NS2016 like any other NS is hard to swallow, especially that idiotic Cave level at the beginning, but after that, when you get your gear, get your first missions and get used to game mechanic its actually nice experience. NS2016 is like Stalker SoC but with 10x more items/guns and 10x more missions that are not only kill/fetch.

Because the tools available to do so in Stalker are buggy, poorly documented, slow, and painful to use. It is, however, much easier to swap out a bunch of .ltx and texture files. Adding maps to Stalker can be done, but it's a real labour of love and even if you get them in-game you're limited by the hard-coded limitations of the engine. Improving AI can be done (by people smarter than me), but it's difficult. New questlines can be done (we made a bunch for Wormwood and I thought they were pretty good at the time), but remember Fallout 4? Remember how it was roundly criticised at release for reducing the quantity and quality of player agency? Well, FO4's remains far ahead of Stalker's. At its most sophisticated, the Stalker conversation system allows you to intimidate NPCs by having an expensive gun. That's all you get. Everything else is running places and shooting people. Don't hate the modders. Hate the game.

I'm waiting for S2, personally.

Where exactly did you get this information from? Slow, buggy, poorly documented, and painful to use yes, but by no means is Stalker's conversation system, or any of its scripting systems for that matter, underdeveloped. I'm developing quest lines for my stalker soup and I'm able to create scripted tasks like ambushes/trade deals/faction wars just like from the Stalker games without having to edit any maps, and through only .script and .ltx files. It's just that, changing some numbers around is much easier than learning how to use and then using Stalker's inhouse scripting language. Hate the modders lol, they're being lazy. I'll post a video later of the complex scripted tasks I'm able to create

im waiting for you to release wormwood sweetie

I guess you're new around here haha

@TKGP might be your best bet iirc he asks for compensation though

It's not that hard, it's only XML. And if you're the one translating, you wouldn't even worry about the XML, you'd just replace where the text is one language with the other language.

gin wizard: release gin wizard: wormwood Beacon: no its confirmed boys