STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl Mod Thread

[Puukko]

Given those circumstances, ironman mode must be a setting aimed at masochists who don't mind wasting hours away grinding only to die to fucking moss.

Based on my brief experience with Dead Air, moss is the single most dangerous mutant in the zone.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Given those circumstances, ironman mode must be a setting aimed at masochists who don't mind wasting hours away grinding only to die to fucking moss.

Based on my brief experience with Dead Air, moss is the single most dangerous mutant in the zone.

Its bloody everywhere too. They should have balanced it to not take 90% of your health + bleeding. It doesn't even show up in the PDA.

 

[RRRrrr]

Just kill me now. CoC & Misery are the worst plagues to ever befall the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. modding community. What a hopeless and dark future this is.

Misery 1.2 with helmets disabled is the best vanilla-like experience imo. The mod really was "vanilla but scarcer items and darker weather". Misery 2.0 was an abomination, though.

 

[Taim]

This whole Dollchan fiasco gave me the stalker itch again.

I tried playing anomaly. I always keep trying to play anomaly. I really just don't get it. I think they do a lot of things right - the engine is buttery smooth - the visuals are great - hell, they even did an okay job with the lore (from what I can tell from poking around in the Clear Sky base - at least). And I love how configurable everything is - but jesus christ the fucking inventory bloat. Also the first quest I got was to go from the Swamps to Zaton. From the SWAMPS to ZATON. Literally traverse the entire exclusion zone. First quest. Sounds like a shitty excuse to basically do freeplay - which I have absolutely no interest in. I like things being as handcrafted as they can be while allowing for some emergent gameplay (it's why I enjoyed Shadow of Chernobyl/Gothic/Elex/Deus Ex so much). Other than that all of the quests are bullshit filler fetch quests which was my least favorite thing about the original SoC.

Anyway, it seems like no one wants to actually understand and enhance what the vanilla game did (or at least not have a well translated English version of such a thing) - so I'm back to playing through vanilla.

Going to create my own homebrew version of Memories of the Zone with a version of the OGSR engine that isn't 2+ years out of date.
For those of you who don't know - it's a Vanilla+ modpack that merges a bunch of (mostly) well-regarded mods together with some optional tweaks.

The base of the mod has the following:
- OGSR x64 engine for enhanced gfx and performance
- Zone Reclamation Project for further bug fixes
- Absolute Nature texture pack
- Absolute Structures texture pack
- Photorealistic Zone 2 texture pack
- Original Weapons Renewal 3 for better weapon animations, textures and models
- STALKER Weather Overhauled v3 for enhanced atmosphere and climate

I'm probably gonna pull out the photorealistic zone pack - takes a few too many liberties with the style at some points and I don't really give it a shit if my 2007 game doesn't look like a 2009 game.
I'm curious what people's thoughts are on the Weather Overhaul. Never really had an issue with the weather. In fact I thought the mood was one of the things GSC nailed almost perfectly - but I'm open to adding it if people here think highly of it.


Also: Does anyone have any opinions on Road to the North? It's based on CoC or CoM or one of the thousands of popamole freeplay mods but it supposedly added a story. Is it like Misery v2 or anomaly (i.e. tedious inventory management v.1.5.1)? Or does it actually like the original Stalker games?

 

[cretin]

Also: Does anyone have any opinions on Road to the North? It's based on CoC or CoM or one of the thousands of popamole freeplay mods but it supposedly added a story. Is it like Misery v2 or anomaly (i.e. tedious inventory management v.1.5.1)? Or does it actually like the original Stalker games?

RTTN is Call of Misery with a story. So you probably won't enjoy it.

 

[cretin]

CoC is still getting some love
https://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-...r7unofficial-patch-all-in-one-repack-reupload

Fan continuation of CoC 1.5 r7, on a x64 engine.

stcop 3.4 ported to this build (with 2D scopes only unfortunately)
https://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/addons/stcop-34-weapon-pack-port-2-d-scopes-1-5r7
https://www.moddb.com/mods/call-of-chernobyl/addons/stcop-34-patch-1-5r7

Same user has uploaded several mods for this build including a handy tool for graphics settings.

I like freeplay but only when I can run it in a "lets see how long I can survive and how deep I can go into the zone" sort of thing where i get rewarded with extra lives for staying alive a long time. Anomaly et al makes it way too tedious to do ironman runs.

EDIT: this shit doesn't seem stable honestly.

 

[Tacgnol]

Also: Does anyone have any opinions on Road to the North? It's based on CoC or CoM or one of the thousands of popamole freeplay mods but it supposedly added a story. Is it like Misery v2 or anomaly (i.e. tedious inventory management v.1.5.1)? Or does it actually like the original Stalker games?

RTTN is Call of Misery with a story. So you probably won't enjoy it.

It isn't a great story either. That said, I was impressed they had one or two side quests that were a bit different from the usual fetch quest faire.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I have tried this Anomaly and the graphics look like shit.

I have played Arma3 for years and got used to that. Going back to X-Ray feels like playing a game from the 1990s without hardware acceleration.

Also the menus lag terribly and that's the final death-knell.

 

[Taim]

Been playing a little bit of Oblivion Lost Remake 2.5:

Haven't heard much discussion on this thread about this.

So far my feelings are mixed.

Cons:
Textures are very rough - even by stalker standards. (holy crap I forgot how rough the original weapon models were).
The bigger issue: The maps are really sparse with people - I'd argue TOO sparse - but this is subjective depending on what kind of experience you want I suppose. Honestly I can imagine GSC realizing they need to cut the map sizes down because long stretches of nothing aren't particularly exciting - even when the mood/environment is on point.
The ambient sound can be hit or miss. I really really dislike when modders add human/mutant sound effects rather than having the a-life just do its thing. There's this one sound that's a human screaming - it's clearly a different sound-effect than the actual stalkers - so I know it's not actually anything - and it just becomes annoying.

Neutral:
I've seen dog packs in the size ranges of 20 off in the distance. Not sure how that's gonna play out. Seems like there's a lot of mutants spawned in this mod.

Pros:
While the textures are bad - the lighting and weather works pretty well to create a good atmosphere - for the most part. Sometimes I feel the bright weather is a bit over-saturated. Probably preferred the weather of original SoC but I like they tried something different at least.
The maps are ACTUALLY different - which is great - and pretty rare. I'm assuming these are based off of actual build maps. Not sure how much additional work the mod did for them. Don't know much about the alpha stuff tbh.
From my little bit of hanging around in the Cordon - the main thing I was missing from Anomaly is here - you are actually rewarded for exploration. The author hand-placed items in a bunch of areas rather than just having empty stashes and those annoying white containers you have to knife open everywhere with random loot in them.

Got to a point where I had to escort a Military commander to his buddies who were openly hostile to me and started opening fire as we got close. Good stuff. Don't know if this is a bug or an oversight.

Anyway - it's made enough of an impression that i'll give it another hour or two at least. Haven't had any actual real firefights that don't involve me getting mobbed by the military so I can't really comment on the gunplay yet.

 

[Baron Dupek]

IIRC Sid/Toad told you to not shoot soldats no matter what, getting pestered by chopper and making that escort quest more difficult. Like usual easterneuropean case - he got connection with them and opening fire is bad for business...

 

[Taim]

Had a rare entire day free yesterday so I spent it in full autist mode evaluating a bunch of different mods.

Oblivion Lost Remake
Vector of Alienation
Narodnaya Solyanka 2016
Wind of Time

I like to think I'm pretty agreeable to jank (love Gothic/Elex - even loved unmodded Clear Sky) - but it is very frustrating how unpolished everything is. There's always at least one thing off - and it's 'off' to a level that's so egregious it's pretty impossible for me to overlook.

Take Wind of Time, for example, looks like a polished story mod with good custom levels, good progression, good economy, even the story sounds pretty decent. The "hand translation" is so fucking terrible that I edited my fsgame.ltx file because I thought it didn't load in. The first person you talk to in the game greets you as a major (even though the intro repeatedly introduces you as Lieutenant), the dialogue is filled with clauses that don't make any sense and pronouns with capital letters in the middle of a sentence. It's sort of sensical after you take a second to translate every line of dialogue in your head. You can follow whats going on but it is not an enjoyable experience at all. This is the same with every dialogue. It's like the guy didn't even do another pass through what he translated to ensure it made any sense.

OLR/VoA aren't that bad but the split forces you to choose what you want to enjoy in your playthroughs more (because there's no way I'm playing through both when its about 80% the same content). Do you want more side quests and better lighting and a slightly less empty world - or do you want better written dialogue, a better main quest (but no real side quests), and better weapons/animations? Sure would be nice if this was one mod that did all of the above. I'll blame this one mostly on my own autism and just suck it up and pick one because it seems the best of what's listed (the translation for both of these - especially VoA - is fucking Shakespeare compared to WoT).

Got NS2016 working on the OGSR engine but haven't played with it too much. Cretin and Boredgunner say good things (and I trust their opinions on Stalker as much as anyone) but my first impressions weren't amazing. Immediately i found a can of propane worth 7000 - so I can tell the economy is going to either be fucked or just hilariously inflated (probably just totally fucked) - but I'll probably give that one another shot soon. I remember emptying an entire pistol clip into a flesh and not killing it so I'm...apprehensive.

-----

I also made the grave mistake of joining the C-Con discord. Holy shit is the English Stalker community toxic and infantile.

I skimmed the last couple days of news and it turns out the lead translator of NLC 7 ("Billy") had a massive fit, was banned, and there's talks of another guy (carlkuwait) taking the reins and starting from scratch. Apparently Billy looked at 12 hours of carlkuwaits work - flipped out and called it a machine translation - and shit hit the fan.

Man that lead translator sounds like a real dick right?

WRONG. Guess what else carlkuwait translated - fucking WIND OF TIME. https://www.moddb.com/mods/wind-of-time/downloads/wind-of-time-13-english-retranslation-dec-2020

If the illiterate shithead who made the absolute worst non machine translation I have ever read is going to be the lead translator for NLC 7 - we're fucked. Starting to seem like if I ever want a half decent translation of any of this stuff I either need to learn russian or get better at Natural Language Processing and build a better Russian -> English machine learning algorithm than google. Both seem equally feasible.

Maybe i'm getting worked up over nothing though and this happens every month on that discord - I wouldn't be surprised.

Goddamn these games really turn me into a bitter cunt.

 

[jebsmoker]

lol i personally know billycockmeme - this isn't really shocking since the stalker community is a small world. he is very mercurial, but i hope he grows out of his issues

carlkuwait is fine, he just needs someone to work with him so that the translation quality improves

 

[Taim]

I did just try running the russian text files for the first area in Wind of Time through a few machine translators and yeah - I don't think carlkuwait touched about 70% of the stuff in here. Most of it is directly from DeepL's machine translation algorithm (competitor to Google/Yandex - which are worse) - which I imagine is from the original machine translation.

My guess is he used the machine translation as a base - terrible idea - but certainly quicker than doing it all by hand from scratch.

I prefer laziness to incompetence - so I see this as a good sign.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I'm more bothered by Modder's insistence on shoving metro into stalker, really.
Anomaly has lurkers from metro, and its really jarring. I shit you not, it looks like the lazy fuckers just ripped the model from the metro games and didn't even try to remodel it to fit the overall aesthetic.
I have yet to see an add-on that changes that, which means that most people are fine with that crap. You'd think there would be a remodel out there.

 

[Billy Cockmeme]

I skimmed the last couple days of news and it turns out the lead translator of NLC 7 ("Billy") had a massive fit, was banned, and there's talks of another guy (carlkuwait) taking the reins and starting from scratch. Apparently Billy looked at 12 hours of carlkuwaits work - flipped out and called it a machine translation - and shit hit the fan.

Hi there,

I got wind of this and I just have to respond to this.

Yes, what you heard is true, but only partially. I fucked up. A lot.

But that is only one part of the story. So, here's everything. Yes, you need to know it all, because it's really important for the events, as well as my current motivation.

I first started the NLC7 project back in November of 2019. BoredGunner was joking around with NLC7 being the best mod and I decided to translate it. Of course, I started off machine translating, because I didn't have any clue on how the Russian language works (more on that later). It was all based in C-Con and the project was going on well at first. Of course, the quality just sucked. I remembered from the times I used to revise translations at The Genies of the Zone (Spatial Anomaly, OLR) how the team lead there just got a bunch of people together and translated as a group. So, a few months later, that's exactly what I did. I put out a few ads on r/stalker and /sg/ and hoped someone would come. And I got a few guys at first. They were pretty good. I moved from being a translator into a sort of manager for the group.

Fast forward one year. We changed the translators a lot. Some came and went, some stuck around. Overall, 18 people came and went, of those 14 are credited, as they actually passed a sort of test I devised to look at the quality of the translation (after all, NLC7 is not a simple mod. It's special). But we made a lot of progress. Nailed down basically most of the smaller files and started moving on to the more complicated and bigger files (oh boy the russian prison slang). We currently sit at 30-40% complete. Why? Because half of the time we just procrastinated. The texts are complicated and hard. We all got burnt out quickly. Due to this burn out, we actually have to get new translators in. Otherwise the project just grinds to a halt, when the entire team is just dead tired.

So now we come to march-april of this year. This is where the first shit hits the fan stuff happens. Basically, the owner of C-Con took a break. Meanwhile, we were flaming in the politics section. I'm extremely anti-communist and there are a couple others who are communists. And yeah, we just duke it out. But believe it or not, it doesn't affect our relationship at all. We just tease eachother and that's it. One of them is actually part of the translation team, so it's not like we can take it personally. Anyways, the owner comes back during one of those political "fights" and just sees us doing it. They decide to mute me, but keep the other, a long time member, unpunished. This angers me and I just take it up with the owner. I say that it is unfair and that the channel isn't serious anyways. This offends them and I get kicked. But once I come back, the bot system kind of freaks out and permamutes me. I decide to leave C-Con for good. I just don't like the management anymore. I wasn't banned, but I leave of my own accord and just pretend that "I got banned". Stupid mistake, now that I see.

Now we come to recent events. Basically, last week, CK came in and asked me if he could translate. I allowed him and he translated the bar dialogues. I looked over them and they were actually fine, but the terminology was way off. That's a 2-3 hour fix. But some of my translators (I won't point fingers, this story is just about my failures), decided that having a machine translator is not a good idea for the project. A secret channel was requested, which I allowed to be made. Discussions took place on how to solve this. Then a vote was started, which asked whether to keep CK or not. It was very offensive; the choices were "We keep the translation handmade and great" and "we turn it into a bad machine translation". It was pretty bad. I mean, I machine translate, but the difference is that over the one and a half years, I was learning russian. Not enough to communicate, but enough to know that the translation is right. Plus, my Lithuanian heritage helped, since we do have similar ways of saying things. But I digress. I actuallly made the mistake of allowing such a discussion to even take place.

Here is where the shit hits the fan. And this is totally my fault. I acted impulsively, because I didn't want the team to split. I went over to CK, I commended his efforts, explained that he made a "good translation from an english standpoint", but that "machine translation is not our goal". He left. But then I realised, "oh shit, he's like the only guy who touched the sheets in the past three months". And I lost him. So then I came to the team, I lashed out that we lost a good translator, that they owe me one file (the bar dialogues), and I demoted the guy who made the vote, as he was a moderator in the translation discord server at the time. And finally I say that if this "kills the team", then the "project will get canned" (of course, I would never bring myself to delete all the work) This was a huge mistake, which I shouldn't have done. Now I lost two translators.

I laid this matter to rest. I wanted to just give it some time and then somehow salvage it. I readded CK's work, started going through and fixing mistakes. I hoped I could later present it to him, explain everything and at least give him something to look at and see how the machine translation should be fixed. Then I get wind of the news, that the guy who wanted CK gone, actually teamed up with CK in C-Con, copied all the work we have done, and decided to finish the mod with machine translation + handmade fixes. This just absolutely infuriates me. First, my paranoia kicks in and I think this was a plot by C-Con, after I quit their server, and I lash out at the owner again. Then it turns out it actually wasn't. So we kind of all talk it out. Yup, my nerves are shit.

We are now negotiating to somehow bridge the two projects, get everything back on track and so on. Two projects going on at the same time is just absolutely terrible from a productivity standpoint. And yeah, I'm apologising to everyone, I'm trying to keep cool. I just want it all to end and to get back together. I don't even care if it won't be under my leadership anymore. But it appears the talks are about to crash straight to the ground. You see, the other side is demanding, that I hand over the project. Everything. Give them ownership and I get put on the sidelines (maybe to even get rid of me). Allegedly it's to "protect against further drama". And oh boy I am just boiling inside right now, but I'm trying to keep it in, so that no further drama would happen. I haven't explained it this *directly* to them right now. I tried to explain it in a whataboutisms, talking about Smigol and the One Ring, asking how strong their stance was. They didn't catch the drift yet. So I guess I'll have to explain this bluntly. The project been a part of my life for one and a half years. I have cared for it, managed it, put my love into it. I started the project, I made the team, I went through the hundreds of files - texts, textures and scripts. Even contacted one of the remaining devs, though that didn't lead to anything. Like, the amount of work I did for this project is just indescribable. And now, they all want to claim ownership over all the work I have done, for "protection". All of the lashing out, all the anger, all the drama I caused, it was because I was scared that the team is going to split and that the project will die off; I'll be left alone to translate. And, you realise by now, the shitstorm is never going to end. The project will be split, because under no circumstances will I give away the ownership. Imagine having a child, taking care of it, having it grow, steering it onto the right path, so that a good person will grow up. And now they want to take it away. And because they will not get the ownership of the work (which, by the way, they have full access to, no strings attached, except that everyone gets credited), they will split the project anyways. The situation is beyond fucked. But I hope they'll understand what I mean and that we can get back to work.

No TL;DR, because without the full context, you wouldn't understand everything that has happened and why I acted the way I did, as well as the future of the project. A TL;DR would just get taken out of context.

Sincerely,
Billy Cockmeme, a.k.a. the Manager of the NLC7 translation project, the guy with a bad temper

P.S. Carlkuwait is actually not going to take over the translation, but rather he's just collaborating. He wants to be a part of the translation project, and I'd be glad to have him on board.

 

[Billy Cockmeme]

WRONG. Guess what else carlkuwait translated - fucking WIND OF TIME. https://www.moddb.com/mods/wind-of-time/downloads/wind-of-time-13-english-retranslation-dec-2020

If the illiterate shithead who made the absolute worst non machine translation I have ever read is going to be the lead translator for NLC 7 - we're fucked. Starting to seem like if I ever want a half decent translation of any of this stuff I either need to learn russian or get better at Natural Language Processing and build a better Russian -> English machine learning algorithm than google. Both seem equally feasible.

In addition to my explaination of what the whole backstory of the NLC7 translation project drama is, I thought I would make a second post just to address this.

First off, do not disrespect translators like that. They put in their free time, so that ungrateful brats like you could enjoy russian mods.
Carl works on his translations for a long time. A month. He has a lot of free time and out of boredom, he translates mods. But he is not a simple blind machine translator. He takes care to make sure the translation is indeed correct. Think of it like a professional CAT user. You can pump out good translations, if you know what you are doing. And he does. It's not his fault Wind of Time has trashy dialogue. Blame the writers of the mod.

Secondly, the translation software has gotten WAY better. Yes, there is a neural network made for translation. It's called DeepL. It doesn't get it right the first time, and sometimes it gets confused, but it gets close enough, so that fixing the text is super easy. And believe me when I say it, it does work well.

Just please, don't talk smack like that. You can criticize properly, but just going out of your way to be so insulting is just not a good way to communicate with people. I know from my experience

 

[jebsmoker]

holy fucking bahooties billy you actually registered here

 

[A horse of course]

First off, do not disrespect translators like that. They put in their free time, so that ungrateful brats like you could enjoy russian mods.

Just please, don't talk smack like that. You can criticize properly, but just going out of your way to be so insulting is just not a good way to communicate with people. I know from my experience

I agree. RPGCODEX has traditionally supported and shown great respect to modders (especially Arcanum and Neverwinter Nights adult content), let's not tarnish our reputation now.

 

[jebsmoker]

billy you posting on here for the sake of clearing up the air in relation to modder's drama is a terrible idea. leave while you still can - i don't think you have the necessary mindset for this site

 

[Billy Cockmeme]

billy you posting on here for the sake of clearing up the air in relation to modder's drama is a terrible idea. leave while you still can - i don't think you have the necessary mindset for this site

What? This seems like a jolly good place here, puke. I don't think I want to leave)))

P.S. The idea is good.

 

[cretin]

woof woof

 

[Tacgnol]

First off, do not disrespect translators like that. They put in their free time, so that ungrateful brats like you could enjoy russian mods.

Just please, don't talk smack like that. You can criticize properly, but just going out of your way to be so insulting is just not a good way to communicate with people. I know from my experience

I agree. RPGCODEX has traditionally supported and shown great respect to modders (especially Arcanum and Neverwinter Nights adult content), let's not tarnish our reputation now.

This place does seem to be a beacon to the lost and the mad (i.e. most modders).

 

[Billy Cockmeme]

Bad news puke,

I deleted NLC 7 translation off my hard drive and now I can't undelete it

 

[jebsmoker]

Bad news puke,

I deleted NLC 7 translation off my hard drive and now I can't undelete it

did you at least back it up on google drive

 

[Theodora]

I agree. RPGCODEX has traditionally supported and shown great respect to modders (especially Arcanum and Neverwinter Nights adult content), let's not tarnish our reputation now.

Didn’t you guys also wrong the VTMB patch dude?