STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl Mod Thread

[Iucounu]

True Stalker

There is no A-Life.

 

[Ol' Willy]

GitHub blocked OpenXray

Not clear if GSC made the request or GitHub's own initiative

 

[V17]

They already denied it on twatter.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Another results of reds malding about S2?

 

[jebsmoker]

the buildo department has called me today... they told me: "jeb-sama.... oblivion lost remake 3.0 is HERE"

.... okay, it's not actually fully released - it's a public beta, but still, this is *huge* news for anyone who is into the original vision of STALKER

you can procure it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11RFIRu5LBI3Y8JBDxwcGWQmKKayzINdz/view

and the AI-done translation for it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UZKDnNxojkUU1iKWEdXXI_SSoe9-dimo/view

this probably won't reach 'gold' status for several months - and it is largely unrefined, so expect bugs

also: i'm slowly working on a hand-written translation for Dester's Arsenal Mod, but after i finish and release that, i'm gonna dedicate my translation effort towards OLR 3.0

 

[V17]

I finished True Stalker. It looks great and it's a great feeling to walk through the reworked areas that evoke nostalgia and yet are sufficiently new and interesting through both new looks and new context, plus the one new overworld map is great as well. The authors focused more on things looking good than on realism, and it does often work, especially at night. Night in bloodsucker village was just gorgeous.
However gameplay-wise it's profoundly meh.

There's been a significant deserved pushback against people who call Anomaly or GAMMA the definitive Stalker experience, because those mods strip away too many things that made Stalker what it is, focus on the sandbox aspects and just make it into a game with considerably different fundaments than the trilogy. True Stalker has the same problem in the opposite direction. It strips away all the semi-openworld sandbox elements, any feeling of agency and A-Life and focuses on entirely linear story focused gameplay.

The overall story and world building isn't bad. But the quest design is mostly shit, so even if the story subjects of the quests are interesting (and they often are, both in the main quests and side quests that are numerous and often large), the gameplay is often close to "watch a cutscene, get teleported to a place, shoot a few enemies, watch a cutscene, end". At least in the mid to late game - early game doesn't teleport you anywhere and instead features a very boring amount of walking back and forth. There are no fast travel guides like in CS and CoP.

And while the story itself is fine and has good ideas, the execution is lacking imo. I only played the english translation, which is serviceable but not great (though I've heard that the writing isn't that great in russian either). There is a controversial decision where in about 2/3 of the game you suddenly swap characters and play as someone else for the rest of the game. I think I can understand what they were going for, but the context just didn't feel that well done. The overall message of the ending seems to be kind of "you don't always get a happy ending or even a catharsis because the zone and its inhabitants don't give a fuck about you", which is not a bad point at all, but for me personally it didn't really have an impact, ending felt more like "well, this is it I guess, okay bye".

From a technical standpoint, the game is incredibly polished. More polished than many commercial games. You can feel that a ton of work went into it. But as with the weird new inventory system, it feels like the work was sometimes misplaced.

edit: Oh, and as a part of the story you lose consciousness I think over 20 times through the whole game. Sometimes by getting shitfaced, sometimes by getting shot, sometimes completely nonsensically. Sure, you can knockout a trained military stalker in an exosuit with a single pistol-whip. Maybe they thought it was a funny running joke.

 

[Ol' Willy]

the buildo department has called me today... they told me: "jeb-sama.... oblivion lost remake 3.0 is HERE"

From the first glance it looks like the same 2.5 but with ubiquitous muh survival mechanics crammed all over the game

 

[Baron Dupek]

Seems like they entertain the old concept of undergound labs being connected with the series of massive series of tunnels

 

[jebsmoker]

i've finished a hand-written English translation for Dester's Arsenal Mod

before you ask 'why the fuck did you translate a mod from 2008' - this mod represents a major milestone in STALKER modding and is absolutely worth preserving and remembering

download it here and follow the instructions in the readme file:

https://mega.nz/file/taVT3bDQ#o9GMYiBNr62zDYJU-PNZv9kVGdpls422Y8ExjYBrdp0

now that this is done, i'm gonna start working on a translation for Oblivion Lost Remake 3.0

 

[HumanTotemPole]

i've finished a hand-written English translation for Dester's Arsenal Mod

before you ask 'why the fuck did you translate a mod from 2008' - this mod represents a major milestone in STALKER modding and is absolutely worth preserving and remembering

download it here and follow the instructions in the readme file:

https://mega.nz/file/taVT3bDQ#o9GMYiBNr62zDYJU-PNZv9kVGdpls422Y8ExjYBrdp0

now that this is done, i'm gonna start working on a translation for Oblivion Lost Remake 3.0

Truly is. Still have an old 1.2 archive from 2008 on an external HDD.

I was so hyped for an early RC I was checking for updates daily on the mod's GSC thread in a French internet cafe whilst on holiday.

 

[jebsmoker]

the old GSC forums are long-gone now sadly - you can only view them on archive.org now

i remember Kanyhalos hyping up his Oblivion Lost mod there, and i also remember him mentioning that he wanted to put music from World of Warcraft into it for whatever reason

 

[KeAShizuku]

Personally I'll just play vanilla with the community fixes and a few HD textures.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

the old GSC forums are long-gone now sadly - you can only view them on archive.org now

i remember Kanyhalos hyping up his Oblivion Lost mod there, and i also remember him mentioning that he wanted to put music from World of Warcraft into it for whatever reason

To be fair to Kany one of the old versions of Oblivion Lost I played remains the only S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series mod ever to get the health loss from bleeding/bandaging speed/bandage availability dynamic totally right for me. Random military spawns in the bar with bizarrely OP Saiga12s weren't so well judged.

Edit: he was a real old-fashioned type of modder you don't see that much anymore. The enthusiastic sperg with a fragmentary understanding of the game engine they are modifying and plenty of bad ideas but who occasionally gets something on point. Usually mechanically because they do love and tend to actually play their chosen game a lot.

 

[cretin]

So since I can't get NLC7 to work on linux for the life of me, I've committed to doing a Prosectors Project playthrough

So far, I'm really impressed by the engine and features that set it apart from the crowd. I'll do a more detailed report when I've gotten more hours into it,

 

[Baron Dupek]

Someone ported mobile (pre-Android/iPhone era) STALKER game to PC
https://alex1197.itch.io/pito

 

[jebsmoker]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/nlc7-he23/downloads

someone bothered to make a better, hand-revised translation for NLC 7 (although ChatGPT did most of the heavy lifting in this case)

sharing this here because it seems like the translation that everyone has been waiting for, more or less - AI-done translations aren't perfect, but they're getting better

 

[Ryzer]

A-Life AI working as intended (tm)

"Those damn trees insulted our mothers"

 

[Stavrophore]

SoC has pretty poor A-life, a-life was refined in CoP and greatly expanded in CoC by Alundaio.

 

[Ryzer]

SoC has pretty poor A-life, a-life was refined in CoP and greatly expanded in CoC by Alundaio.

SOC A-life is weird, sometimes it can do incredible moves and flank you, sometimes it can be dumb as a brick, staying idle and pointing his gun at the roof, or wall, or something.

 

[Stavrophore]

If anyone wants to play SoC i recommend autumn aurora, or radiophobia for more modern[and buggy] rendition. Vanilla SoC aged poorly.

 

[janior]

you know A-life is good when the NPCs start shooting you through the walls(just like russian counter strike players online)

 

[Ol' Willy]

SoC has pretty poor A-life, a-life was refined in CoP and greatly expanded in CoC by Alundaio.

SOC A-life is weird, sometimes it can do incredible moves and flank you, sometimes it can be dumb as a brick, staying idle and pointing his gun at the roof, or wall, or something.

This is not a-life, just general ai bugging out.

This is to be expected because ai in stalker is simple, but fairly unique as it gives bots lots of freedom

 

[ciox]

I still have no idea what causes that bug that turns up sometimes, which makes all enemy NPCs aim at like 90 degrees away from you, and maintain that offset as if they convinced you are 90 degrees from them.
It seems to affect every NPC in the map when it activates.

 

[Ol' Willy]

SoC has pretty poor A-life, a-life was refined in CoP and greatly expanded in CoC by Alundaio.

SOC A-life is weird, sometimes it can do incredible moves and flank you, sometimes it can be dumb as a brick, staying idle and pointing his gun at the roof, or wall, or something.

This is not a-life, just general ai bugging out.

This is to be expected because ai in stalker is simple, but fairly unique as it gives bots lots of freedom

it's also a matter of if you've quickloaded on the map, it does things to npc alertness and scripting

Ahh, yes. If you quickload and at least a single enemy is killed, all bots from the same group are alerted and given dead-on on your location

This makes stealth runs pain in the ass as you have to single segment them

 

[Ryzer]

SoC has pretty poor A-life, a-life was refined in CoP and greatly expanded in CoC by Alundaio.

SOC A-life is weird, sometimes it can do incredible moves and flank you, sometimes it can be dumb as a brick, staying idle and pointing his gun at the roof, or wall, or something.

This is not a-life, just general ai bugging out.

This is to be expected because ai in stalker is simple, but fairly unique as it gives bots lots of freedom

it's also a matter of if you've quickloaded on the map, it does things to npc alertness and scripting

Ahh, yes. If you quickload and at least a single enemy is killed, all bots from the same group are alerted and given dead-on on your location

My guess is that it was made on purpose to nerf weapons with a silencer like the op SVD-Dragunov.