STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl Mod Thread

[Jack Of Owls]

Two things I hate about S.T.A.L.K.E.R:

-No women. Sometimes after a hard day at the office murdering mercs, vanquishing controllers and getting raped by anomalies, a Stalker just wants to come home to something soft, sweet & spongy, and there's not a woman to be had in the wasteland of The Zone (at least not in SHoC).

-No real stamina system in the default games. As someone previously posted, it's like you've got a jet-engine up your ass. Attacked by a horde of mutants? No problem. Just zoom out of there from zero to sixty in 3 seconds flat with your new atomic super-legs. I'm trying to figure out how to get a decent stamina system using the ZRP options.

 

[DraQ]

-No real stamina system in the default games. As someone previously posted, it's like you've got a jet-engine up your ass. Attacked by a horde of mutants? No problem. Just zoom out of there from zero to sixty in 3 seconds flat with your new atomic super-legs. I'm trying to figure out how to get a decent stamina system using the ZRP options.

The worst thing here is that sprinting doesn't abort weapon reload so when attacked by mutants you can just zoom around like a spazz only pausing to shoot.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Since I'm in a griping kind of mood, why does the engine for Clear Sky run like feces through a funnel in DirectX 10 on Maximum compared to SHoC and CoP? Naturally, after getting at least 60 FPS in the first and last entry in the series (i regularly get 120+ FPS in SHoC on my GTX 660 Ti), I'd expect the middle entry to get that too. Oh, I can turn the details down and get 60+ by why the fuck should I? I like my eye candy. But I'm beginning to suspect that even a GTX 1070 (the card I'll soon be getting) can't make this one (or the latest OGSE) run smooth since that particular series of cards has no DirectX11 optimizations. Time will tell. Anyone else here getting decent framerates on a high end Nvidia card with CS and OGSE?

In other, more positive news, I tried the first few minutes of SGM 2.0 which seems really nice & atmospheric. I love the idea of traveling through thick fog with a fellow Stalker to reach a certain destination only to have wonder warthogs of horror (I don't like the term "boar"... it's boaring) come charging out of the fog to kill ya...or rather cause such frantic reaction on your part that you end up killing each other in crossfire. I tried the latest repack (1.6) of SGM but it's not recommended. No fun fog, and my Stalker bro this time crosses an entire radioactive body of water, forcing me to follow and die a slow death from radiation poisoning. Totally bugfucked version. This is gonna be a fun run when I get back into the STALKER world.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

the last house in camp on the left as you are heading out has a merc suit in the roof rafters - you have to jump from the house roof before it to access it

Which camp?

the very first camp you emerge from at the start of the game

 

[Invictus]

Reading all the responses makes me so sad that we probably wont see another game like the Stalker series; this are really "open world" games where you have a ton of options on how to play however you want to.
You can sneak past the fence, sneak through the tunnel, pay to pass or fight your way through...and there are several ways to fight your way like sneaking and then throwing a few granaded from above, stealthy shooting, sniping, getting some help...
This is exactly why I love this series and what made it so fucking special
Now youve done it; now I want to replay ShoC with some sweet AA2

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, I'd recommend killing them simply because the following areas are far easier with an assault rifle than a sawn-off shotgun. Gunfight against the soldiers is tough but far from impossible, just kill the commander and immediately bolt to cover, then kill whichever army guy tries to circle around you and grab his AK, swap to single fire, and pick off any remaining soldier that tries to get close to you, occasionally peeking out to see who's left and creeping between cover to circle around the area.

Kill them all and you can get a rifle that'll carry you for most of the game, a semi-decent handgun, and a good supply of ammo and medkits, as well as all the remaining weaponry that you can sell for a decent amount of money.

The bridge guys only have shortened AKs on them. Those are pretty much garbage with their stiff recoil and poor accuracy, and you can just as easily get them off bandits or unlucky stalkers.

It's better to not have their replacements try to gun you down whenever you're in the area, at least for a while and if you're in a hurry then even being able to bribe your way through might come in handy.

 

[Multidirectional]

Since I'm in a griping kind of mood, why does the engine for Clear Sky run like feces through a funnel in DirectX 10 on Maximum compared to SHoC and CoP? Naturally, after getting at least 60 FPS in the first and last entry in the series (i regularly get 120+ FPS in SHoC on my GTX 660 Ti), I'd expect the middle entry to get that too. Oh, I can turn the details down and get 60+ by why the fuck should I? I like my eye candy. But I'm beginning to suspect that even a GTX 1070 (the card I'll soon be getting) can't make this one (or the latest OGSE) run smooth since that particular series of cards has no DirectX11 optimizations. Time will tell. Anyone else here getting decent framerates on a high end Nvidia card with CS and OGSE?

Yeah it runs like shit but it's not an issue because, you see, it doesn't just run like shit, it IS shit which you shouldn't even waste time trying to play. Seriously, no amount of mods can salvage that game.
And yeah, Severian Silk, get that hidden armor in the starting area, it really helps a lot with these parts before you get decent firearms. Here's how you get it:

Spoiler

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Since I'm in a griping kind of mood, why does the engine for Clear Sky run like feces through a funnel in DirectX 10 on Maximum compared to SHoC and CoP? Naturally, after getting at least 60 FPS in the first and last entry in the series (i regularly get 120+ FPS in SHoC on my GTX 660 Ti), I'd expect the middle entry to get that too. Oh, I can turn the details down and get 60+ by why the fuck should I? I like my eye candy. But I'm beginning to suspect that even a GTX 1070 (the card I'll soon be getting) can't make this one (or the latest OGSE) run smooth since that particular series of cards has no DirectX11 optimizations. Time will tell. Anyone else here getting decent framerates on a high end Nvidia card with CS and OGSE?

Yeah it runs like shit but it's not an issue because, you see, it doesn't just run like shit, it IS shit which you shouldn't even waste time trying to play. Seriously, no amount of mods can salvage that game.
And yeah, Severian Silk, get that hidden armor in the starting area, it really helps a lot with these parts before you get decent firearms. Here's how you get it:

Spoiler

Don't be so cagey and on the fence about Clear Sky. How do you really feel about it? I'm still gonna give it a whirl because, hey, it's still S.T.A.L.K.E.R. :D Gotta be 10X better than Call of Doody or any of its consoletard derivatives. Right? Right?

Some gloomy trivia about the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky (whom Ingmar Bergman said he constantly tried to achieve what Tarkovsky had achieved in his cinema regularly but failed): the shooting location for the film was an old abandoned plant or industrial complex of some kind right next to a chemical production facility that used to dump their toxins in the river nearby. Tarkovsky & crew would regularly watch the fuming foam on top of the water's surface as it bubbled by...and I do mean bubbled! He died of a mysterious cancer just a few years later...along with at least two others in the cast and crew. Talk about your hideous anomalies!

 

[Sodafish]

They removed that suit in the starting village in AA tho. Just FYI.

 

[Multidirectional]

They removed that suit in the starting village in AA tho. Just FYI.

Guess it wouldn't matter to me at this point, unlikely to have problems with anything in that game. Unless they made difficulty in that mod on retarded Clear Sky levels or something. Will have to try AA at some point. Call of Pripyat might be the only genuinely good game in franchise but I'm starting to slightly itch for that SoC atmosphere. Been years.

Anyone knowledgeable on how good is Oblivion Lost nowadays? I have fond memories of playing 2.2 version.

 

[Sodafish]

AA is deffo worth a go. The lethality is increased over vanilla, but not to retarded Misery levels.

 

[Multidirectional]

Good, I fucking hated Misery when I tried. Seemed like a mod for insane people.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I was kind of intrigued by Misery going by comments in this topic by veteran Stalkers like MotherMachinae who both liked it and didn't like it, so I gave it a go for a few minutes. Had a distinctive visual style that I actually kind of dug and felt fit the Stalker universe better than the original games. So I filed it away, thinking I'd like to give it a full run later. Then I read comments on Steam by other veteran Stalkers who said it had severely flawed mechanics and went into detail, like enemy AI annihilating you with high-level equipment, then when you lost a testicle or two in a hardfought victory and defeated them, you'd loot their corpses and find junk weapons and other low-level loot. I was, like, "WTF??" No way way I'm playing that shite. So I'll do SGM or OGSE or even Faction Wars or Mystery instead. Thanks for all the helpful info in this topic, btw. You boys are BOSS!

:russiastronk:

 

[Multidirectional]

Honestly vanilla COP with visual enhancements (Atmosfear + Absolute Nature/Structures texture packs) is just fine to me. Problem with STALKER modders is they just don't know when to stop changing things. True for modders outside the series too but seems to come up particularly often with these games. In Misery you even had retarded shit like changed soundtrack and Snorks sounding like Charger from Left 4 Dead 2.
Now for a game as flawed as SoC I don't mind more changes, but something like CoP is already solid enough at its core enough to only require small tweaks here ant there at best. Yet any popular gameplay mod I come accross seems to go bonkers with changing stuff just for the sake of it.

 

[DraQ]

Unless they made difficulty in that mod on retarded Clear Sky levels or something.

Apart from retarded homing grenades CS had good difficulty. Other than general area design and GFX it's pretty much the only good part in it.

Call of Pripyat might be the only genuinely good game in franchise but I'm starting to slightly itch for that SoC atmosphere.

CoP is much more diverse and better in almost all the individual aspects, both technical and things like quest design and writing, however:

• It lacks superbly atmospheric locations like X18 or even CS' Red Forest.
• It doesn't have such an overwhelming atmosphere of isolation
• It has weak difficulty

SoC also has better artifacts as it lacks simple division between radiation sinks and useful stuff that irradiates you.

 

[Multidirectional]

Artifacts in SoC are definitely more interesting, the way of finding them isn't, however. Artifact hunting is the only good addition in Clear Sky and I'm glad they kept it for CoP. Difficulty in CoP is definitely lower but still good enough on Master, I think. Resources could be more scarce though.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

They removed that suit in the starting village in AA tho. Just FYI.

still there in the complete 2009 mod

sorry, should have mentioned that i run this mod exclusively

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

i'm old; i dont keep up with what the youngsters are doing these days

 

[DraQ]

Artifacts in SoC are definitely more interesting, the way of finding them isn't, however. Artifact hunting is the only good addition in Clear Sky and I'm glad they kept it for CoP. Difficulty in CoP is definitely lower but still good enough on Master, I think. Resources could be more scarce though.

I gave mixed feelings about artifacts hunting. On one hand walking around waving detector makes for fun gameplay and it's nice when people aren't tripping over artifacts bobbing up and down or rolling on the ground everywhere , but on the other artifacts that are physically present where they are are less gamey and better for immersion. It's also neat to be able to just dump massive pile of pretty loot on the ground in some secluded place to have something to feel smug about before you pick it all back up and go to pawn it off for booze and new suit.

Some sort of hybrid with artifacts not just lying in the open but also not appearing out of thin air just because you have your detector out and are within arm's reach.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Been a long time since I played this. What is the get to go mod? AA? The Complete 2009 mod?

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

opinions differ but i prefer complete 2009

it doesnt muck around too much with gameply, fixes bugs and pretties up the graphx a tad

 

[DraQ]

Been a long time since I played this. What is the get to go mod? AA? The Complete 2009 mod?

ZRP if you want a near vanilla experience only better and without bugs.

Otherwise I'm not the go-to guy as far as mods are concerned.

 

[Sodafish]

Complete is far too easy. AA is better all around.

 

[Jaesun]

Complete really dumbs the game down. Go with ZRP.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Complete really dumbs the game down. Go with ZRP.

Not to mention that out of all the Stalker overhauls/enhancement projects I sampled - including Misery and the latest OGSE - this was the one that most ran like ass on my i5, GTX 660 Ti-based system. It still holds the record for the least time any mod ever had on my system.