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baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Konsek posted:

I just read Roadside Picnic, awesome short story and definitely recommended, so I feel up for a trip into the zone and I've just got Call Of Pripyat.

Roadside Picnic is fantastic, as is Tarkovsky's Stalker film which takes it as its inspiration. I really like the mystery of The Zone as a living, breathing place that people really shouldn't visit. The plot of the game loses some of this mystery and originality but still has a lot of that brutal and lonely essence.

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baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Konsek posted:

I need to get round to watching the film.

One thing I tried to work out was how many stalkers there were. Spoilered just in case: the fact that there's a trader who buys items from The Zone means there must have been enough for him to make a living, but on the other hand it also seemed like Red knew every other stalker by name, and there weren't many. And in every trip into The Zone, he never met anyone apart from his own companions. Either way it seems far less populated than the games, but I suppose a completely empty zone wouldn't make for much of a fun game.

Just to warn you, the film is very slow (much like Tarkovsky's Solaris), but I found it very atmospheric and rewarding.

As for the number of Stalkers, it's been a while since I read it so this might not be accurate but I got the impression there were probably the regulars that Red knew, the ones who had reasonably good survival skills and then a bunch of nameless noobs who just died or disappeared.

It might have been good if the game had a town outside The Zone like in the book where Stalkers would swap stories and make the Zone itself terrifying and desolate. You could come across remains of Stalkers and helpful notes about anomalies and artefacts. However I think that would be a totally different game and harder to market.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
I started Lost Alpha, I must say the writing and voice-acting in the intro was pretty jarring and amateurish. Is there much more of this later in the game? It's a bit off-putting. TBH I really want to play a version that's more like the book, but I guess that's not really going to happen since it would mostly do away with gun fights and mutants.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Bacon Hat posted:

the fanmade plot and in-engine cutscenes are cringingly pedestrian. The locations and scenery that go with them are visceral as gently caress but the impact is diminished by horrible voice acting and model breaking animation. Its sad to see all that immersion go into the toilet for the sake of some half life references and "creatively" animated models.

The poor presentation is exactly why I couldn't bring myself to play LA for very long. The whole draw of Stalker for me is the atmosphere, and that bad "fanfic" aspect of it ruined it for me.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Horns posted:

I don't think that's odd at all. Or maybe we're both odd. ;)

I'd kill for a STALKER game that was more of a happy medium between Roadside Picnic and the '79 film. Less straight up gunfights, more weirdness, solitary exploration, creeping dread and big open places to poke around; where every encounter with another living human is an extremely rare and life-or-death event (sort of like what the encounters in I Am Alive tried to be).

Same. I absolutely love the book and the atmosphere Tarkovsky created in the film. Having a village on the outside of the Zone's borders like a mission hub might be cool, and some added pressure of having to fend for your family with what you can scavenge from the Zone. Almost no gun-fights and few mutants, letting the Zone itself be the main threat. Journeying into the Zone would be a real event, that you'd have to plan for and research from info gleaned from other stalkers. The real trick would be making it varied and fun to play whilst keeping that fantastic feeling of mystery and immersion. I don't really trust any amateur modders to do that concept justice though, without turning it into some cheesy pedestrian fan-fic.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

staberind posted:

I am really enjoying the feeling of the stalker movie in SGM Geo.
Mainly : a lot of the spoken sections are silent, so its two or more guys awkwardly eying each other up as the camera pans around them.

I think the best stalker experience is in russian with subtitles, however, I'd like them to include bandits swearing and generally saying dozy stuff like glue sniffing chess players, bonus points is "what a strange trick" is included.


That actually sounds like it's up my street.

A general question:

What's the best Stalker mod experience which looks and plays great, brings something new and doesn't add lovely immersion-breaking cutscenes, stupid difficulty or OTT fanfic rewrites?

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Swartz posted:

Also, someone give me a good drug/medicine that would make you trip out, or maybe some anomaly or creature that could cause you to trip.
this but with rapid grass waves, changing sky, even more motion blur, and other effects to screw with you.

That tree effect is crazy, I really like it. How about making the drug a kind of mushroom that has been "altered" or is unique to the zone? Or in Roadside Picnic there are dangerous things described as "silvery glowing cobwebs", which one of the characters ends up touching. IIRC think you can see something like them hanging from the trees in the game (don't think they do anything). Maybe touching these would cause you to trip balls? It might good to have some cycling psychedelic colours as part of the effect, no idea if that's hard to do.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Missing Name posted:

Am I alone for thinking that a version of LA without the story would be great? Less Illuminati, more "gently caress, let's go wander east for a good while and see what there is." More of a free roam thing, without having to beat the game first.

Nope, not alone. I started playing LA, excited at the potential for fresh experiences, saw the opening cutscene and started to get worried. It went downhill from there. I couldn't stomach it for very long, the whole draw with Stalker for me is immersion and LA shits all over it with its amateurish and cringeworthy presentation.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
I'm thinking I'd like to try out CoC after a long hiatus from serious trips into into The Zone.

Since my time is fairly limited, I'd like a nicely-modded (stable) first experience of CoC since once I get going I don't plan to do multiple restarts to try different things out (and I want to avoid corrupted saves). All of these different mods, branches and permutations are a bit overwhelming.

- I was thinking maybe OWR3 and some kind of nice cosmetic packs. Instead of OWR3 should I wait for AO3 to be adapted for CoC, is it more fun?

- For texture/weather mods, what's the consensus? Atmosfear, Absolute Nature, Absolute Structures?

- I'd also want to adjust the trader weapon condition to change the buy threshold, is that something I have to do manually or is there a mod with a fix for it included somewhere?

- Are there a bunch of other fixes for bugs and annoyances I might need to grab?

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
Cool, thanks for that Ddraig. So you have any thoughts on OWR3 vs AO3 also? Are there any other mods you know of that are nearing release for CoC compatibility that might be essential? (If so, then I will hold off jumping in for now).

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

v1ld posted:

CoC is standalone, don't install it in your CoP folder. The installer does a registry check if CoP has been installed to appease GSC, but there's no other dependency between the two games.

If CoC is standalone, I don't particularly want to download and reinstall CoP from Steam just to install CoC (though CoP has been installed on my machine before). Does the registry key hang around after uninstalling? If not, is there a key I can add manually or is there no way around this?

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
Reg key was removed on CoP uninstall it seems... with a bit of google translate on the russian forum I was able to find what I was looking for, thanks.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
Edit: sorry, I jumped the gun, as it were. See you already sorted that out.

EvanSchenck posted:

I have a problem with the optical sight overlay. I bought a PSO scope for my AN-94, but when I try to use it the image is vertically stretched. The very top of the scope is where it's supposed to be, but the whole thing is oblong...

I noticed in the Read Me.txt file for OWR3 it mentions a scope fix, did you try that?

quote:

SCOPE FIX
----------
If you're experiencing crashing on DX9 or warped scopes on DX10/11 then try the following.
Delete the 'ui_ingame.xml' file in gamedata\configs\ui\textures_descr and rename the 'ui_ingame.xml.alt' file.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
I'm having a pretty good time with CoC (modded with OWR3, Absolute Nature/Structures and Ddraig's 1.9 mod).

However, every now and again I get a crash-to-desktop, most frequently when I attempt to trade with someone. Looking in the xray log shows the following:

quote:

stack trace:

0023:6B624906 d3d11.dll, D3D11CreateDeviceAndSwapChain()
... [stuff]
0023:77AB9855 ntdll.dll, RtlInitializeExceptionChain()

[error][ 8] : Not enough storage is available to process this command.

Looks like an out-of-memory error. Anyone know, is there something specific I can turn off/reduce in the settings to make this happen less?

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Ddraig posted:

More changes from COC repo:
...
* Sultan now at Dark Valley Bandit base. Requires NEW GAME START.
...

Sounds awesome, good job pulling this stuff out. Where it says "requires new game start", does that mean only for the Sultan/Bandit change? Do you know if I can I theoretically continue my save game where I left off otherwise?

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
How do story/main missions work in CoC vs vanilla games, is there a difference concerning what's available in CoC? I made my way up to the Red Forest and talked to Forester, he didn't offer me any quest options. Did I miss something to trigger those? It's been a while since I played the original games so I can't remember what the "official" experience was supposed to be like.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Blacktoll posted:

Yup that was exactly it.

Well...Now after playing with the graphic settings it crashes to desktop without an error message. Oh, well.

It was vertical sync.

Nope, still crashing.

I was getting pretty regular crashes. I put -noprefetch onto the launch command and turned graphics to DX9 enhanced. Much more stable now, though I still get crashes now and again. I do have various mods installed over vanilla CoC, no idea if any of those are responsible.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

NO gently caress YOU DAD posted:

Shotgunned him in the face. Looted some loving landmines off his corpse. Dude must have been Military, because a helicopter started shooting at me with a minigun.

Faction omniscience in games has always irritated me. I mean if someone was around to see me pop one of their buddies and lived to tell the tale or radio for help with my description/location, that's one thing.

I wonder if that can be fixed.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012
Somebody created a pretty good mod manager program for Fallout 3/NV IIRC (there's also Nexus Mod Manager). Is such a thing a viable option for CoC/Stalker in general or is the way the files are structured too complicated?

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Sparkyhodgo posted:

There is a STALKER Smart Mod Manager https://smartmodmanager.codeplex.com but I've never used it. You're welcome to be our Guinea pig. Can it swap out the v1.0008b fan patch for v1.0006 when needed? baromodo, we look to you to find out.

Looks like that was last updated in 2009, and it only mentions Soc and CS. Don't reckon it'll be up to the task for CoC, I won't have the time to try any time soon either.

baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Missing Name posted:

My housemate and I cloudreamed a movie adaptation of Roadside Picnic while we stalled on homework.

Nice, I'd like to see some more stuff adapted from this book, it's one of my all-time favourites. I think I'd leave out the narration though, more mystery that way. It should basically be as impenetrable as Lynch's Dune to people who haven't read the book ;)

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baromodo
Nov 14, 2012

Jonathan Yeah! posted:

I never understood why people liked the VSS so much. The SVD was my go-to backup in all three games.

Well, until the Gauss rifle, anyway.

Silenced sniping.

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