Complete S.T.A.L.K.E.R. re-texturing. It looks amazing.

[JoeDirt]

It's a complete re-texturing of the game that changes the look and feel of it into something in-between a black-and-white graphic novel with brilliant splashes of vibrant color and a nightmarish winter wonderland.

Note that AFAIK, since I haven't actually played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with this mod installed, it is only a graphical re-texturing project and it doesn't alter gameplay. There are many, many other mods that do that.

Without further ado, here are some screenshots of what the game looks like with this mod installed. Most of the people that like it describe an unparalleled sense of ambiance and atmosphere:

Simply put, it looks beautiful.

Here's a torrent link to the mod: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3764139/S.T.A.L.K.E.R._-_Nuclear_Snow_[mod]_-_Reseed. Here's a more "official" download link: File Front.

Here are some more screenshots that I found that show what the mod looks like without Dynamic Lighting, i.e. Bloom. I think it looks even better! Grittier and... artier? Anyway, here they are:

 

[Bluebottle]

That's looks pretty fucking amazing. I'll probably give it a go once the 1.4 patch (or whatever it ends up being) comes out with the freeplay whatsit. I've been waiting to play through it again until then.

OT: Why don't more games use effects like this for night environments? After all mimicing the effects of the human eye does seem to be all the rage nowadays. That looks more convincingly like being out at night than most efforts I've seen.

 

[JoeDirt]

Here are some more snapshots, without any particular order or explanation. Talk about atmosphere and gloom... I found exploring dungeons in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. one of the better creepfests in any FPS game I'd ever played, and just looking at this shot of the black-and-white doorway illuminated by the flashlight fills me with dread.

 

[JoeDirt]

This one is another one of the snapshots taken without Dynamic Lighting (Bloom).

 

[Naked Ninja]

That looks more like a full screen shader effect than retexturing. Like how you do sepia rendering.

 

[JoeDirt]

Here's what the author says about the process:

HOW THIS RESULT WAS ACHIEVED:
Several tests were made before I came up with a somewhat good result. What I had
to do was to change many textures, sky, ground, foliage and actors to be able to
see how the result might end up, so before making the final overhaul, there were
plenty of hours photoshoping and batchrunning.
The final retexturing took me several days, mostly because of the different settings
for every texture to not loose alphachannels and to get a good result on the image -
amongst the other textures.
So, when I ended up with my favorite result, I recorded it in Photoshop as a macro
and then ran it on a couple of files at the time, mostly the same group of textures,
just to not loose track of where I was editing. To be able to edit and save into
Stalker's textureformat I used Nvidias DDS-plugins for Photoshop.
After that, the fun part took place, I started editing some images, like blood, artifacts
and some other textures, to achieve the strong contrast in a gamescene. Then some shaderediting
and lightcolorchanges in the engine took place, and finally it ended up with this result.
Some time was also spent on looking for the grasstexture, which GSC has hidden well, thank
you nokturnal over at oblivion-lost.de's forum for pointing them

 

[Starwars]

It looks really nice, and I'll probably try it out whenever I happen to reinstall STALKER. However, since I'm a weakling at heart, it will probably scare the shit out of me even more than vanilla STALKER does.

Have there been any other good mods for STALKER? I assume the singleplayer construction set hasn't been released yet?

 

[Naked Ninja]

Hmmm, interesting. Sounds like a lot of gruntwork though.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

Looks mildly like Sin City, but without the city.

 

[cutterjohn]

Face it. Stalker retext does nothing more than Oblivious retext, but at least Stalker looked better to begin with.

Frankly, the retext looks no better to me than did the original..

 

[Woetohice]

__

 

[MetalCraze]

the 1.4 patch (or whatever it ends up being) comes out with the freeplay whatsit. I've been waiting to play through it again until then.

except for completing the "storyline" there's nothing to do. Well if not counting all those FedEx quests. And now imagine if a "storyline" mode is stripped from there. What will you do?

 

[Monolith]

Enjoy the countryside and architecture.

 

[fastpunk]

I'm not sure I like it too much, it looks too grainy. The immediate sensation is WOW! but I think it can get a bit stressful for the eyes after a while.

 

[Blacklung]

It looks like someone took an art direction from the real movie or the Wizard of Oz. It seems like that whole idea of the world being black and white until something unworldly pops in. Pretty neat effect to see in a game.

 

[HanoverF]

Interesting screen shots, but looks like it would be a fucking pain in the ass to play.

It was pretty close already.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

Yeah, it looks like it might get kind of old and/or irritating after eight hours or so.
Still, amazing screenshots.

 

[Severian Silk]

Where did the pictures go?

 

[thesheeep]

Too much traffic, I guess.

 

[VonVentrue]

That looks very nice, I must admit.

This game is simply begging for a mod SDK... It has so much potential that can be unleashed only by allowing the users to add numerous features to the game.

 

[denizsi]

Images are dead. Do not use photobucket or other massively popular image hosting sites like imageshack or what have you for fuck's sake; they go down damn fast!

 

[thesheeep]

Since when does imageshack go down?

Haven't noticed such a thing.

 

[barzam]

Check that piratebay link in the OP, there are some screens there.

 

[Elhoim]

Check that piratebay link in the OP, there are some screens there.

Cool.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

http://www.mediamonster.se/games/stalke ... w/ns03.jpg

Chilling.