S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

[Iucounu]

I was a regular on the GSC forum from 2009 or so until the end, and the only complaints I've ever heard about SoC's A-Life were that it wasn't as extensive as promised (which I agree with). But I've never heard before that it was entirely missing, and I don't think it was. Patches only fixed bugs.

The bugs being that A-life didn't really work until they fixed it and it started to work. And people still flamed because it wasn't what was promised.
You can load now STALKER1 after all the patches and A-life still barely works.
Clear Sky is when that feature finally started to work properly and you could properly see roaming groups, mutants etc. but that game had other issues.

So what the hell was A-life all about?
Sort of a "radiant AI" that has a day and night cycle?

During development GSC apparently experimented with fairly advanced things like this: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/interview-inside-the-ai-of-i-s-t-a-l-k-e-r-i-

"In early versions of the simulator, a character knew one or several dealers, which had sets of quests that they generated based on the map of anomalous activity and requests from organizations, which wanted to get rich from artifacts found in the Zone. Completion of a quest brought the character closer to his goal. There was only one type of quest at the time — “bring an artifact”. The character would take on a quest to search for the artifact, go to the approximate area in which it could be found, if able to find the artifact, brought it back to the dealer, traded it, then picked a new quest. Along the way he could encounter enemies and fight them. In offline mode this was simulated: the opponents took turns making moves, the result calculated based on a formula and the random factor. The effect was that one opponent could run away from another, sometimes characters got killed, sometimes they did not even notice each other or decided to avoid confrontation. If the character was a stalker and met a neutral or a friend, they traded with each other, guided by a developed trading scheme. All of this worked both in offline and in online modes. To notify player about the offline activity, we used news, which were generated if some character could see an event or its consequences. It was planned that the number of types of quests would later increase, and character behaviour would diversify due to introduction of requirements of food and sleep. We also planned that our characters would be able to uncover the mystery of the Zone before the player, or at least collect a certain amount of information."​

​

Little or none of that went into the finished SoC game. CoP has something mimicking this (stalkers going to an anomaly, picking up artifacts and then go home), but in CoP it seems more static and predictable to me than the replacement migration in SoC and CS.

 

[Iucounu]

Here's another interview with more details:

A-Life, Emergent AI and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
An Interview with Dmitriy Iassenev​

https://web.archive.org/web/20080228032107/https://aigamedev.com/interviews/stalker-alife

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I played my physical copy of SoC on release and A-life worked

i played "gold" stalker, so it's 1.0 or even earlier in rare cases. dog packs ran around like dog packs and attacked other stalkers like dog packs and especially in the beginnings i went around looking for corpses to loot. the game was unstable as hell, but it was complete.

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

PATCH 1.0.3 Dropped.

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

 

[v1c70r14]

You can load now STALKER1 after all the patches and A-life still barely works.
Clear Sky is when that feature finally started to work properly and you could properly see roaming groups, mutants etc. but that game had other issues.

Having recently played SoC this is bullshit, A-Life does send out roaming groups of different NPCs, both large packs of mutants, probably due to me not dealing with their lairs, opting to do more fun missions and hunting artifacts instead, as well as squads of friends and enemies roaming about.

Little or none of that went into the finished SoC game.

The biggest difference in Clear Sky, beyond the very detailed faction war mechanics, is that the game doesn't obfuscate as much what the AI is doing. At the start of the game you can see a map of the entire zone, at least up to the inner areas, and groups of NPCs appear as dots moving around, it even states what they are up to, like defending, or laying siege to a place. Just like how we can only fully appreciate FEAR because the AI is communicating to the player what it is up to, this is also the case in Clear Sky, if it was just messages for help over the PDA there'd be no way of knowing that they were under attack from a squad sent out from X location to Y location. The most crucial thing about good AI is transparency, letting the player know of the fact that it is performing these operations. You can see why the following was cut from SoC.

I was very happy with the work done when I followed a stalker from one level to another, saw how he searched for artefacts, found them, returned to the dealer, approached him, traded, picked a new quest, went on — too bad this did not make it into the original game. It was very interesting to witness.

When we were just implementing GOAP, it was very interesting to watch two hostile unarmed characters that knew were to get weapons and ammo: they first run to the weapons, find that they have no ammo, then run to the ammo, the first one to get there causes the other to panic if he is still far away from weapons and ammo, the panickier gets wounded and falls, the other approaches to finish him (this did not make it into the original game, since all characters received unlimited ammo, and such situations could not take place).

In my playthrough I did loot artifacts from NPCs, but without some kind of system to let the player know that they were looted from the zone, there'd be no way to tell if this is from a random loot list, or if this is being informed by A-Life simulation. The only difference it'd make to the player would be other stalkers trying to snatch up artifacts when you yourself were hunting for them, and that in itself could also be faked as an event that'd trigger when you came close to one. I haven't started replaying CoP, so I don't know how it worked out when they finally did attempt to implement this more fully. As it stands it's really hard to tell how tied up to A-Life, if at all, these artifacts I found on people are.

 

[Perkel]

What part of it do you think barely works? I think it works fine, except that NPCs often go online in fire barrels or walk into anomalies even after the final official patches (mods have fixed that though).

The part that was supposed to give life to zone. If you play SC1 almost every encounter is completely scripted. A-life does some things like some groups move but everything feels static. Clear Sky is where things started to properly work and you could feel it working. You could finish SC1 and never notice anything because how broken it was at release and after patching things up you still can barely feel it.

To me, basic replacement NPC migration in CS works the same as in SoC. On top of that CS also adds various kinds of faction war behavior (such as spontaneously advancing into unoccupied areas) that has never existed in vanilla SoC.

Yeah it adds what A-life was supposed to be.
People played too much mods and CS/CoP and forget how uneventful S1 is when it comes to its AI.

Mind you i hated CS. I always felt that S1 was better than both CS/CoP due to it's non AI stuff.

 

[kites]

Patching 10-20 gigs for every minor hotfix patch is insane. Christ why did I sign up for a terabyte data limit

 

[ArchAngel]

When I roam in Stalker 2 I do run into locations that have dead stalkers, both with or without loot. Or I find campfires with stalkers around but next time I pass they left.
There is some offline simulation happening.

 

[ferratilis]

Patching 10-20 gigs for every minor hotfix patch is insane. Christ why did I sign up for a terabyte data limit

That's why you wait a year or two for the game to be fully patched and download it in one go. You made a rookie mistake of modern gaming.

 

[Gerrard]

In my playthrough I did loot artifacts from NPCs, but without some kind of system to let the player know that they were looted from the zone, there'd be no way to tell if this is from a random loot list, or if this is being informed by A-Life simulation. The only difference it'd make to the player would be other stalkers trying to snatch up artifacts when you yourself were hunting for them, and that in itself could also be faked as an event that'd trigger when you came close to one. I haven't started replaying CoP, so I don't know how it worked out when they finally did attempt to implement this more fully. As it stands it's really hard to tell how tied up to A-Life, if at all, these artifacts I found on people are.

The artifacts are taken from anomalies. If you don't go to anomalies right after emission when artifacts spawn, NPCs will take them and you won't find anything.

 

[Alienman]

https://www.videogamer.com/news/stalker-2-devs-broken-a-life-system-aggressive-optimisation/

Let's check system requirements.

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10 x64 / Windows 11 x64
Processor: Intel Core i7-11700 / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
Memory: 32 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti / Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
Storage: 160 GB available space
Additional Notes: Graphics Preset: HIGH / Resolution: 1440p / Target FPS: 60. 32 GB Dual Channel RAM. SSD required. The above specifications were tested with TSR, DLSS, FSR and XeSS.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Christ why did I sign up for a terabyte data limit

That's not so bad. You mean per day, right?

 

[Fargus]

Patching 10-20 gigs for every minor hotfix patch is insane. Christ why did I sign up for a terabyte data limit

That's why you wait a year or two for the game to be fully patched and download it in one go. You made a rookie mistake of modern gaming.

This.

Just wait til this mountain of pigshite is patched out... someday lol. Then update the game.

Also "oh no i can't survive with terrabyte of bandwidth, there is so much slop to consume!! why God why???"

First world problems.

 

[ArchAngel]

Patching 10-20 gigs for every minor hotfix patch is insane. Christ why did I sign up for a terabyte data limit

That's why you wait a year or two for the game to be fully patched and download it in one go. You made a rookie mistake of modern gaming.

This.

Just wait til this mountain of pigshite is patched out... someday lol. Then update the game.

Also "oh no i can't survive with terrabyte of bandwidth, there is so much slop to consume!! why God why???"

First world problems.

Sounds like Australia with its internet limits so more like 3rd world (not by wealth but how they treat their population)

 

[Clockwork Knight]

 

[NecroLord]

I don't understand.
Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?
Shouldn't there be more important stuff in a proper video game?

It's like they are trying to convey a message:
"We piss all over your game nerd! You are just another consumer to us and nothing more".

 

[Iucounu]

I don't understand.
Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?
Shouldn't there be more important stuff in a proper video game?

I recall Cyberpunk 2077 has it too, maybe it's fashion now. But rest assured the female stalkers are not shown doing it.

 

[NecroLord]

I don't understand.
Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?
Shouldn't there be more important stuff in a proper video game?

I recall Cyberpunk 2077 has it too, maybe it's fashion now. But rest assured the female stalkers are not shown doing it.

Postal 2 had way better urine mechanics.

 

[Iucounu]

I don't understand.
Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?
Shouldn't there be more important stuff in a proper video game?

I recall Cyberpunk 2077 has it too, maybe it's fashion now. But rest assured the female stalkers are not shown doing it.

Postal 2 had way better urine mechanics.

And player agency.

 

[ArchAngel]

I don't understand.
Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?
Shouldn't there be more important stuff in a proper video game?

I recall Cyberpunk 2077 has it too, maybe it's fashion now. But rest assured the female stalkers are not shown doing it.

What female stalkers?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I don't understand.
Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?
Shouldn't there be more important stuff in a proper video game?

 

[Zewp]

People on the GAMMA discord were apparently looking through the leaked Stalker 2 dev build from last year/early this year and apparently couldn't find A-Life code.

yerts — Yesterday at 16:25​

Just like how the leaked developer version of the game is entirely empty for a life as well?

reter — Yesterday at 17:14​

oh right i should use that developer version too, do you see no alife string in there?

yerts — Yesterday at 17:17​

There’s no a life code in the developer version
Like the menu was made yet the scraps are mostly empty
it shows they tried but
they’re nowhere near releasing anything for a life
Maybe a year or two
considering it’s nearly entirely empty

Dunno. It could be that the people digging through the dev build don't know what they're talking about, but it wouldn't surprise me if they are actually spot-on.

Personally, my money is on A-Life 2.0 doesn't exist. If there wasn't time to get basic stuff like NVG and binoculars working, it's not at all far fetched that they couldn't get a complex system like A-Life working. The game was obviously rushed out unfinished to avoid having another delay.
And now they've done an interview in which they claimed that performance issues is the reason that it's not working and that the text was just removed from the store page because of a marketing guy doing it without their permission (yeah fucking right). So now they've got the perfect excuse. A year from now they could be telling us "oh, it's still not working because we haven't managed to fix the performance issues" and people will still lap it up, because nobody wants a game that already runs like shit to run even more like shit.

Here's my theory: they couldn't realise a complex A-Life system like in the original games, so they used a very basic spawn director and hoped that nobody would notice. As with many other design decisions in the game, they completely misunderstood what made their core fans like Stalker and expected them to be satisfied with playing the game like a themepark.

 

[Gerrard]

Here's my theory: they couldn't realise a complex A-Life system like in the original games, so they used a very basic spawn director and hoped that nobody would notice.

There was nothing complex about this system in any of the original games, and it's about time to stop pretending otherwise. It did not require a genius to make, and it did not require a supercomputer to run.

 

[Alienman]

Why do devs these days go out of their way to simulate urination?

Guaranteed someone's fetish on the dev team.