Stalker: Call of Pripyat modding

[DraQ]

I was personally very fond of the Gauss rifle snipers on balconies in Pripyat. That was very fun.

STALKER: Putting FFFUUUU- back in FUN.

 

[Jasede]

Jasede
If you are still looking for mods, check this compilation: http://jumbofiles.com/whrkhqqfmo1u
It includes: AtmosFear3, AbsoluteNature2, Absolute Structures, IronSight Fix 1.1, plus few other fixes.

Thanks, but I basically made that in my harddrive myself! I got AtmosFear 3, Absolute Nature 2, Absolute Structures, IronSights, English subtitles, Russian speech, 3GB memory fix, FoV changed to 67.5 fix, no-prefetch, ai upgrades (nice to see allied stalkers medkit each other IMO), no intro and fixed stashes. I will play like that on Master- with me sucking at FPS games, any other difficulty mods would be stupid because I will just end up draining all that money-supply bloat into medkits and repairs due to me sucking, so it should be fine.

 

[CorpseZeb]

... well, and be prepare on some "main story stop-bugs", because such amount of mods melted into, uhm, should I say, not 100% prefect and bug free code, means... "serious snafu" sometimes. Especially, especially in the last chapter (city Pripyat) user care is required in the flesh of non-free but strictly story movement - I mean - no free exploration is advised, story movement from point A to B, from main quest to main quest - because city is full of chunks of story scripts, which are very easy to broke. But after main story ends, feel free to explore whole city.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I was personally very fond of the Gauss rifle snipers on balconies in Pripyat. That was very fun.

STALKER: Putting FFFUUUU- back in FUN.

The first Gauss sniper encounter in Pripyat cannot be anything but a troll. You end up in the underground parking lot after getting there with your bros, and are all excited about all the cool stuff out there. "Time to explore Pripyat!", you decide, walk to the parking lot's other exit, and instantly die to a sniper conveniently positioned in a building on the other side of the street.

 

[DraQ]

I was personally very fond of the Gauss rifle snipers on balconies in Pripyat. That was very fun.

STALKER: Putting FFFUUUU- back in FUN.

The first Gauss sniper encounter in Pripyat cannot be anything but a troll. You end up in the underground parking lot after getting there with your bros, and are all excited about all the cool stuff out there. "Time to explore Pripyat!", you decide, walk to the parking lot's other exit, and instantly die to a sniper conveniently positioned in a building on the other side of the street.

RPGs are still better - even if they miss, they have huge kill radius even if you're in exo.
And if you are in exo, they won't miss much because of your poor mobility.

The only hope is to wear SKAT or SEVA and dive behind some solid cover if someone fires RPG at you.
They tend to fire from long distance (and unexpected directions) so you have a lot of time - about a second or so.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

On a completely different note, the last time CoP made me rage, was during a stupid escort mission for the scientists, where you defend stalkers as they take measurements around the Plavni anomaly. The game would just spawn wave upon wave of fleshes and boars, which I would easily kill, and it was quite boring. Then, as the final wave, it decided ti spice it up and spawn a Controller. Fucking Controller in an open space with no solid cover, but a ton of bushes and trees that make aiming difficult for you, but don't hinder him in the slightest. Plus, Controller attacks in CoP make you aim at the sky as part of their disorienting effect, so he would nuke me from behind some fucking bush, and after I had regained my balance, he had already moved to a different location and was ready to fuck me up again. Then he killed the stalker I was protecting with a melee attack.

It was literally scumbag CoP - millions of boring fleshes charging you, Controller at the end just because they can. I raged so hard at that part. Especially since I hadn't saved throughout the mission and had to redo everything from the very beginning.

 

[DraQ]

Well, you could have sniped (or at least softened) him before he got in range, also, there could have been more of them, IIRC, luckily not at once.
This quest is a bitch if you didn't save stalkers in the previous ones - doing it with full group is much easier.

Jasede, I hope you'll get around to playing SoC as well - buggy and with bad quests, but it has beyond excellent atmosphere, especially in the underground labs.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Yeah, but I didn't notice him approach the first time. At that point my mind was numb from all the flesh genocide, and only registering "Boars approaching" sensory data.

Also, it would be a riot to hear Jasede's "I'm bad at FPS" thoughts about SoC on Master, especially the later parts.

 

[DraQ]

Also, it would be a riot to hear Jasede's "I'm bad at FPS" thoughts about SoC on Master, especially the later parts.

Well, hopefully he will at least not get himself killed as often as he would if he heeded deeply ingrained run'n'gun instincts of someone good at them - I've always found the complaints of supposedly seasoned FPS players about having to put magazines upon magazines of ammo in someone to kill them hilarious.

 

[Gord]

Sorry if I derail the topic a bit, but has anyone encountered problems with performance in CoP that appear after 30-60 minutes of playtime?
When I start the game, I get 45-70 fps, usually around 50 in most locations (no AA, most other stuff except for SSAO (HBAO, medium) and sunrays (medium) at high to max).
After playing a bit it can happen that quite suddenly my fps go down to 20-30.

I'm playing with Complete and the LAA patch.

Maybe a memory leak? Vram filled up? Complete to blame?

 

[pipka]

...

Here, have a copypasta:

The in-game AA slider DOES NOT WORK in SoC. You gotta force AA on through GPU's control panel. Avoid anything above 2x for minimal performance hit!

In CS and CoP, if you use ENHANCED FULL DYNAMIC -mode, set its three specific settings (SSAO, Sun Quality, Sun-shafts) to LOW. You won't notice quality difference, but your performance will skyrocket!

Another easy way to improve visuals and reduce random stuttering is to lower Vision- and Lighting distance, plus Object-Quality bar to around 50%. Again quality difference is minimal, but fps improves.
Reducing the Grass Density a point or two also may help stuttering outdoors.

Probably memory leaks or maxed RAM. If low RAM, set -noprefetch shortcut.

 

[Multidirectional]

Sorry if I derail the topic a bit, but has anyone encountered problems with performance in CoP that appear after 30-60 minutes of playtime?
When I start the game, I get 45-70 fps, usually around 50 in most locations (no AA, most other stuff except for SSAO (HBAO, medium) and sunrays (medium) at high to max).
After playing a bit it can happen that quite suddenly my fps go down to 20-30.

I'm playing with Complete and the LAA patch.

Maybe a memory leak? Vram filled up? Complete to blame?

Turn off sunrays completely. They are not worth the hit and can kill your performance even when they're not visible. Also lowering shadow quality and view/detail distance might help, without having a significant visual impact. Also, don't set Sun Quality on "High", there's no point to it. Additionally, if you have too much stuttering when running around, lower texture quality. And restart the game after changing anything, even when it doesn't tell you to.

 

[Gord]

Hm, I thought sunrays only are affecting performance for about 2 hours in the morning?
Will test setting some stuff to low, as it indeed does not seem to have much visual impact.
Engine is a bitch to test, though. Initial load takes a few minutes for me and you need to restart for a lot of the settings.

Anyway, a restart of the game seems to fix the problem (which is why I don't think it's due to overheating; especially as I never had any problems with overheating with my pc, and I have recently cleaned it).

It shouldn't be low system ram, either, I have 8GB and even with LAA, CoP won't use more than ~2GB of that, which leaves only VRAM, I guess.
I will play a bit with GPU-Z in the background this evening to see how vram is used.

About the -noprefetch thing:
I have read that Complete already has it, it won't work a s a start-option in CoP and it may screw up A-Life, so I'm not sure what to do about it.

 

[pipka]

Gord

Did you applied 3gb ram unblocker/patch/tweak (I don't remember the name)? It's an universal application that allows exes*32 access more RAM than it was intended.

With 8gb of ram you don't need to turn on -noprefetch, it will cause loading stutters and you have enough power already.

 

[Gord]

Gord

Did you applied 3gb ram unblocker/patch/tweak (I don't remember the name)?

Yes, as written above I'm using the LAA-flag (large adress aware), which is just that.

 

[CorpseZeb]

... and without patch? Remember, while /3gb switch gives you one more gigabyte of user space, it cuts in the half system memory resources (from 2GiB to 1GiB, where drivers, various caches, paged and nonpaged memory stuff lives).

 

[Gord]

... and without patch? Remember, while /3gb switch gives you one more gigabyte of user space, it cuts in the half system memory resources (from 2GiB to 1GiB, where drivers, various caches, paged and nonpaged memory stuff lives).

I'm on Win7 64bit and have 8GB ram in total, I wouldn't expect any shortage of (system) memory due to a LAA-application.
But I could try without nevertheless. If it's a memory leak, maybe it helps?

 

[CorpseZeb]

Ah, you are on the 64-bit system. That's another story. Definitely you should try to run game in the "pure" state, without any magical/mythological extenders (which often doing nothing really, if given application was not written in the special, "large memory aware" way). Memory leaks can "leak" on the system side as well (drivers/background programs etc.) not necessary on the game side. That said, I personally hadn't any problems with CoP (pure game, without any mods), except some quest bug related stuff.

 

[Multidirectional]

Isn't "large adress aware" enabled in CoP and Clear Sky by default? I'm playing on 64 bit Win 7 with Advanced version of Complete mod and it runs fine. Disable the fucking sun rays, anyone who's done enough testing with settings in this game will tell you they're not worth it. And don't try running textures on max either, unless you have like 2GB of VRAM, I'm on GTX460 1GB now and I keep texture slider on middle (using 4xAA though + FXAA injector, mainly for sharpening). This game eats VRAM very easily.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Isn't "large adress aware" enabled in CoP and Clear Sky by default? I'm playing on 64 bit Win 7 with Advanced version of Complete mod and it runs fine. Disable the fucking sun rays, anyone who's done enough testing with settings in this game will tell you they're not worth it. And don't try running textures on max either, unless you have like 2GB of VRAM, I'm on GTX460 1GB now and I keep texture slider on middle (using 4xAA though + FXAA injector, mainly for sharpening). This game eats VRAM very easily.

You got a postprocessing injector to work with Stalker? Last time I tried to inject SMAA into CoP, the game wouldn't even start. Did you do anything special? Are you using DX10/11?

 

[Multidirectional]

You got a postprocessing injector to work with Stalker? Last time I tried to inject SMAA into CoP, the game wouldn't even start. Did you do anything special?

Yes, you need to put dll file in bin folder and the rest of files in main directory. Same method works for Crysis games.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Thanks, it does work. In hindsight, it should've occured to me that games with a separate engine dir would require something like this.

 

[CorpseZeb]

Isn't "large adress aware" enabled in CoP and Clear Sky by default? I'm playing on 64 bit Win 7 with Advanced version of Complete mod and it runs fine.

Yes, it is "aware" (so, it doesn't need any "hacks" on the 64-bit system). And yes, Stalker series loves Vram (even the "old" SoC paired with the Complete mod, eats vram very quickly).

 

[Wyrmlord]

By the way, when you get a Exoskeleton early, how do you utilise it?

Do you take it off while travelling, and put it back on before a fight starts?

Or do you keep it on all the time?

 

[CorpseZeb]

Sir! Gentlemen never put off his exoskeleton, even in the presence of ladies. I mean, while replaying the game n-times, there's no reason to rush. Besides, more roomy pocked space (ammo...) is fair price for the slowness. Well, in the SoC one of the first thing I do is get a SEVA suit (from the "random" chest), which can last to the end of game (now, SoC Priboi Story is another story, where exoskeleton is very, very recommended).