STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl Mod Thread

[Gerrard]

Ok NLC is both interesting and infuriating.

Lets start with the good:
- Custom engine gives SOC good visuals without going over the top on dramatic lighting like some mods are want to do.
- Custom engine also allows for a much needed rework of stalkers gunplay/aiming.... this feels, I dare say, the best shooting I've played in a STALKER mod. It also has 3D scopes, albeit not PiP (presumably to avoid the inevitable performance hit seen in other mods).
- Weapons are all very high quality models with good animations. Some of the best I've ever seen for STALKER actually.
- Inventory system is the best Ive ever seen. You carry everything in your bag and then if you want stuff to be easily accessible, you have to mount it/put it on various parts of your clothing, early in the game you get a tactical rig which allows for keeping multiple magazines of ammo and grenades at the ready and so on.
- The zone is deadly, and doesn't feel like a theme park as it does in some mods with too many people wandering around. This mod apparently has the highest anomaly count of all mods and there are huge numbers of mutants too.
- "hardcore" economy based - sensibly - around Artifacts, rather than MISERY's retard "hardcore" economy based on absolute nonsense and make believe.
- Artifacts are actually useful and worth getting. Even "degenerates" - artifacts with only negative properties - are still valuable for trading.
- AMK style artifact transmutation.
- Probably the most amount of C&C ive ever seen in a STALKER mod. There are often multiple ways to deal with a quest and your choices affect later quests/characters.
- unlike MISERY mod item bloat, every single item in NLC has a purpose, and its usually logical and intuitive.

The bad:
- The beginning of this mod is awfully unfair, and repeatedly asks you to eat shit and then laughs in your face for actually doing it. An example of one very bad beginning quest is the standard fetch an artifact for Sid. You will be very low on HP and also sleep deprived (so running very slow as a result) - which the mod doesnt make you aware of - and picking up artifacts barehanded gives a random amount of damage and chance to bleed, so its pretty much pure luck if you can make it back to sid's bunker and get necessary meds as reward from him before dropping dead.
- the mod does the opposite of hand holding - it instead literally asks you to remember crucial details yourself to the point where there is apparently a note writing function in the game. Seriously - no "quest" entries in your PDA, no map markers etc. You still do quests, but all the information comes from dialogues and items.
- the machine translation is very rough, and this is a mod that requires attention to detail.
- Changes to mutants are annoying. Boars emit a minor radiation field that stops you from sprinting, blind dogs have a psy effect that gets stronger the larger the pack, pseudodogs have an infuriating effect that throws your aim and vision off, tushkanos cause massive bleeding. Zombies, for whatever reason, cause hunger and deafness just from being near you. I'm sure it will get worse from here but i havent found out yet.

Everything sounded incredibly until the inevitable modder autism started.

 

[cretin]

Curratum

On discord, i mentioned wanting to steal Anomaly's great sound layering and distance attenuation and put it into a less autistic mod. Someone asked "like what" and I linked them your package. Cue much hubbub over you being a banned member from two discords for aggressively berating people for playing anomaly instead of coc

 

[Curratum]

Holy crap, the little shits still remember? :D

Yeah, I did get banned mostly because autists on there were stroking each other off, arms criss-crossed, over Narodnaya Solyanka and Joint Pak and I wasn't very onboard with that!

Well, I'm flattered the little unemployed, Eastern European, 20-year-old, barely literate shits that comprise the majority of those discords still remember me! :D

 

[cretin]

managed to fix gunslingers shockingly low fps by forcing it to use my GPU through nvidia. I know should be obvious - isn't, because it still uses the xray exe after. Also absolute nature 4, despite containing a LOT more geometry due to the tree models, actually seems to make it run better. I'm guessing COP grass is insanely unoptimized despite its ugliness, which is probably why it had a render distance of like 5 meters in the original game release. So the game looks better and runs better. What a boon.

 

[luj1]

ZRP or Starter Pack for SoC?

 

[Curratum]

ZRP or Starter Pack for SoC?

Word on the street is, ZRP is better.

 

[cretin]

ZRP or Starter Pack for SoC?

ZRP if you want to play authentic SoC.

If you want a remastered STALKER, dont even bother with retard features, just get https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-memories-of-the-zone which is on the newer 64 bit engine

 

[Gerrard]

Stalker turned 13 years old recently.

 

[cretin]

Midyear 2020 roundup:

NLC 3.7 is out and with a machine translation that is allegedly a improvement over the previous one, although i really couldn't tell when i played it. It's still the worst machine translation in existence, primarily because (so the slavs tell me) NLC's writing is very good and the people talk like actual slavs, not scientific textbooks, so BEEP BOOP has trouble translating it accurately. One thing is the new translation also covers the characters who spoke in ukrainian and belarussian, so thats a definite improvement over the last translation.

3.7 is a perplexing update. On a technical level, nothing has changed, so if anyone was hoping for improvements in stability, nah. Feature wise, nothing is new, with the exception of the deletion of one line of quests and the replacement with a new line of quests. Oh and they decided to make the mod even harder on every difficulty, because fuck you.

The hand translation is being furiously worked on, and will apply to both 3.0 and 3.7, but is still several months away. Ultimately, while NLC remains by far the most impressive stalker modding effort I've ever seen, I can't recommend it to anyone unless you're really hardcore into stalker. This is an extremely difficult mod that requires attention to detail, and it just got even more difficult, and the machine translation is so bad it just adds an extra layer of difficulty for us monolingual gwailos. According to the slavs, while all the technical and gameplay stuff is of course fantastic, the real joy of NLC is the writing and story, and we can't enjoy that or even understand a fraction of what is going on with the MT, so its probably best to wait for the hand trans.

other thangs

I can recommend onegriot's Muh Immersion Pack for Anomaly. A merge of some of the larger and more quality Anomaly addons, along with a bunch of QoL improvements. I was indeed immersed.

Gunslinger has been quietly getting updates. Unless you follow the russian pages you dont actually hear about it, for example the moddb page has remained untouched since feburary. I cant speak to the full list of changes, but of significance is all the weapons have complete upgrade trees now, a few QoL improvements, the performance is better and they added the Bizon.

The Last Stalker was adapted to the OGSR engine. Can't comment much on this one, TLS is one of those niche esoteric fanfic story mods. I never played any version of it. A fella on discord summarized it as "good but really shit" .

NS2016 was adapted to the OGSR engine along with a new texture and weapon pack. Unfortunately for gwailos, the extensively hand translated version of NS2016 from moddb is not ported and its not just a matter of copying and pasting. No word from Codex on this development yet.

DoctorX's Call of the Zone is finally out. I haven't played much of it, but the few people who have sing its praises and rate it highly. One thing i dont like is DrX by default having addons such as warfighter built in, and his decision to use "vanilla" weapons that arent actually vanilla at all, including garish retexs, bad sounds and highly modified behavior. If you're bored of the aimlessness of CoC derivatives, this might be the cure. Protip: create a shortcut and use the -smap4096 switch to get good shadow quality. For whatever reason, the shadow quality by default is ATROCIOUS looking. worse than soc.

Other than that, theres not much happening. 2020 is the year of excruciatingly-close-yet-so-far-away in the mod scene. OLR 3.0, OP 2.2 on 64bit, Dead Air 1.0, hand crafted trans for NLC, and so on. It all seems to be always a few months away.

 

[jebsmoker]

i'm working on a hand translation for goldsphere on and off with a small team, and it has made a great deal of progress. i can't promise when it'll come out, but it'll be sometime in the near future. it's a somewhat wacky but very good story total conversion built on top of OGSE 0692

 

[cretin]

i'm working on a hand translation for goldsphere on and off with a small team, and it has made a great deal of progress. i can't promise when it'll come out, but it'll be sometime in the near future. it's a somewhat wacky but very good story total conversion built on top of OGSE 0692

The little i played of goldsphere was amazing, and probably the closest any STALKER mod comes to capturing the Roadside Picnic feel.

 

[Curratum]

ЗОЛОТОЙ ШАР

 

[jebsmoker]

just for reference, zoloty shar/goldsphere is the mod that has

Spoiler

burers that have fully gone 1488 or whatever for some reason, and you're introduced to them after you wake up from being knocked out by having.. a barrel thrown to your head. it has to be seen to be believed

 

[Tacgnol]

DoctorX's Call of the Zone is finally out. I haven't played much of it, but the few people who have sing its praises and rate it highly. One thing i dont like is DrX by default having addons such as warfighter built in, and his decision to use "vanilla" weapons that arent actually vanilla at all, including garish retexs, bad sounds and highly modified behavior. If you're bored of the aimlessness of CoC derivatives, this might be the cure. Protip: create a shortcut and use the -smap4096 switch to get good shadow quality. For whatever reason, the shadow quality by default is ATROCIOUS looking. worse than soc.

Does this differ much from his addons for Anomaly/COC? Or is it basically just a standalone version.

 

[cretin]

DoctorX's Call of the Zone is finally out. I haven't played much of it, but the few people who have sing its praises and rate it highly. One thing i dont like is DrX by default having addons such as warfighter built in, and his decision to use "vanilla" weapons that arent actually vanilla at all, including garish retexs, bad sounds and highly modified behavior. If you're bored of the aimlessness of CoC derivatives, this might be the cure. Protip: create a shortcut and use the -smap4096 switch to get good shadow quality. For whatever reason, the shadow quality by default is ATROCIOUS looking. worse than soc.

Does this differ much from his addons for Anomaly/COC? Or is it basically just a standalone version.

Differs quite a lot in scope and size AFAIK.

 

[Curratum]

Just played Call of the Zone for a while...

Spawned as Loner in rookie village, explored all of Cordon bar the military outpost. Not a single NPC.
Went through the Garbage. No NPCs in the train station, near the tunnel or near the blockade leading to Rostok / Bar.
Went through Rostok, Bar is completely empty, even Barman is gone.
Went to Wild Territory, first area was empty then I got one-shot point blank by a military guy in the narrow tunnel.

God, what a colossal waste of time making that must have been. Deleted.

[Edit] I almost forgot - there was a pseudogiant some 100 meters outside of rookie village. Such dynamic A-Life, such immersion...

 

[cretin]

Just played Call of the Zone for a while...

Spawned as Loner in rookie village, explored all of Cordon bar the military outpost. Not a single NPC.
Went through the Garbage. No NPCs in the train station, near the tunnel or near the blockade leading to Rostok / Bar.
Went through Rostok, Bar is completely empty, even Barman is gone.
Went to Wild Territory, first area was empty then I got one-shot point blank by a military guy in the narrow tunnel.

God, what a colossal waste of time making that must have been. Deleted.

[Edit] I almost forgot - there was a pseudogiant some 100 meters outside of rookie village. Such dynamic A-Life, such immersion...

Thats definitely not normal

 

[Curratum]

Just played Call of the Zone for a while...

Spawned as Loner in rookie village, explored all of Cordon bar the military outpost. Not a single NPC.
Went through the Garbage. No NPCs in the train station, near the tunnel or near the blockade leading to Rostok / Bar.
Went through Rostok, Bar is completely empty, even Barman is gone.
Went to Wild Territory, first area was empty then I got one-shot point blank by a military guy in the narrow tunnel.

God, what a colossal waste of time making that must have been. Deleted.

[Edit] I almost forgot - there was a pseudogiant some 100 meters outside of rookie village. Such dynamic A-Life, such immersion...

Thats definitely not normal

Did absolutely nothing, just unpacked it and played.

 

[lightbane]

Soo, I was considering to play Call of Pryat after having not touched it for years. Which mods do you recommend me to use that are QoLs, graphic improvements and the like instead of hyper-autistic "realism" ones for a first playthrough?

 

[cretin]

Soo, I was considering to play Call of Pryat after having not touched it for years. Which mods do you recommend me to use that are QoLs, graphic improvements and the like instead of hyper-autistic "realism" ones for a first playthrough?

gunslinger with AN3 lite is fun and looks great. Heres some screens from my recent play:

to install AN3 lite to gunslinger, first install AN3 lite to its own folder, then delete shaders.xr in the gamedata folder and copy the gamedata folder to your gunslinger folder. I dont bother with Atmosfear 3, because it changes the colors and weathers for the worse IMO, in addition to adding obnoxious events like acid rain, fallout and psy storms. That stuff is probably cool for someone first experiencing it, but to me these things are just mandatory 5 minute time outs from actually playing the game. The game already has blow outs, it doesn't need more shit like that. As for why AN3 lite instead of AN4, because AN4's added geometry is unoptimized, and the changes make the scenes look way too busy. Also AN4 fucks with the ai spawns and I'm pretty sure it results in less activity. Gunslinger has engine edits, so for things like grass draw distance can be easily set through the console with the command r__detail_radius (thats two underscores in r__detail)

alternatively, you could do the same things i just described with OWR3 instead of gunslinger. OWR3 doesnt have the bells and whistles of gunslinger, but it is complete, and before gunslinger was the highest quality weapon pack for CoP by far. OWR3 is also much closer to vanilla balance.

 

[Icewater]

looks nice. where can I find the most up to date translation for gunslinger?

 

[cretin]

looks nice. where can I find the most up to date translation for gunslinger?

theres nothing to translate. you just get the mod from the moddb page or a google mirror or wherever else, install and run the updater.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

Christ, why are there so many different large mods? I have no idea which one to choose.

 

[Invictus]

Jesus! I just saw a video for the latest Anomaly using a winter look mod and goddamn it looks like a modern game... I wonder what kind of rig would one need to run that mod

 

[Major_Blackhart]

So, I haven't touched stalker in quite a while. Is there anything out there that adds viable pistols / revolvers? I want some single action badassness. Gunslinger my ass.