Posts by Jetsetlemming

Just installed a couple of mods for STALKER, the most significant being this:

Night time Before:

The content cannot be displayed because it is no longer available. ss_owner_09-03-08_16-37-00_(l03_agroprom).jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=0]ss_owner_09-03-08_16-41-30_(l03_agroprom).jpg[/attachment]

I actually had no idea it was night time when I saved and quit last time I played, so when I first started it up after installation I thought the mods fucked up. Played for about 15 minutes, scariest gaming experience since Afraid of Monsters. I met my first bloodsucker, in Agropom, and then met a second which I had to kill with my pistol after using every single bullet for my primary in a panic trying to kill the first.

Currently hiding in a building, cowering, waiting for dawn.

I just saw three bandits torn to little bits by an anomaly.

I got STALKER to work through 3dAnalyzer! Runs at about 20-30 FPS.

For some reason I can't turn off shadows or some stuff like heat waver over fires, which is weird. During a thunder storm the lightning flashes illuminated the world and cast shadows on everything and stuff- totally wasn't expecting that in Static lighting.

Quote

But it and decide for yourself. Don't let some random number make your decision for you.

Or at least read the review, IGN's complaints were basically "Wah this is hard", mixed in with copy-pastes from what the Russian gamers that posted in english to complain about the game said. The Reader Review marks on IGN is an average of 9.3.

Here's someone who posted on SA who knows Russian and ordered a Russian copy-

Quote from Georg LeBoui

Hey guys I have the Russian version of Clear Sky. If you have any questions regarding the gameplay, story, etc I'll be happy to answer.

I'm really liking the russian voice-overs, seems like they are much better than the english ones in the original game (I knew I should have imported the russian version). The story is much more interesting this time around too as it does well to explain what the zone actually is and why Blowouts actually happen. I'm not far into the story (I only got the game just yesterday and only got through Swamps) but so far it's been really great.

Overall the game feels much more open-ended than the original. Compared to Clear Sky, the original Stalker felt way more linear, whereas thanks to the massive maps you are actually expected to explore every corner of it. By the way, the swamp really is fuckin massive. I'm pretty sure you can fit the entire NPP area as well as most of Pripyat onto it.

By the way, the faction system is surprisingly pretty deep. I haven't gone past the Swamps so I haven't met anyone apart from (faction spoilers, though you find this out in the first 5 minutes of the game I'd rather not have people complain)

. Basically every faction has a main adversary. On your PDA you can see the strength of both feuding factions, how many squads they have, how many resources, what their objectives are, etc. In order to truly help a faction, you have to make sure they achieve their global objectives. For example, for the Clear Sky faction, their early goal is to (again, something you learn in the first 10 minutes)

control the swamp and drive the bandits out

Display More

.

They actually achieve these goals on their own and they are constantly sending out squads to capture/reinforce various points (you can see what each faction stalker's objective is on your PDA's map) and you might not even be present for the "final" battle - still you basically make sure the good guys win by helping them out.

The upgrade system is pretty deep as well. Every weapon and piece of armour can be upgraded - theres a whole upgrade tree even. Basically for the armour you can add night vision, better protection against various things, improve weight distribution, etc. For weapons you can replace barrels, make it easier to handle (theres apparently an "ease of use" stat), and most useful of all - you can rechamber weapons to use different ammunition - but you can only do this once. For example, you can make your MP5 use 9x18mm ammo instead of 9x19mm which allows it to use the more common pistol rounds.

I'll go into more details once I have more time.

EDIT: I have to say though, the game is pretty buggy. Theres minor stuff like the when the stalkers tell jokes they go "Here's a joke!" and then theres a pause and everyone either laughs or tells him to shut the fuck up. As for major, it took the game about 5-6 hours for the first CTD to occur. When it did, it apparently corrupted all my saves and now those crash whenever I try to load.

I basically, have to start a new game. A bunch of people in the russian community made a patch to fix the particular error that causes this crash so hopefully my new game will fare better :unsmith:

EDIT2: If there are any other people with the russian version here, this fix should make sure you don't get CTDs in the Swamp area. Basically it's just a bunch of corrected script files - you put the Gamedata folder into your game directory, just like a mod.

Quote from Georg LeBoui

To be honest, no, the weapons are a bit of a dissapointment. Maybe I'm just used to Arsenal and PLR's mod, but the guns in this game sound worse than the original. Also the shotgun that you have to use at the start of the game is so inacurate and feedback-less that you pretty much end up using the pistol all the time. Seriously, it takes 2 shots to kill someone from about 5 metres with the shotgun. If they are beyond that distance, you pretty much will never hit them.

Now, I don't play with the crosshairs on and rely on ironsights. They changed the pistols ironsight view from the usual centre-of-the-screen type thing, to more off-to-the-side which ofcourse defeats the whole purpose. You basically have to rely on your tracers except beyond maybe 20 metres even though the tracers land on the enemy, they just don't do anything at all.

I've got an MP5 now which is a killing machine.

Infact, I was out fucking around in the swamps, fighting the bandits and such. I go too far into the bandit territory and the only safe route back gets overrun by like 10 bandits, so I was essentially surrounded. I decided to press on and try and take on this lightly defended village where I can wait for help to arrive. I hid behind a tractor and lit the bandits up, only for them to completely pin me behind cover - my pistol ammo was gone and I had to rely on a shitty over-under shotgun. The bandits realized I wasn't giving them much of a fight and started getting closer and closer.

Suddenly I look behind me and see a friendly Clear Sky stalker emerge from the swamp water like some kind of a gas-masked mermaid and he proceeds to kill every single bandit using his MP5. Seriously, like 6 bandits mowed down in seconds. I ended up following him around and helping him out cleaning the bandits out. He even gave me a quest, except I failed it when he took a bullet to the face

Also, the AI squads actually communicate pretty well and you get quite a lot of chatter from them. It's very atmospheric. By the way, if they are ready to attack a point and you are around them, they'll actually ask you to tell them when to attack - in the meantime they take cover and everything. They also get pissed off if you take your sweet time giving the Attack command.

Display More

Quote from Georg LeBoui

Yeah, Clear Sky is incredible in that regard - even better than the original Stalker. And hell, if the base game is this good, imagine how much the community will improve the game later on!

I've actually had even better moments. I saw on my PDA that a whole bunch of Stalkers were heading to attack a major camp of the enemy. I ran and caught up with them (one of them even yelled at me to stop running otherwise I'd give their position away) and followed them as they snuck along a path that bypassed the smaller enemy outposts. It was really tense because you could hear movement in the surrounding tall grass and at any moment you could get jumped by pretty much anything - crazy boar or bandits alike. Finally we make it to the big camp - it's situated on an open clearing, surrounded by shallow water. The squad stops just before the clearing and tells me that they are waiting for my signal. I looked at the map and saw another friendly squad approaching the camp from the other side. The sun was setting down and the sound of the swamp was really prominent in the tense silence.

Finally, when the other squad was really close, I told my guys to attack. We charged across the short open clearing, firing at the bandits in the camp as we moved. By the time they returned fire we were really close and had cover. A massive firefight ensued - about 15 stalkers against roguhly 12 or so bandits. The whole fight lasted just 5 minutes and at the end only 6 or so friendly stalkers remained. I went around and shot the injured bandits - no point wasting medkits.

A bunch of bandits that must have been out patrolling the perimeter mounted a rough little counter-attack, but ran away when a couple of them got killed.

Suddenly I get a "Task Completed" for a task to attack a bandit outpost guarding the exit out of the swamp which I was going before I got distracted with my current adventure. Apparently while we were out attacking this base and kept the main force occupied, a small group of our stalkers attacked that very outpost and captured it.

It wasn't a scripted event at all - for example I could have attacked that outpost first as I was going to do (infact it was a major task), but undoubtedly there would be an overwhelming counterattack from the large camp, and I think I couldn't have handled it. Even those two squads attacking the major camp would still attack it anyway without my help - infact I only popped like 2 or 3 bandits so they could have still won without me.

So yeah, its really open-ended like this and feels like the world is still going on around you. At the same time, even though everything is happening everywhere, it still feels like you make a difference and help your faction out.

Well, there are faction armours which you get if they like you enough, I guess thats new. Also the over-under shotgun which was in the original game but wasn't actually used. Apart from this, I'm not actually far enough in the game to see any new weapons.

I haven't tried the artefact detection. Well, I read about it and I have a detector, but it only tells you a rough distance to an artefact. I haven't deliberately went on an artefact hunt at all. You can actually get new artefact detectors which have better functionality and more features. I haven't seen those yet.

As for grenades, I heard grenades going off but I've never actually died to one. Maybe it'll be a problem later on in the game.

Display More

I don't think it looks too bad, it just needs more color in some places and less LUDICROUS GIBS

Quote from Buddy

The e3 demo is from early 2007 and its basiclly very same build as stalker did i'm not sure what you did expected

I didn't expect the specific conditions to enable it to run to be 1280x1024 and 4x AA. That's just ODD. BIZARRE, even.

I just found out that they actually made a HD2400 in PCI, and it's only $60. I'm so very tempted to sink money into yet another PCI video card, just for your game...

Quote from st0lve

Why not? I don't get it.

Cause it's a follow-up on 2 of the most legendary turn-based, isometric RPGs in history? Atleast the name suggests that it is.

I'm gonna make a batman movie about spiderman, and call it batman 3: the light knight.

Because theme = medium. Ok.

A far more apt analogy would be a Batman story that wasn't a hard boiled detective super serious superhero story, which they've done, plenty of times. Do you find the family friendly Batman- the animated series to be such a horrible affront to the Batman canon? Because that's pretty much the same sort of thing as taking Fallout and keeping the thematic elements and game feel the same while changing the sub-genre it fits into. Fuck, if you watched the latest trailers you would've seen you could pull the camera back to isometric view, and you've got turn-based combat via VATS.

I just spent the last four hours fucking with the Clear Sky E3 demo's settings. For some reason it will ONLY run at 1280x1024 with 4x anti-aliasing- on any different res or any different amount of AA, the main menu is black, and the game is scrambled, just like STALKER behaved for me. With 1280x1024 and 4xAA, it runs at 0.5 FPS. Literally one frame every two seconds. With out either setting, it's smooth as anything, in those rare random moments where I can see the game world through the fuzz (normally looking at the sky- I could tell it was running smoothly because a buzzard was circling overhead).

This is pretty goddamn perplexing.

Quote from Inveramsay

Gearbox did after all make the greatest expansion/sequel ever in the shape of opposing force. Hell, I even think opfor is better than hl.I'm born 86 and have never even played halo, probably because I haven't owned a console since I sold my snes... To me it looks like another generic shooter and so far the only good that has come out of it is red vs blue.

And yes, wolfenstein ftw, funnily enough sometimes you didn't know if it was germans or plants you were pumping full with lead.

Plants don't yell HALT.

Someone posted on Something Awful saying he got STALKER running on a Geforce 4 using -noprefetch and -noshadows launch commands and when I went to install my copy to try it out it failed, saying cyclic redundancy failure or something. My disk is fucked.

The gibbing and ragdolls look retarded. Everything falls apart at the slightest blow and the ragdolls just slump or get thrown around in a really bad looking way. You'd think it was a first generation havoc game.

Also the grocery and especially tenpenny tower REALLY need some fucking color. I can forgive a nuclear wasteland being grey and brown but the inside of a well kept tower should NOT be uniformly mustard.

Other that that, it looked fantastic.

Turn down your HDR brightness a bit.

Quote from Buddy

So no worries.

By the time I get around to being able to play Clear Sky (oh my poor financial woes, damn this shitty PC) you guys could be on your 20th patch, so I'm not exactly worried either way.

Apparently Clear Sky has been delayed because the publisher forgot to stick CD keys in the cases before shipping them out. It's not gonna make the Sept. 5th release date.

In other news from Russia from angry diatribes posted on the internet by angry Russian gamers it appears that Clear Sky is actually BUGGIER than STALKER's initial release. How this is even fucking possible, I don't know.

I hope they take the CD key related delay as an opportunity to patch the game a bit before release.

Quote from Furyo

And even if Duke/Wolfenstein/Doom were your first shooters to play, no one will argue that you had to be in a pretty particular group of people to know these games even existed when they came out. You had to have the PC that would run them, something very few people were even interested in at the time, and there was no marketing to speak of, this was all word of mouth, you played these games because you had heard about them or someone had given you their copy.

I was FIVE. I played them pretty much randomly, they were included on a CD of shareware games. I had the computer because back then my mom heard on the news that "computers" where this huge growing industry and everyone involved were billionaires and you could easily get in now and be instantly rich without effort so she took a night course in computer science or something and had to buy a PC to go along with that. I don't remember anything about it except it ran DOS, the programming language she used on it included smily faces as characters ( :monocle: ), and on the front of the tower was a button marked "Turbocharge" that changed an LED readout next to it from 16 to 32. I'd push it when I was doing bad at a game.

Quote from Furyo

I completely agree, if you were a PC gamer you knew about CS. The question is do you consider 2000 era PC gaming mainstream?

Yeah, dude. Gaming in general not so much, but within gaming PC was definitely the huge overpowering dominant force in 2000. It still is worldwide, but has slightly less attention in America.

Quote from Furyo

I think what most of you guys aren't seeing is the generation gap there is for this game. If you think of guys who were born after 1985, Halo on the console is to them what Doom was on the PC for us. Even Goldeneye was our game and not theirs, they were nearly 12 then. To that generation, like my own cousin's, who I need to tell everything about the Sega vs Nintendo days, what Sonic used to be like and so on and so forth, Halo was the very first shooter they ever played.They could have played other shooters before, but they were either too young, or just not enough "in the know". No other shooter caught the mainstream audience like Halo has. Couple that with Microsoft's marketing department, quite possibly the best in any company, and you get yourself the halo phenomenon.

I was born in '88 and my first shooter was Wolfenstein 3d. My first experience with videogames were a pack of Shareware games on CD in DOS when I was 5.

I learned to read thanks to adventure games!

I played Halo 1 and 2 on Xbox, and Halo: Combat Evolved on PC. Halo 1 was playable in spite its horrible level design and stale premise- the only element out of it I found interesting was the behavior of plasma grenades. The enemy behaviors and entertaining reactions to grenades kept me going to the end. Halo 2 had a cool segment on Earth and then went to shit and was a much worse game than Halo 1. The PC port was even worse due to the age by the time I got around to playing it.

In contrast:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timesplitters

2000 Playstation 2 launch title. Took the quake style superfast movement and fun physics and behavior, a groovy soundtrack, a bullshit time traveling premise as an excuse for awesome levels spread across time and genres, and an absolutely great game. Timesplitters 2 in 2002 took the original game and added a genuine single player campaign and made the graphics better. Future Perfect is a goddamn amazing game. Fuck, the Timesplitters games even have LEVEL EDITORS! I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer, and I LOVE Timesplitters, and wish this console-only FPS series was on PC. Halo? Just overhyped banality.

Updated the map to v4 to remove a bug, and once again expand the content. The wall climb area is entirely redone, there's a couple extra secret areas, and an entire secret ending.

http://files.filefront.com/Second+Basem ... einfo.html

Quote from Bic-B@ll

lso anyway, im confused, isnt bungee owned by microsoft and they made the first 12 versions? why would they have another studio develop it?

Bungie's now free.

Quote from dux

P.S Chief isn't dead, noobs.

He deserves to be.

On a related note, can someone tell my why the hell Halo got so popular? It was a mediocre game at best, and Timesplitters was far and away the better console FPS all around.

Quote from dux

Deus Ex you imbecile. But wow, that guys ears are huge.

And look upsidedown.

I can't think of how you could possibly make a point and click adventure in Source. The best you could do is physics puzzles and grabbing objects and rubbing them up against other objects to trigger logic.