Oblivion Lost. Trippy.

[catbarf]

I just installed this mod for my second playthrough, and all I can say is wow. New weapons, redesigned HUD, weapons that are accurate and pack a hell of a punch, sleeping, and that's not even touching the AI ecology. If you haven't tried it, DO SO.

I'm in love with the double-barreled shotgun. Not that ridiculous sawn-off, this monster is an over-and-under assembly that does a ton of damage over a fairly long range. And it looks cool to boot.

I find that I'm really scrounging for supplies and ammo. Every corpse has to be completely looted, nothing is left behind. Money and equipment is really valuable, and I imagine I'll need to fight in the Arena to get money so I can be ready for Yantar. It feels much more like an apocalyptic wasteland than previously- even bandages are rare, and if you don't use one you won't stop bleeding. Very gritty.

Now, since you're wondering what the point is, a quick question for those in the know:

Are the signs for an imminent blowout the same as in vanilla STALKER- rumbling, weird colors? And what will protect me- is the warehouse in Garbage a good refuge, for example?

[Microwave Oven]

The blowout warning in OL is pretty much the same as vanilla, but you go blind for a second when the colors go wacky. Use caution when driving, I was hauling ass across the zone looking for shelter when that happened, drove right into a whirlygig. Also, you take a lot more damage than other mods have, especially psi damage. Shelters are easy enough to find, just follow the human AIs when a blowout happens, they'll find it for you. Usually it'll be any structure that has a solid roof, but I haven't tested everything to make sure.

I like the transmutation system, I've gotten a few nice new artifacts out of it. Of course, I've lost more to the degradation effect, but since cobblestones are worth up to 2800ru it still winds up profitable.

I don't like the trade balance, there's a huge imbalance in prices, 1000% or more, it's really exaggerated. This really makes repairs and new items a real strain on the budget. You could haul in a whole exo-suit full of artifacts and just barely afford repairing the damage to your suit you got from collecting them.

[Rogue Keeper]

I favor AMK over OL. Not just because OL borrows most main features from AMK, but because OL is just too revisionist, in a bad way. In fact I see OL drawing too much undeserved fame from AMK's deeds.

OL features I see as negatives :

-NO AMK DYNAMIC NEWS SYSTEM
-waking up starved to death
-new skins make NPC factions harder to distingish at big distance
-zombies after every blowout, annoying
-patterned, lousy weather (prolly AMK weather mod is compatible?)
-pitch black nights (usually not even stars can be seen)
-new drunken songs of the stalkers
- ... prolly more if I had enthusiasm to go beyond Garbage

Now AMK isn't buggy and recently in latter areas I noticed some really wicked ALife - like hordes of pseudodogs, tushkanos and pseudogiants spawned, who killed a quest important stalker. Luckily there is an AMK compatible minimod which makes quest important NPCs much harder to kill. AMK also has great install options - you can adjust everything important before installation to your liking.

[mothra]

seems you didnt play ol20
most of your claims are wrong
e.g.
night is not pitch-black, there's a moon + stars, lol
not every blowout spawns zombies (but many)
use your minimap if you cant make out friend/foe (which is a feature imo and makes it more interesting)
eat some more, especially b4 going to sleep, I think it's plausible that after 36hours of shooting&looting and only 3 hours sleep you wake up starved.

the mod clearly states what was taken from AMK.
while I like AMK as well you can't play it above 1.004 which has some pretty serious bugs (spawn in military) itself.

ol's sneak mechanics are the best I've seen up today.
you really can confuse a whole enemy camp with a silenced weapon and some patience. but to each his own.
I miss the body looting/News feature as well but then I hated the stash-looting by other STALKERS even if they were hidden in places the AI does not have access to.

[Rogue Keeper]

I did play 2.0 and yes, my points are valid. Wanna argue more, HUH?

[mothra]

i'll provide you with screenshots of my pitch black nights when i get home
your other observations are subjective, I would even say hostile against the mod, especially
the "AMK did it first" which is only partly true if you would read the lists of contributors to both mods
and its paralells. I couldn't see any proof to your claims on my playthrough, so yeah, i wanna argue some more.

[Rogue Keeper]

Love makes people blind...

-NO AMK DYNAMIC NEWS SYSTEM: Indeed. Valid point. This is what makes huge portion of impression on player that even offline areas are alive, stalkers there are stalking, fighting, exploring, trading, dying. Could use more tweaking, but it's great addition. They loot actively but it I never got my secret stashes looted.
-waking up starved to death: Ridiculous. I am eating quite often, but having red hunger icon after 5 hours of sleep is ridiculous.
-new skins make NPC factions harder to distinguish at big distance : I have Red Dots on Minimap turned off to increase difficulty. Only in AMK.
-zombies after every blowout, annoying : Whether all or just many, makes little difference. It is annoying to clean up areas of them.
-patterned, lousy weather : Yes. While default AMK weather is bleak, it is very random and with AMK Weather Mod+new torch even more bautiful.
-pitch black nights (usually not even stars can be seen) :Moon doesn't shine every night. If it doesn't, it's pitch black. Truth is default AMK weather doesn't have pitch black nights, only AMK Weather Mod adds them.
-New drunken songs of the stalkers. just crap to listen to. The recordings even have room reverb.
-New HUD : completely redone isn't my personal cup of tea - one of the referrences to revisionism I mentioned before. AMK changes the HUD a bit, but it remains faithful to graphical concept of the original.

[mothra]

love makes ppl blind...

could say the same thg of your post, only not using the word love,

and here our preferences/reactions differ.

who has to clear out zombies ? they are ass-slow and are taken care of the other stalkers/enemies/factions....i ignore them IF they are there
no zombie ever got a bullet wasted on him by me (if they are unarmed)

red hunger symbol after waking up ? - NEVER had it, max a green one

turning red dots off and complaining about "hard2distinguish" - sry, you wanted it that way......

dynamic hud is an AMK mod feature afaik and it's even described so in the OL - menu having its own AMK Mod Feature section.....

so I got from your post that the NEWS system is the one you are missing and the rest seems to be your subjective opinion I won't continue to argue about since you can see we had different experiences, so the "features" you claim that suck just are not there or we would have had the same pitch-black nights and dying from hunger after sleep or getting raped by zombiehords.....

I played OL1, OL133 and new OL2 (had to start anew and made story until Yantar) on hell diff.

[Koki]

So was I the only one who didn't really care about AMK's dynamic news system? I mean it was nice and all, but ultimately had no impact on gameplay whatseover. The Zone was just as dead as it was without it. I've never seen any bodies caused by fighting, be it Stalkers, Bandits or Mutants. And the enemy reports? There's a boar in the Miltary Warehouses... grand, just grand. I'll remember that when I go there. Oh wait, I'll forget it after a minute. Besides, who gives a damn about a BOAR? You'd think no one would care about them outside Cordon.

[mothra]

I care for AMKs A-life, the looting system seemed to work much better than in SOC or OblivionLost (although I had them pick up weapons there as well, just not loot bodies). What DID happen to me is e.g. some of the better stashes were emptied by NPCs which frustrated me very much. having a nice artifact collection there.

[Rogue Keeper]

could say the same thg of your post, only not using the word love,

I'm glad you catched the baith tho.

who has to clear out zombies ? they are ass-slow and are taken care of the other stalkers/enemies/factions....i ignore them IF they are there
no zombie ever got a bullet wasted on him by me (if they are unarmed)

They're still pricks.

red hunger symbol after waking up ? - NEVER had it, max a green one

Well, YOU.

turning red dots off and complaining about "hard2distinguish" - sry, you wanted it that way......

I complained their faction is harder to distinguish at distance because of variable armor skins, but since OL has no turn off red dots option, it doesn't matter anyway.

dynamic hud is an AMK mod feature afaik and it's even described so in the OL - menu having its own AMK Mod Feature section.....

OL's 'dynamic hud' is more different from the original one than AMK's

so I got from your post that the NEWS system is the one you are missing and the rest seems to be your subjective opinion I won't continue to argue about since you can see we had different experiences, so the "features" you claim that suck just are not there or we would have had the same pitch-black nights and dying from hunger after sleep or getting raped by zombiehords.....

At least AMK creators have provided decent installer where I can actually choose which features I want and which I don't (that applies not to all, but most new features).

So was I the only one who didn't really care about AMK's dynamic news system? I mean it was nice and all, but ultimately had no impact on gameplay whatseover. The Zone was just as dead as it was without it. I've never seen any bodies caused by fighting, be it Stalkers, Bandits or Mutants. And the enemy reports? There's a boar in the Miltary Warehouses... grand, just grand. I'll remember that when I go there. Oh wait, I'll forget it after a minute. Besides, who gives a damn about a BOAR? You'd think no one would care about them outside Cordon.

If the Zone is dead for you that way or another, and if you never saw dead bodies of stalkers and animals, caused by clashes, there is no help for you.

Maybe not you, but newbie stalkers may be scared of every critter - and the elders may warn noobs about anything. The DNS is not only for you - it's for every other stalker. It is here to enrich depth of the environment, not to twist your gameplay by 180 degrees.

Grand indeed.

[mothra]

btw, the AMK-installer is a rather unnecessary thing. if they would have seperated their 1000 different tweak-options into differently NAMED folders instead of doing all with their own configs you could use the SmartModManager to instantly check out EVERY possible combination of settings/features for AMK
in a matter of seconds.

So I had to go and install it 12 times, make a diff of all versions and make my own little AMK-archives for the SMM. but that's pretty unimportant, I dont expect any fancy installer/mod management for mods. What I do like is a take-it-or-leave-it approach for SP mods, not the "do your own mod inside the mod" where you have to choose again. I already don't know which of the 35 stalker mods I have I should stack upon each other.

So I just stopped collecting every little mod and instead concentrate on some "grand" package mod like OL or AMK or FatRaps RNG.

[Rogue Keeper]

Smart Mod Manager has been made to install and manage numerous small mods coming in zip files - AMK is neither small or Zip file. I also better try out a larger mod which conveniently asks me which adjustment I want and which don't I want. Indeed, managing 35 different minimods with SMM would be a nuisance. Handpicking folders and CFG files for this purpose from mod's big extracted gamedata folder isn't really exciting thing to do.

[Rogue Keeper]

Smart Mod Manager has been made to install and manage numerous small mods coming in zip files - AMK is neither small or Zip file. I also better try out a larger mod which conveniently asks me which adjustment I want and which don't I want. Indeed, managing 35 different minimods with SMM would be a nuisance. Handpicking folders and CFG files for this purpose from mod's big extracted gamedata folder isn't really exciting thing to do (and subsequent praying that something important won't be missing in order for it to work).

[ChickenMcOwnage]

OK, what the hell is AMK?

[Rogue Keeper]

Beats me. I uninstalled it yesterday because of the sick animal ALife in later areas (pack of 15 pseudogiants or pseudodogs, wtf...) killing important NPCs. They were amazed by possibilities of ALife spawning, but they forgot a concept of gradual danger in the zone - is it healthy to have three controllers and a burow in Cordon at the same time? Plus the NPC respawning doesn't seem to work as I hoped it would be , the cleaned areas repopulate way too fast.
Pity, because other features are very good, I can overlook bad English dialogues, even a crash now and then... So unless they fix it in future versions (I doubt so) I will try other big mods or say bye to Stalker until official 1.1 and Clear Sky come out.

[mothra]

1.1 is out. and I doubt it will be updated any more. and for your information: it's harder than OL.

[Rogue Keeper]

It's leaked beta, not.

[mothra]

read the thread on gsc. the moderator confimred gsc is good with it and there won't be any more big updates in the near future. so it's an officialy leaked 1.1 and it's supported by GSC via the board and accessible to all modders. NOT so with the leaked E3 demo of CS that is not allowed to link to or discuss on GSC.

read thread, not headlines.......big problem those times

[242]

mothra, it's not supported officially, moreover it's FORBIDDEN to discuss or mention it at least in the Russian-speaking half of the official forums.

And it's not a beta, it's an alpha which is dated by summer of 2007.

PS: maybe something changed though during the time I didn't visit the forums...

[mothra]

original official 1.1 thread (old hat):
http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=...ge=10&sec_id=1

confirmation BETA status and "semi-official":
http://www.gsc-game.com/main.php?t=c...ec_id=1#171508

official mod entry:
http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=...3354&sec_id=16

beta:
http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=...3437&sec_id=14


I think you confuse it with the leaked ClearSky Alpha.

on SOC support:

GSC replies:

1.0006 has been recalled, because of a bug discovered in it. Consequently, additional versions of the patch have not been released. The bug fix has been added to 1.0007. However, everyone is currently in a crunch to release the new project, so the patch has been delayed until we have a gold master of Clear Sky.

It is inconvenient for the players, but there is no other way.

[242]

mothra, mod's reply (from your link):

1. This is not official release.
2. This is private beta, which I saw on November. Old.

And 1.0006/1.0007 has nothing to do with 1.1

[mothra]

It is work by GSC. They have said in the past that it is going to be released as an official mod. It has been in closed beta testing for some time. I seems, the beta test is now an open one.

posted by DonReba, the only guy with REAL ties to GSC and the devs themselves. what other mods post does not matter. They posted the Alpha-demo as well and Don removed it.

1.0006/7 has to do with 1.1 as in IT COMES BEFORE IT.

apart from stupid nitpicking on the word "official" I wanted only to demonstrate that 1.1 is an open beta now, that all consecutive work on SOC (meaning 1.0006, 1.0007) is being halted until CS comes out and that 1.1 likely won't ever be released since GSC seems to have given 1.1 into the modders hands (like with the game and its remaining questbugs)

[242]

apart from stupid nitpicking on the word "official" I wanted only to demonstrate that 1.1 is an open beta now, that all consecutive work on SOC (meaning 1.0006, 1.0007) is being halted until CS comes out and that 1.1 likely won't ever be released since GSC seems to have given 1.1 into the modders hands (like with the game and its remaining questbugs)

If it was official open beta it seems to me it would be announced on the site and link to it would be published on a site's page.
Also, how it may be beta if it's half finished at best, there aren't even text descriptions on the map - only some digital codes. It's more like Don Reba after discussing the leak with someone from GSC just let it be accessible, knowing that there is no way to stop its spreading after the leak and hoping to get some helpful responses for possible future work on it after CS. So to tell that 1.1 is out is not correct at all, IMO.

[mothra]

so it's forbidden on the russian forum to discuss 1.1 beta ?
and last time don asked GSC DID tell him to shut down everything regarding the e3 demo alpha leak. so there seems to be different degrees of unofficial or official

well, time will tell. but I have the strong feeling 1.1beta is the only thing we ever gonna see from the promised SOC freeplay by GSC.