NEWSA+SIMBION_tweaked Support and Gameplay

[NatVac]

It's an engine problem. When an NPC hits an object and get stuck on something (behind a pillar for example) it takes down the game!! Instead of engine guides the NPC -with several moves- back to its original path, or just lets him remain stuck there.

It's worse than that. There's a radius jitter in spawning that helps increase the randomness in the game, but this can spawn entities in a place where they can't navigate to the next waypoint. This applies to existing entities -- you can save a game with an NPC or mutant in the right place, but loading that save runs the risk of recreating the NPC or mutant in the wrong place.

There's also NPC offline movement -- they can go through obstacles while offline, but when you come within switch distance, this can put the NPC/mutant in a bad place. An example is Shaggy, who can be spawned outside his cell.

And yes, the no-accessible-waypoint issue should not take down the game. That is a critical flaw in the design which leads to a bad perception of the game.

I'm on a personal crusade to come up with workarounds, but the lack of time and tools doesn't help much.

I vaguely recall that you were running Vista, Nightwatch. If so, have you increased your application process space from the default of 2GB? This can help with some out-of-memory errors, and not just while playing the game.

[Nightwatch]

It's an engine problem. When an NPC hits an object and get stuck on something (behind a pillar for example) it takes down the game!! Instead of engine guides the NPC -with several moves- back to its original path, or just lets him remain stuck there.

It's worse than that. There's a radius jitter in spawning that helps increase the randomness in the game, but this can spawn entities in a place where they can't navigate to the next waypoint. This applies to existing entities -- you can save a game with an NPC or mutant in the right place, but loading that save runs the risk of recreating the NPC or mutant in the wrong place.

There's also NPC offline movement -- they can go through obstacles while offline, but when you come within switch distance, this can put the NPC/mutant in a bad place. An example is Shaggy, who can be spawned outside his cell.

And yes, the no-accessible-waypoint issue should not take down the game. That is a critical flaw in the design which leads to a bad perception of the game.

I'm on a personal crusade to come up with workarounds, but the lack of time and tools doesn't help much.

I vaguely recall that you were running Vista, Nightwatch. If so, have you increased your application process space from the default of 2GB? This can help with some out-of-memory errors, and not just while playing the game.

Thanks NatVac for sharing this pain You are of course absolutely right. Those (otherwise would have been wonderful) random-distance-spawns puts things into a more painful Russian-roulette of "guess which NPC will get stuck now?" when the xray engine continues to act more capricious than Maria Carey.

It's inconceivable in this day of age that a game engine cannot steer an NPC around a tree, pillar, door or a piece of wall.

NPC Name-A hits door?
Move back one step, then turn 5 degrees right, move ahead
Hit again? Repeat the above move until NPC walks free...
(or anything like that, just my point)

Why is it so difficult that this was not implemented in the first place??

It is, by any means, unforgiveable that a game engine abandons its own game because an NPC gets stuck because of its own fault!
At least leave the NPC right there, and get on with the rest of the game.

My daughter played Mass Effect, I watched in amazement. Dozens of NPCs (and vehicles as well) hit everywhere, climbed over them when necessary, or quickly turned around them. That was after all simple game, not a masterpiece.

I reiterate my examples of Racing Games.

Vanilla snipers on windows and on the roofs in Pripyat are extremely buggy. They are the ones who are taking down the game (in great majority of the cases). Gulag_pripyat.script is not an admirable piece of work either, I'm afraid. Very uncooperative approach, as if: either this way or the highway approach.

It's encouragingly good news that you are working on such matters (despite the lack of support and tools, time is also a very big issue) and only people in your stature can provide some stable and permanent solutions.

--And, yes, I use Vista and I've activated the increaseuserVA 3072 switch, despite my initial worries of its possible effect on Kernel. No problems seen (as I could possibly notice) so far.

__________
(PS: I still have very much respect for GSC developers, as I believe that at the root of all the problems it lies the financial and support issues, and if they had been catered by companies like Ubisoft, Crytek, Capcom, etc, with a couple of hundred supporting developers and immense financial input, they would have (they still can) created a real masterpiece. With a handful of developers and mostly on free software, this is still a big achievement.)

_______________________

Wombat_70

You are very kind to offer such nice compliments to encorage me on this work, much appreciated.
Thruth of the matter is taht the underlying work is the STALKER from GCS which we've found ourselves hooked and gon einto these modding lengths, and all the wonderful and spectacular mods ingredient to this multi-mod. I'm just twisting here and there and putting some salt, (hot) pepper and tomato from the jar of NEWSA, lol.
And thanks to you all guys, that I'm enjoying to see that you enjoy the product.

[Kaidonni]

Hey, just wondering when 3.0 might be out. Been holding back from playing the 3.0 version of the mod because I thought it would be out soon (haven't played Stalker, actually, because this is the mod I want to play - I don't want to start another and then swap over, and I didn't really fancy starting 2.4 and then starting again - LOL!). Don't intend to be pushy, of course, you do want to release a quality product. Was hoping it might be in time for Christmas, though... *has those puppy-dog eyes you just can't say no to*

double post fixed busetibi

[Nightwatch]

Thanks for the interest and your expectations from the mod, Kaidonni.

I had been planning ( and hoping) to be to release it before Christmas, but the work proves to be consuming more time than expected, considering that some 'real life catching up with me' has also occurred meanwhile, and additional works that I'm putting into the mod which were not in the start-up plan, and also the other works that suddenly inspire me to include them in the mod (as examples given in the previous posts) have caused the inevitable skip over the Christmas period.
I'm trying to bring some workarounds to this vanilla Pripyat-paths/spawning problems (as the above posts and as NatVac perfectly pointed to) at least making some improvements on them. Requires a lot of thinking and endless tests. So, sorry about the delay. But it pleases me seeing folks caring and wanting this mod. Thanks.

[busetibi]

/waits to see the "Attachments" icon

[Wombat_70]

MERRY XMASto nightwach and to all stalkers awaiting the release of v3.0.



"All hope abandon ye who enter here."

[Nightwatch]

Merry Christmas to you all, too, guys.
3.0 is improving and on the finishing path. Translations are also continuing. I took a day or two off from moding naturally, for the the benefit of family in festive season. Starting work tonight again.

I hope everyone is having a very happy time during these holidays.

[Troman]

Does anyone have any tips for fighting stuttering in Military Warehouses? Before the freeplay the stuttering would sometimes start when I entered MW level and would stop after some time, but now after I have started freeplay it became unplayable. Now Dark Valley started to lag too, while other levels are perfectly playable.

I have read the minimal sys requirements and my system is ok.

Any ideas?

[busetibi]

I think most people find those levels "laggy" I know I do, regarding AW level theres so much happening and so much stuff being loaded it can cause lag, and even DV is a kinda busy level, Yantar was kinda laggy and WT was a complete no go for me during freeplay
when I come a laggy level I try and run as much as possible, sometimes it stops it, My belief is that the further you get from the spawn points the better and the lag stops.
But I'm sure Nightwatch could explain it better than me

oh, and welcome to the boards Troman

[EggChen]

I am not talking about NEWSA here, just in general.

One of the best fixes I found for lag was to exit the game completely, reload Stalker and reload the save when you enter the level (or one you made while on that level). It can be a pain, but my theory is it helps by freeing up memory usage that was not properly purged. I noticed it when my game was silky smooth the first few levels, but the more levels I visited in one session, the more it lagged.

Welcome to the forums buddy

[Nightwatch]

Welcome to the forums Troman,and thanks for playing the mod and posting.
And also many thanks to you guys, busetibi and EggChen to answer the post.

Yes, from the vanilla the AW and DV are prone to stutter blamed partly on level design, larger areas than the rest of the game and maybe more importantly, as EggChen rightly refers to, the memory management issues that lie in the base of the XRay engine. That's why, when you close down the game and start again, as EggChen says, memory is cleared and an improvement should be witnessed.

This stutter issue has also been reported in Clear Sky as well.

And this mod uses more objects than the vanilla version. Return from NPP (in general, not specific to this mod, because it uses the vanilla engine and memory management system; in fact, it plays, as known, with STALKER game playing underneath) may increase the vanilla memory management problems, and it is said that it was one of the reasons that GSC did not follow up releasing the freeplay addition/patch.

This situation, of course, reflects itself differently in each system, depending on many things on that specific system, which does not necessarily mean that the system is inferior. (Though large amaounts of high performance memory should be expected to provide more help in this.) It has been recorded that, sometimes, some slighly lower systems suffer less stutter and sometimes a higher system may suffer more.

The situation is further elaborated on by busetibi correctly and concisely as he says: "regarding AW level theres so much happening and so much stuff being loaded it can cause lag, and even DV is a kinda busy level," and also offers -alongside the ones seen on the links under the page- another additional solution (he's a very experienced players and his words need to be taken seriously ) : "when I come a laggy level I try and run as much as possible, sometimes it stops it, My belief is that the further you get from the spawn points the better and the lag stops."

And there is a good guide for fighting with stutter in STALKER from Decane here:
http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=community&s=forums&s_game_type=xr&lang=en

And also from tweakguides, here:
http://www.tweakguides.com/STALKER_10.html

Again, thanks for playing.

-----------------------------------
Edit: last paragraph (reference to busetibi's views and solutions offers that was lost during cut & paste) was re-inserted.

[busetibi]

[busetibi]

b a d l y i n n e e d o f f i x

[DARK TEMPLAR]

So hows it going with one of my favourite mods

[Nightwatch]

Thanks guys
Recently the real life has caught up with me a bit and I need to work much longer for my day job but I'm still continuing working on version 3 about one-two hours every night; improvements being done, they are now in a fine tuning stage, if I may put it like this.

There're improvements in Pripyat paths problems that was known to lead to crashes (particularly apparent so when significant number of NPCs are used; so fault probability percentage also increases) but it's a bit too early to claim the improvement are permanent, works in that matter should not alter, change the gameplay significantly, and certainly not negatively (well, it's always a matter of opinion anyway), so I hope I won't need to roll back current improvements later after completing all the tests. But, in short, things do look promising at the moment.

Also, I've stumbled on a different idea, maybe a scenario we may also call it. There is also a possibility to make the Zone quite eerie; a scenario in which no NPCs do behave the way they are expected to do, no linear missions, in fact no missions to follow, sort of post-apocalyptic scene, yet one can still find and ask missions if they wish to do so, many things based on chance as in real life. I am not considering to apply this vision as the main scenario of this version. But I may include it later in a special add-on pack.

You want to hear another complaint? The weather is too damn cold. This is one hot global warming, everyone's *ss is freezing, and some parts of Thames river has frozen as the TV showed. Got my due share of cold from this weather like many many others, and I'll continue to work on the mod tonight with various hot drinks one after another, lol

[DARK TEMPLAR]

Pretyy warm where I'm right now but that just might be my opinion cause I'm more of a cold area person. everything above 24 c is a real agoni for me

[busetibi]

nice ideas Nightwatch I was playing a mod awhile ago called Hell,it was dark,moody,eerie the only problem with it was it kept CTD but the game play was good, I mean if you get caught in a blowout why would you expect the trees to still have green leaves? or god forbid purple flowers or any flowers for that matter kinda spoils the "dark" feeling for a mod.
I would love to play a really dark mod, the zone would be desolate, grass would crunch underfoot, trees would be twisted and broken, no fkn crows flying around (again, birds flying after a blowout??) instead of normal rain, how about acid rain? maybe less NPC's but more zombies? instead of sunshine the zone would be covered in a fog, light in some places but thick and hard to see through in other places like Dark Valley, Imagine walking down the road to the bandit base and a thick fog came over, then you would hear moaning and a huge swarm of zombies would come walking out of the thick fog
Hell yes!!

[DARK TEMPLAR]

Second that

[Nightwatch]

In this version 3, there are already some touches that, I believe, offer a bit more fitting look for a accident lived/devastated Zone. The test that I did (as I metioned in previous post) and all other type of stuff can be offered later as a special add-on pack. Because what I've come accross changes the Zone and the Story profoundly (no story left, no lienar order-missions, wounded lying around, type of thing) and significantly altering the current storyline. So, while working on the finishing touches of version 3, another screenplay has arisen. But it's for the future, anyway.

This version is crowded, but not necessarily with friends... but believe me it is much more like a true hell. It will bite and it will hurt, lol.