NEWSA+SIMBION_tweaked Support and Gameplay

[NatVac]

Congrats on your new release, Nightwatch. Many promise but you deliver. And from the sounds of pain in this thread, I suggest a subtitle for Extreme: "House of Pain".

I'm wondering about an effect I'm seeing even in vanilla, and it is worse as a mod gets heavier: Some schemes are not being executed by the game properly, so you get stalled entities or broken door switches. And some jobs are not assigned, or lost due to a distraction; the NPC or entity doesn't return to work after dealing with a threat.

That might not be the cause of the unmoving helicopter; maybe there's a pilot inside sleeping it off or trying to become a member of the Foot-High Club...

Choppers are awesome, bringing more atmosphere than blowouts ever could. I've never been a fan of the blowout obsession in Stalker modding, and as a result have never played a mod that included them. Anyway, back to the choppers, I'd just wasted the bandits and rescued Nimble, was heading up to the tunnel where you find the jacket and I heard a chopper in the distance. it made me turn round and run back for cover. The reason these are better than blowouts, your not limited to set hiding places, and you can fight back. Blowouts you just sit there waiting

QFT. (IMO, it's truth.) While blowouts initially serve immersion, later they become simply tedious, making the game longer but not more fun. If there's a way to tweak aspects of blowouts (frequency, duration, strength), cool...

I never attack the Military at the bridge...you might be able to guess why. And them being difficult to kill is not the reason. Their 'backup' is.

Heh. Reminds me of the noob that wanted to deal with an enemy like a pseudogiant. His battle-scarred buddy said, "Don't even think about hurting Junior." He said, "Aw, come on! We can take 'im!" "Junior's not the problem," came the laconic reply, with an index finger pointing at a boulder the size of a two-story house behind the creature. "His momma is."

[Nightwatch]

Thanks Natvac
"House of Pain"? What a good catchy title, I should've named this mode like it.
about the blowouts, yes they can be tweaked to an extent. I recently increased the already pretty severe numbers even further. Particularly the ones in RF and Pripyat are not survivable if not sheltered well from them. Even the shelters need to chosen well, because not all walls are not equal as one might think when sheltering behind.

and the delayed spawn or action incidents are of the making of dual or (even more severely) Quad CPUs as I experienced first hand after changing my pentium D with Quad-CPU.
Also people need to have a very good PSU, as you'd agree, for the demand for power is absolutely is very high. (suddenly I felt as if I'm describing a typical politician. )
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Very good list of hiding places Ultradad.
About the Nano suit: yes, it's the suit that has the most healing powers (bleeding stop, heal wounds, etc) beside its high anti-telepathy but as a side effect, this time it gives 20% radiation, and there is only 3 artifact slots on the belt. So, it'll take a great care to don it in high-rad areas.
__________________

PS: For all: You don't need to put the dedectors on your belt.
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[Balious]

Nightwatch
Your welcome. I tend to add pictures as soon as I can but theres so many to sort out.
Well Wolf on my game most likely died to the APCs from where his corpse was but I am not 100% sure on this as Military bodies are round there too. But on my current game I could easily kill him without him doing a thing which frightens me as he hadn't been in any action unless he started out all weak and hadn't healed.

I like to congratulate Nimble on my game for being the only main character in Cordon to still stay alive (Sid doesn't count as he just sits on his lazy ass serving loners and watching por... TV ). I congratulate him mainly due to he is normally the first person to die on my game. But first Wolf dies by Military hands, Petruha looked like he got killed by bandits (can't get to his body the bandits are too tough around that place) and a death message that comes up came up for Fox so I assume hes dead. Fanatic doesn't count either as he hasn't arrived there yet.

That explains why the Bloodsuckers are super weak here. I met one alive, one running for its life (Always see one do that in Cordon) and a dead one. The helicopters also seem to be acting quite weird. Not once have they killed me (I normally die alot of times), I assume I became a god of avoiding them.

Right now im struggling to leave Cordon. Theres always action happening such as Mercs attacking Rookie Village. And I can't leave Rookie Village in its current state with only five active members (Nimble one of them when hes not sleeping).

A question Nightwatch. Would anything happen if I changed my characters name with your mod? I tend to not try and change anything but I have changed the music to something I like (my music mod of course) and would of changed the time from a persuading Jamie if he didn't tell me it requires a new game. Basically does changing my name affect anything in the game to cause unexpected errors etc?

There was one other thing I was going to talk about but I totally forgot what.

Edit:
You dont need to put detectors on your belt?! I do that anyway as I feel better but thanks for saying that. Means I can remove it if I need to add another artifact.

[Nightwatch]

Yeah, that says it all, balious that no one can survive the persistent fire of an APC more than a few moments no matter how tough they are. And bandits can also kill even the very strong characters, if they corner him in a bad place. There's no god-type NPC (the running-around ones) in the game, as it would create too much of a "granted" certainty in the game; player now feels that they need to save those characters from their bad situations or doom, or leave them to their fate. It's a choice. It can be reloaded (very frequent quicksaves are possible) and the situation can be re-tried hoping for a different ending, if on efeels like this way. Of course, it doesn't guarantee that any such attempt will be successful anyway. You can't know without trying.
About the name, you mean Marked One? I don't remember putting "Mark One " name in check with other functions, its normal protocol for doing this is "actor." I hope I haven't reference it somewhere, I can't say it off my head now, I need to check through long notes. If you want you can try, while paying absolute care to strings and any characters, etc. If it doesn't go well, you should be sure that you can reverse it.

[rockingmtranch]

Dangit!!!! I was playing along beautifully until right after I helped Fox. I decided to go check the two Loners near the rocks and my FPS took a dump. Dropped from 40 to 6 and won't recover. I've tried just about everything to no avail.

[Nightwatch]

I hope it's not your hardware that caused this sudden 40 to 6 FPS drop, try another game just to be sure. If the cause is proven to be with STALKER, (it suffers from memory management, too, among others) then please reboot your PC and see how it goes. You can also try loading an earlier save, if possibly starts pointing towards the engine entering into loop in one of the processes in the game.

[rockingmtranch]

Oh, I restarted. I did everything except load an earlier save (way earlier...almost starting over). Must be a loop thing. Damn. More hard saves coming up but it is running as it was before. Thanks.

Damnit Edit: Damnit! Did it again!

Other Edit: I'm trying an old Fatrap trick of not playing a game that has any RED flash on the screen when a new game is created. Took several tries but I finally got one that was NO red at all. Now, we'll see.

[Grump642]

Damn! Lost the quest for nimbles armor already and it hasn't even been 8 hours game time yet!! That bastard must have went & got it himself....
Oh well... got me the NW deagle replica, an MP5, & an AK-74U tactical - time to go wup ass on the military @ the bridge.

edit: Oh yeah, and two pineapples I went to get when I lost the nimble quest.... could come in handy with these damn robocop bandits....

I don't think he went and got it himself. I watched him attack an APC with a PISTOL!!! Soon as he died, the quest was over. What an idiot.

[Grump642]

Other Edit: I'm trying an old Fatrap trick of not playing a game that has any RED flash on the screen when a new game is created. Took several tries but I finally got one that was NO red at all. Now, we'll see.

???????????

[rockingmtranch]

Haven't you seen all those error messages in RED when you start a new game Grump? It's a better game when everything loads as it should.

[Grump642]

Oh, OK. Now I understand what was meant.

[Grump642]

Yeah, baby!!http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv340/Grump642/Soc/ss_grumpy_04-13-09_22-51-21_l02_gar.jpg

First APC with just hand granade

[Kaidonni]

I've already totalled TWO APCs.

I always deal with the Military Outpost in Cordon early on, some useful supplies there (plus, given that you can wear the suit of your enemy and infiltrate them to an extent, it's useful to have the Light Army Uniforms). I just love getting the APC near the bridge where you save Tolik and driving it through the minefield to the left of the outpost (and this is 'looking south left'). Whether it is destroyed or not, I bail out and take cover near the felled tree at the barbed wire fence, there's an opening there and sufficient cover from the APCs that fire at you. I then sneak around behind them and dispatch them. Usually, by the time I do this, I've already had to eliminate some very curious soldiers who want to see what goes on in the rookie camp (curiosty didn't kill the cat, it killed the soldier!), so very few remain in the outpost. Mind you, yesterday when I did this, a chopper also showed up so I had to take cover for a short while, but he left eventually.

[Nightwatch]

Congrats on your new release, Nightwatch. Many promise but you deliver. And from the sounds of pain in this thread, I suggest a subtitle for Extreme: "House of Pain".

Thanks NatVac This means a lot to me.

Yeah, baby!!http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv340/Grump642/Soc/ss_grumpy_04-13-09_22-51-21_l02_gar.jpg

First APC with just hand grenade

That's very nicely sneaky move there; you managed to circle around the APC and ambush it?


Kaidonni, you seem to be a much better and more shrewd (in the best meaning) fighter than you seem to give credit yourself.


rockingmtranch
It's good at least that it's not your hardware is having the problem. hardware is costlier. I hope with no-red start things will go better on that location. Actually, you may consider stay away from those two stalkers around the rock, there may be a level design problem there in STALKER, a code not well placed type of things, which may be putting the one of the processes in CPU or GPU (or both) into loop, might be a hardware sensitive issue with that design as well. I can't say for sure, but as I've noticed around (not in STALKER, but in other games as well) more powerful hardware, mostly Graphics Card are effected more by any not well-written Graphical codes. (Far Cry 2 doesn't play on many high end PCs, including on mine, Nvidia driver crashes, but not on lower end cards)
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Hey Guys,

I'm in some conundrum (well, maybe not so dramatic, but nevertheless a question to solve)

I'm starting to update the Players corner, which has been left quite behind during this 3.0 work. I have pictures that you posted (tried my best to save them as they are posted)I saved them, some of which also are PDA stats pictures. Now, what should the criteria be to line them up? I mean what's the thing that should be the main thing to decide who's number one and who's no 2?

Total NPC kill? Mutants? Total ranking? Controllers? or the total of them all? When people are starting to score hits quite near to each other, suddenly this question arose. A point system? What? anything I haven't even thought of it?
Help please!

(And don't forget to take pictures when you feel it's worth documenting, anything. Also: PDA stats. particularly they'll be more definitive towards and ends of the game.)

[Kaidonni]

I am having two problems with the mod. Both quest related.

Nimble just will not accept the Jellyfish artefact. It doesn't matter how many times I talk to him, he just will not. And the quest to get the TOZ for Petruha appears to be broken, because I purchased a TOZ-34 (and it looks exactly like the weapon displayed for the Detailed Task Information of the quest), but it doesn't register me as having collected the item...

[Balious]

Thats a great idea on having some rank point system thing. I would think all of them which the ranking system in the game may actually do as it adds up the NPCs, Mutants and the quests done.

Perhaps we can have some awards to go with this as I suggested earlier (I think it was me anyway, proves how crap my memory is). Like someone can get an award for being first place for a week without being overtaken and so on. I suggest we should do this starting with 3.0 as it may seem a little unfair for some people *cough* the controller kills *cough*.

Thats all I have on that.

I will be posting pictures and others as soon as I can but theres so much to do.

On the helicopters. It seems they done with oh lets just go up and down just firing our machine gun until something gets hit. They actually have killed me twice so far. When I have been dragging bodies.

Every now and then I like to roleplay so of course I was roleplaying a little on Stalker. When I found out there was only five survivors in Rookie Village I did not want the new recruits to see all the dead bodies and give them the wrong impression that what should be an easy area for them to get used to the zone a war zone. So I hid all the bodies in the basement next to Nimble's place (Well he sleeps there so I assume its his). Then there was only two survivors after a Merc attack which was Nimble and some experienced loner. After hiding the other bodies again and about to leave reinforcements for the village arrived. It seems Rookie Village is in good hands now. With this out the way I will find out what happened to Fox and head for Garbage. With the Military dead at the bridge (unless more came) I have easy access to the other part. I wonder if I am ready for the horror of Garbage. I will be expecting at least as much action as I have had at Cordon.

Once I arrive in Garbage and stopped playing I shall start a story with pictures and post it here and in my screenshot/story thread.

[Nightwatch]

That, they are vanilla STALKER broken quest problems Kaidonni. (considering you've got the "right" TOZ in respect of Petruha mission, there're 2 TOZes available) STALKER is riddled and heavy with broken quests, ever-repeating, never ending quests, and similar things with a list too long to put here.
NatVac with ZRP has done enormous quality job in repairing such matters and they are well documented in ZRP thread and its documents.

If one needs to play STALKER in which all side missions, every single thing function properly as the GCS should have done it in the first place, then this person does need to play ZRP. It's more than a mod, it's the only patch-quality release, as it's recognized "an unofficial patch" better than GSC patches. Otherwise, there will be some inevitable GSC problems apparent along the game, though a lot of things also have been repaired in NEWSA, such as vanilla Pripyat pathway handling problem, etc.

Xray works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, due to many reasons which are only known to a building full of GSC personnel, it sometimes just feels like not cooperating with the game. These behavior is well-known and well-documented with hundreds-and-hundreds of posts over many forums.

(There are also issues that need to be taken into account related with hardware as I've seen the prove of it first hand, dual-cores and particularly Quad-Cores are affected adversely because the STALKER is not well optimized for dual-cores, and not optimized at all for Quads. Many other things, RAM, PSU are also factors for various matters.)

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Very good ideas, Balious. Do make them a bit more detailed. I'm waiting more ideas from everybody (either on this line, or new) about the ranking system in Players Corner as in my above post.

You are well-immersed into the game, it's a very true form for the most as well, and it speaks volumes about the immersity of STALKER, it's a very great game.
On the subject: you'vbe done a great job there, Stalker.

[Ultradad]

Hello there

Another cracking day in the office (Stalker on extreme mode) , after much smashing of my head into monitor and shouting naughty words loudly i managed to get dark valley in the bag and make my way back to sid dragging a ton of goodies with me

http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/huntersgotnicekit.jpg

I got army base mission off sid and did the mercs before the hole village got wiped again by a very nasty horror time and blow out

http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/poorsodswipedoutagainlol.jpg
http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/grouphug.jpg

I suck at shooting down helicopters but after a few reloads i got the bugger just outside sids bunker

http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/bullseye.jpg
http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/hopehegotairbags.jpg
http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/igotthebugger.jpg

All ready to do my run and nightwatch kicks everything up a gear

http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/hellothere.jpg
http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/anotherone.jpg

After dodging helicopters and APC's in garbage i finaly made it back to barkeep, gonna have a nice cuppa tea and a fag before setting out for the scientists Got some other screenshots as well, what a day

http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/bigpackoffirebites.jpg
http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/howilookafterarmybaseraid.jpg
http://i476.photobucket.com/albums/rr127/Ultradad2008/feeltheburnbaby.jpg

Not sure whats best for players corner tbh nightwatch, i was bulletproof more or less when i racked up 400 controller kills, i am sure someone will comeup with a good idea

[EggChen]

I'm waiting more ideas from everybody (either on this line, or new) about the ranking system in Players Corner as in my above post.

How about a form of "achievements" like you get in GFWL, I know GFWL is a bit shite itslef but bear with me.....

Come up with some specific awards and a total to give more than one person a chance, here a few measures and the achievements you could give :

Total points : No1 Ranked Stalker
Total NPC kills : Mass-murderer
Most money : Tight-arse
Most Master level NPC kills : Best of the Best
Most Bandit kills : Vigilante
Most Controller Kills : The "busetibi" award
Most Army Kills : A Stalker's Best Friend

... etc, etc.

I have not had much chance to play this tonight, been watching the footy. Another quick question though, is there a limit to use of the Sleeping Bag? I used it once, got interuppted by a blowout, now I cannot use it again. When I click the bag it makes a noise but no ui window opens.