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[Robsoie]

Sad news like all those reports from that war.

For the anecdote, in Call of Pripyat the character Loki had been given his apperance.
I pray he is at peace in heaven.

[Ulfarr]

I found a video series on youtube about a MASSIVE modpack for anomaly called G.A.M.M.A.

I haven't played it myself yet, hell I'm not even sure if my pc can handle it, but on theirs it just looks so damn smooth. According to this wiki, the focus is more on the survival/crafting/scavenging aspect of the game but from what I've seen so far, there are a few new mechanics introduced, tied to what artefacts you use (teleport to what you just killed or causing your bullets to explode your targets).

[Robsoie]

It seems that GAMMA modpack has a huge following and popularity.
My own PC would surely not handle it unless most features would be disabled
It's running on the Anomaly mod that is already not running good on my old system until lots of settings are lowered and i have read that GAMMA is even more hardware intensive.

Still amazed how much modding the STALKER series still get after so many years.
And still enjoy launching my very modded Call of Chernobyl every few months and making a complete run of Shadow of Chernobyl every years

[Dostoevsky]

I've played a fair bit of GAMMA. As a person who played Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky when they came out, played a bit of early-modded Clear Sky, then nothing until GAMMA it's pretty darned impressive what the modding community has done.

I really like GAMMA, but it's not for everybody. You can't buy (or sell!) weapons or armor, so will have to repair things you find via a system of tools and parts and then make sure to maintain said gear. Some of the parts and sub-tools can be purchased from traders, but the critical core tools are locked behind random loot stashes - these effectively slow down / gatekeep progress going north towards Pripyat. There are optional submods to reactivate buying & selling weapons and armor, but it's not the intended experience -- and personally I found I liked scrounging for workable gear, though the amount of parts you accumulate ends up in having FO4-like stashes of scrap.

There's a Tarkov-like health system that works pretty well in practice, and combat is balanced between fighting armored and unarmored foes. Hollow point bullets or buckshot are a necessity against the beasts of the exclusion zone, while AP is needed to deal with armored humans.

[Funk]

I just don't like the survive on scraps phase, it's often really unfair.
Partly as you fight people that have unlimited ammo an working guns that become junk an 4 rounds after you kill them.
Its the arbitary hardness like gun being sold but never bought that gets to me. 

[Ulfarr]

Partly as you fight people that have unlimited ammo an working guns that become junk an 4 rounds after you kill them.
Its the arbitary hardness like gun being sold but never bought that gets to me. 

I think these can be configured by the user to some extent..maybe not the unlimited ammo but weapon/armor condition should be doable. As are the lists about what can be bought/sold. Though I get it, not everyone will want to deal with that stuff and at some point it does create some dissonance.

In other news, I've been fidling with Anomaly's graphic settings for the last couple of days. It seems I can get some decent performance  by using the DX8 render (30-70 fps at the swamps, max render distances, almost max textures and some low density grasses). It does lose some fidelity but the game still looks good, arguably better than say DX9, where even trying to make it look decent results in about 10-30 fps.

I'm not sure if I'll go ahead with GAMMA though I think, it being modular as it is (it uses Mod Organizer 2), means I should be able to achieve it's gameplay without the "heavier" visual stuff.

[Robsoie]

I remember when i tried Anomaly setting it to DX8 resulted in a very playable framerate even on my old system.
But the problem is that the Anomaly vegetation in DX8 does not react to flashlight, so at night you're only illuminating the ground while the vegetation stay dark, so you have to lower a lot the vegetation density if you want to see the groundscape at night unfortunately .

There were  some addons that could help to improve Anomaly performance noticably and so making DX9 more playable on low end system if you are annoyed by DX8 vegetation at night :

https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons/x3-performance-tweaks
https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons/classic-textures-151

[Ulfarr]

Thanks for the suggestions Robsoie 

 I don't think I'll use the fog mod, I'm trying to keep viewing distance high for now,  but the classic textures might prove to be usefull.

[Ulfarr]

After about a week or so, searching through the muddy waters of Moddb and troubleshooting (some) comflicts, my anomaly modlist (~85 mods) can be considered almost feature complete. There were some conflicts that are beyond my skills to patch but for now I have to actually playtest it.

That alone wouldn't be enough to justify the post but the following will:

1) Going from manual installs to MO2 is just great. I 've used it before for skyrim, but I didn't know it could be used for stalker too. Modding Stalker has never been that easy or stress free before (aside from just using a modpack  ). Hell, the most tiresome part was finding the mods in Moddb's atrocious site.

2) Ledge Grabbing. Let me say it again. LEDGE GRABBING! Some geniously mad modder made it possible to add climbing (with animations) to STALKER. Trucks, walls, big ass containers, the fences that block X-16's back exit from the swamp's side. Anything that you can stand on and reasonably reach for, you can climb on it. Use with some caution, it usualy works flawlessly, but I did got stuck once after trying to climb on a truck's cabin and the character's model clipped through the front window.

[Robsoie]

Oh wow that ledge grabbing addon looks amazing from what i see in the videos, there are so many locations all around the maps in which you feel you could just grab a ledge to climb slightly up to reach a place but the game does not allow this.
I wish there was such an addon for other mods, as i don't play with anomaly.

[Ulfarr]

Seeing how the ledge grabbing mod requires the anomaly "modded exes" I don't think it's possible to be used with other base game mods. Maybe if someone knew how to write it from the ground up for the older engines. I wonder if it would be possible to migrate CoTZ to the engine that anomaly uses (xray-monolith). Then perhaps it would be possible to use it with the more advanced mods.

In other news.. after a lot of hours researching how to make DX8 anomaly look better and supposedly getting ReShade to work* with it (it did not), I managed to "fix" an issue where in foggy weather, beyond a certain distance, everything but the grass bleached out resulting an ugly very high contrast view ( "white object + ground / blackish grass)...all it took was simply setting r1_fog_luminance below 0.5 through the console.

*There is supposed to be a way to give backward compatibility to ReShade, the proccess is described in this reddit post about using the EFT shaders with dx8 anomaly, but while I did get it to run with my game whenever I activated it nothing changed visually but I would still lose performance.

[Dostoevsky]

From what I've heard (mainly through the GAMMA window into the modding community), mods that add first-person animations have a nasty habit of breaking first person animations entirely after enough playtime (which also just softlocks the save outright). It was described as a core engine issue - so perhaps the ledge grabbing mod is attempting some sort of fix to that? I'm just guessing, though.

[Robsoie]

It's been a long time people have been hoping for this one, but finally  "True Stalker" got released yesterday :
https://www.moddb.com/mods/true-stalker

Note : people have been reporting that the installer can throw up a generic trojan detection on some antivirus as it is most always the case when something is not signed with microsoft.
It's been reported as a false positive by most people.
But keep in mind that trusting people you don't know, regardless of how respected mod developers they are and how quality and good and popular the mod is, is always a risk.

So fortunately you have an alternative to using the installer : by extracting the files yourself , as it was explained on some reddit post:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Download all the truestalker installation files (the .exe and the various .bin) and place them in a folder
For this example in  C:\Truestalker\

Download innoextract-1.9-windows.zip from
https://github.com/dscharrer/innoextract/releases/tag/1.9

Extract the content of innoextract-1.9-windows.zip into that C:\Truestalker\  (especially the innoextract.exe)

Open cmd. (press the window key+R , then type cmd  ).

Enter the following command:

cd c:\

then enter the following command:

cd Truestalker

Now enter the following command:

innoextract.exe ts_setup.exe

Wait until (it can take a while as True Stalker is a rather big game packed with content) the process is finished, the extracted game will be in "c:\Truestalker\app" folder.

To switch language to english, after launching the game once (it's in ukrainian i think by default) , quit then in
C:\Truestalker\app\userdata\
open the file user.ltx
then change
g_language ukr
into
g_language eng