Servalion

Yeah, its that one sargeant. If you'll notice, near the beginning of the game, you have a minor and insignificant task of meeting up with a guy before the railroad bridge pass. This happens after you save Nimble and bring Sidorovich back the flash drive. Anyways, said guy is dead, but you supposedly pick up his PDA, which has a picture of all the Military types that can be found in game, including this masked guy. However, the masked sargeant typically only shows up at the Dark Valley, directly after Lab X18. He's one of the last few guarding the area, just outside the abandoned factory gate. Sorry I haven't been around guys, but RL and stuff caught up to me. That, and Left 4 Dead. To be honest, I haven't played either Stalker game in well over a month. Well, I guess I'll see what happens.

The P90 (made by Gosuke, I believe) has a plainly visible reload animation, while Zenobian's P90 moves off to the bottom of the screen to reload, which is the easy way out of having to make a custom reload animation. Other than that, I don't know of any other differences, since I've never really used Zenobian's.

LOL. Gotta say, I've never seen Sparrow get nearly that far. He's actually usually the first corpse I come across in the Bar. He's not usually dead at first of course, but he's dead soon afterwards, with no explanation. Someone wants his Unique Colt way too much. As for the gigantic wave of mutants vs Freedom, I LOVE good fights like that. As long as it doesn't significantly lag up the computer or slow down, it puts all that ammo to good use and tests combat survival. Not to mention a nice surplus of mutant parts to sell. Now if only Tushkano, Pseudo-Giants, Chimeras & Controllers had parts to sell (really, why don't they?)

Stalker's got a strange rep. Plenty of people install wrong, and I've been no exception in the past, but there are times where it genuinely seems like various necessary files just go missing. Heya, I'm back. School's been kicking my ass. Kinda tired today. I haven't been able to finalize that partial CS weapon pack I'd promised would be released last weekend. Ah well, got the next couple days for that. How goes Arsenal progress?

Wow, sounds like quite the complex system you've set up. Sounds like a sure-fire win, can't wait to see this all over again.

I'd been also thinking about various weapons that would make sense. I find it interesting how so many Desert Eagles can get around here and there in games, but that its more useable successor, the Jericho 941 - "Baby Desert Eagle" - remains completely unknown to almost all. With an initial magazine capacity of 10 .45 ACP rounds, and basically looking like a smaller Deagle, if only a game model existed, it would be an excellent handgun to put to use. I also keep dreaming of seeing that Thompson in game some day, but I think I can keep on dreaming. CS really needs more SMGs. Many mods of lately have edited the MP5 icon, removing the stock, so it can fit in the pistol slot. I'm sure people are dying to have the P90 return, but since the P90 reload is rather unique, not being able to put in new animations could be a serious hamper in making new weapons for the game. The Bizon would be more than a welcome return, but again, the reload thing. And weren't Mac-10s supposed to be in the game originally? Wonder if that was just a rumor, or if they were removed early on? The game needs more automatic uses of the .45 ACP. I'm actually very surprised that there's been no H&K UMP for Stalker yet. Also, in CS, Shotguns (at least the animations and usage) have been majorly improved upon, especially after upgrades. Winchester feels like there's some practicality to it now, and SPAS is a beast - fully upgrades its firing out close to 4 shots a second. With a fire rate like that, only thing the Saiga can bring to CS is even faster automatic fire and a PSO-1 mount option. Well, the magazine feed's a plus too.

Dunno about that one. The doubts of others have been proven wrong before in SoC, and its really a little too soon still to tell for CS. Sure sucks if its true though.

Ahh, good to see ya alive and kicking, Skullhunter. Been busy trying out CS since its release. Naturally it falls short in quite a few areas, but the latest patch from yesterday helped smooth things out. Get it as soon as you can, these new sounds and animations are quite nice. Porting them to SoC may be another issue. Modding weaponry in CS is very similar to SoC with almost no changes. Some differences are to be spotted, however. Weapons.ltx sports a couple new ballistics values. For instance, your typical 9x39 AP round stats (modded).... k_dist = 1 k_disp = 1.6 k_hit = 2 k_impulse = 0.2 k_pierce = 1.2 <-------New: SoC's pierce factor's been split up. k_ap represents piercing effect against NPC armor, while this represents penetration through the environment, such as boxes and such. k_ap = 1.15 impair = 1.05 buck_shot = 1 tracer = on wm_size = 0.05 k_air_resistance = 1.6 <------New: Not sure. I assume that a higher value allows it to travel farther and resist the gravitational pull downward. The upgrade system is great. Basically you're allowed to take armor and weapons to mechanics and have them alter your stuff for a substantial fee. Mechanics also do all the repairs now. However, not all upgrade options can be had - most armor & weapons have two upgrade trees of sorts to follow. You can opt to lower recoil by -20%, or you can do it by -50% at the drawback of a reduced RPM rate. You can insert kevlar plating, or add a relief vest so you can carry 5kg more. But you can't do both. Taking one will dim out the other option. By following the series of related upgrades, the tree can open up later until all are had. Will you optimize your L85 Enfield to have a 1.6x scope with a much higher rate of fire and reduced recoil, or will you make it more sniper-oriented with sharper accuracy, a 4x scope, a steady fire rate with minimal recoil & shots with higher velocity, distance, and flat trajectory? Perhaps you wanna beef up your SEVA suit with better nightvision, teflon plate inserts, and a hardening solution to make the material more durable against rupturing? Or maybe you think its best to improve what the SEVA does well, with ointment coating and foam lining to raise resistance to shock/thermal/chemical damage, and a psy-system to guard against telepathy? The lower weapon classes, such as handguns, shotguns & SMGs (with MP5 being the only SMG once again) have minimal trees, allowing the user to get nearly all available options. Furthermore, most weapons have some upgrade sections that are independent from the trees, such as an expanded magazine or swapping the weapon caliber (Make an MP5 w/ 9x18 barrel first on list to get made). Likewise, most armor suits have independent options to add more slots for artifacts (no more belt slots, artifact allowance is now purely dependant on the suit you wear) I imagine the .ltxs for each weapon in both games aren't identical, but if not, they're pretty close. Editing the vanilla weapons will likely be minimal, but the new animations may call for some alters with the position and orientation settings, at least. Guess we'll see. Also, I'll check in regularly again now that you're back.

Well, despite some saying that CS was delayed in the US until the 25th, I'm seeing indication that it did in fact hit the shelves yesterday. I'll be heading out tomorrow to try and snag a copy. Anyone here playing the American release? How goes the experience?

Oooh yeah, I'm really digging those icons. What with the new images for ammo and artifacts, rather nice. Also, is that a new suit I see? Wonder what that is. Also Sasha, I put AMK Arsenal back in to try it some more a little from my old saved game (Man, why does AMK load so much slower and stutter more than Oblivion Lost?!), and ran around the place inspecting bodies. They've all been long looted. Not an item on any of them. Also, I remembered something critical. The Flamethrower causes extreme lag. The particles spewed by it take too much of a toll on the game. Even when the flames hit the mark and vanish, the lag persists when I face the direction of where it hit, as if an invisible fire still burns there eternally, or at least until I zone out of the area. Well, thats what used to happen. This time though, something's different. If I fire the thing for more than half a second, the game crashes. Its THAT bad. Something tells me that it may have something to do with the particles file, cause I think I put in a custom one this time through. Even so, that doesn't explain why the bodies wont effing vanish. Any idea where I can lurk in the folder to find what controls that?

Damn, he's not responding to emails like he used to, either. Hope he didn't drop off the face of the planet or something.

The Weapons.ltx usually lists them all at the top.... Basically all the guns Arsenal brings to the game, aside from the stuff already in AMK, are 3 Desert Eagles of individual caliber (+1 Unique), the Saiga 12C, the AK-74SU Camo, the AK-47, AK-74 M1, two different Mac-10s, Steyr TMP, MP7, HK416, two Mosin-Nagants (scoped and not), the Benelly M3 Short, Tec-9,the Bizon, and the Kriss Super V Hmm. Where's Skullhunter. Hopefully he's still checking to see if the forum's up. I dunno where he lurks again.

Dunno how many scary bits there are. I imagine there's a few, but probably using scripted events, since the bigger baddie mutants make even less of an appearance this time through (just ONE controller?).

Well, guess thats a handy solution. A lotta junk to sell, but never a bad thing. Just as long as it works.

Beat the game with AMK Arsenal again, and running through previous areas I just noticed a serious flaw. The corpses wont go away. Maybe some do, but not all of them (not talking about important NPCs either), and they dont go away fast enough. I just backtracked through Wild Territory, and there's the usual lot of bodies, although the construction site swarmed of death. There's a dead group of soldiers just into the Wild Territory from the Bar that I can recall being there since about midway through the game (Their names are the same, so I'm sure). But when I got to Yantar, I was shocked to see so many dead bodies! Piles of them placed here and there, some in trios or quads, and a couple by the dozen. The gate to the factory area had about two dozen bodies strewn across the way! The effect was very noticable too - framerate quickly dropped from the overload. Did the latest patch break the corpse poofing?