Interesting Experiences

[Master Bates 0]

Hello, everyone. I've been a lurker on this forum for quite some time, and just recently decided to register in order to show some support for what is easily my absolute favorite Stalker mod. Keep up the excellent work!

 

Anyway, I recently started a new playthrough of SHOC with the latest English release of AMK, along with the AMK Arsenal mod. I've equipped myself with a PP-19 Bizon submachine gun and a Mosin-Nagant M1891/30 rifle (easily one of my absolute favorite guns ever; I own one in real life and it's incredible), both taken from deceased bandits at the Cordon car park. After clearing the car park with Petruha, rescuing Nimble, and retrieving the reinforced bandit jacket for him, I spent some time wandering the Cordon, completing jobs, scavenging for useful loot and just generally exploring. While returning to the village one day to stash some goodies, I noticed a green dot on the minimap where no green dot should normally be found - namely, heading towards the military outpost, apparently running full tilt.

 

Following this dot and peering at the individual it represented, I noticed it was apparently Nimble, either trying to escape the Zone or attempting a one-man assault on a hostile barricade defended by a number of elite troops, two armored personnel carriers and an attack helicopter while equipped with nothing more than a shotgun I sold him and a rusty old Makarov. Unsurprisingly, the poor fool was cut down by fire from the outpost as soon as he got into range - before he was even able to get a single shot off. I then watched as a Spetsnaz bastard strolled casually out of the base and proceeded to loot my friend's corpse. Soon after, soldiers began to stream out of the outpost, led by the Spetsnaz soldier in question. I counted well over a dozen heavily-armed men converging on the village. I drew my trusty rifle, quickly switching out my old surplus rounds for the five precious high-quality bullets I had 'liberated' from a local bandit. Settling into a comfortable position behind the cover of a large tree, I waited.

 

I didn't have to wait long - I noticed, astonishingly, fire coming from the rookie village at something to my right - and, even more surprisingly, bodies began to appear there! First one, then two, and finally - after one phenomenal grenade throw by one of the rookies - five army bastards lay dead before I even got the chance to see the enemy, and without a single one of ours lost! It wasn't over yet, of course - the army still had many more men to throw at us, and they put them to good use, with two approaching up the road and four or five more coming at me from my left flank - the east side of the village, in other words. I took a deep breath, leaned out from behind the tree, and sighted in on the two closest enemies, a pair of Spetsnaz troopers creeping down the road, in the open, with no cover whatsoever. It was almost too easy. Two bullets, two headshots, two dead enemies.

 

Assuming I would soon be forced to repeat this ritual, I spun to my left, just in time to see two of the Ukraine's finest get sucked into a Mincer anomaly and killed, while a third was mauled to death by a wild boar. It was pitifully easy to mop up the remaining few, and checking my minimap revealed that my comrades in the village had managed to eliminate two more soldiers while I was busy! It seemed that we had defeated the counterattack, and all we lost was my moron friend, Nimble!

 

I let out a triumphant shout, putting away my rifle and eagerly running forth to loot the bodies of the slain soldiers. I had just reached the fresh corpse of my first kill when a rocket barrage from a passing helicopter killed me.

 

So after reloading from my quicksave, I let out a triumphant shout, put away my rifle and eagerly ran forth to hide in a basement, where I stayed until the helicopter went away. Astonishingly, despite essentially being a flying tank, it didn't successfully kill anyone (although Wolf ended up needing a medkit). I went out and looted the bodies of all the soldiers who had died outside the range of the BTRs, including the one who I had seen looting Nimble's body (getting me back the bandit jacket and a pair of artifacts I had sold to Nimble). I distributed their weapons - a mix of AKS-74U carbines, AK-74 assault rifles, a single AN-94 Abakan, and the usual assortment of pistols - to the village's inhabitants, along with most of their ammunition, food, and medical supplies. The military has never hassled us since, nor has anyone or anything else, what with everyone in the village being equipped with a vast assortment of military-grade hardware.

 

Tomorrow, I tell you the story of 'The Pack', the largest grouping of wild dogs I have ever seen, and how it brought down Major Kuznetsov's extortion racket.

[ahilej 0]

Yes, that's the way the things are going in Ukraine... in the Zone, I wanted to say. :-) Anyway, what kind of a bussines could have elite army men, every one of them having 12 or so years of combat experience, with a bunch of a Rooike stalkers... they just didn't knew whom they will fight with. :-)

[Mazryonh 0]

Master Bates,

 

I think what you described is part of a really stupid bug in vanilla SoC--NPCs will keep on repeating their original AI scripts forever and ever and ever unless they're killed. Here's a few examples.

 

1) After you help Professor Kruglov or Assistant Semenov get the radiation measurements, he will keep going to Sakharov and say "here are the measurements, couldn't be any more accurate" over and over again every time you enter the bunker. Normally you can't see it because he does it every time you enter Yantar after that quest is finished, but it's there. It would have been much better if after the quest was done he would either wander around Yantar taking measurements with eco-stalkers protecting him, or else just spawned and stayed inside the bunkroom of the bunker.

 

2) Everytime you go into Cordon, you can see Nimble's map marker make its way from the east side of the Cordon, going through the same route he took from the parking garage.

 

3) Everytime you enter the Army Warehouses area, the Duty kill squad always makes its way to the three corpses of the Freedom soldiers they've killed right in front of the entrance to the area, unless of course you destroy them. If you throw the three corpses into Vortex or Whirligig anomalies, their pathing script will break and several members of the kill squad will just stand there doing nothing, even during blowouts.

 

I hope the next version of AMK will fix these and only have these scripts execute once, replaced by something more appropriate (such as Nimble spawning at his house every time you enter Cordon instead of east of the rookie camp, the Duty kill-squad spawning at the farmstead around the campfire instead of at the ambush point, etc.

 

I like playing dress-up with the game's NPCs where I give them better weapons and armours (though they often don't equip the armours you sell them, such as the Ecologist outfits, the bandit armours, the Freedom or Duty armours, etc), so maybe I'll share a few tales here too. It's fun leading packs of mutants to them and watch them fight.

[Lum4r 0]

Is that what it is? When I saw the scientist giving Sakharov the measurements after the mission, I assumed it just a feature to make the ecologists seem busy (That is until I heard Sakharov say "Let me adjust the prototype").

[Mazryonh 0]

Lum4r,

 

Yes, what you saw is the bug (or programming laziness, whichever you prefer) in action.

 

I have a savegame here on my filefront account that shows a little confrontation about to occur between a gang of unarmed zombies and three stalkers around a campfire in Cordon. I've armed one with a Monolith armour suit and an L85A2 assault rifle, another with an AK-74 assault rifle, and the third with a TOZ-34 shotgun. You can get the file here:

 

http://www.filefront.com/14638835/Zombies-vs-Stalkers.rar/

 

I tried running the scenario 3 times by leading the gang of zombies to the Stalkers around the campfire. The stalker wearing the Monolith suit most often never hit the zombies--in fact it looked like he kept firing his gun too high to hit much of anything. The stalker with the AK-74 shot his gun straight, but even he could hit the zombies very well, and one time even threw a grenade near the campfire, killing himself and his two buddies.

 

The third stalker, despite being armed with only a TOZ-34 shotgun, did the best, actually. He usually killed around two zombies with his shotgun, instead of missing so many shots like his buddies did.