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Version History







June 23, 2015

DX11 upgrade patch

There is the complete DX11 upgrade available in the 109990 optional downloads folder.

Read the instructions carefully and if you are going to tweak them please tweak the SS style and not the Meltac style so that you have a base reference while making changes.

NOTE: Load times are much longer with DX11 as it recompiles the shaders on every load.

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 22, 2015

Update

Well, busy day yesterday! I was out and enjoyed a free concert: Jefferson Airplane and of course 'Whittle the Wood' which is a contest where you carve statues with a chainsaw..

On the SS side of things:
I have integrated Maltac 2.0 DX11 shaders to work with SS.
It replaces one .DLL and adds a re-compiler DLL to the bin so there will be a little more to installing it. I will try to make it as easy as possible.

I am attempting to make it work all the time but some users may not want to triple their loading times as the present version recompiles the shaders every load which I am sure will be resolved (by maltac or me) in the future.

It has been a busy weekend so far and it will be quite some time before emails will get responses as there are many..
Keep helping each other and keep me in the loop, we can get these last issues put to rest and get on with the ZEP! (Zone Expansion Project)

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 18, 2015

Update

Having discovered the cache issue with amk_utils I decided to rid myself of it..

I thought about it and realized that there was no real difference in speed so why duplicate memory use?

The real problem here is having quests in the task manager that search for all that crap every cycle, have more than one of these and..

Best way to handle these is to check on item take and not in the loop, it is much better to have a small stall when taking stuff then during each task cycle.

I am going to do just this and hopefully by tomorrow as Friday I am going to fish creek falls for the day.

I will be spending several hours on it tonight and I am pretty sure it will go smoothly but for sure it will improve performance.

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 16, 2015

Update

Congratulations to all you FSS members!
We have reached our initial stage and now have all the tools, licenses, etc.. to start conversion of the engine!

FSS members are in for a treat soon as you'll get to help me with that phase. Not to fear! I plan on first fixing/improving the existing engine at 32 bit before I spend the effort to convert this old technology. One benefit to this is stability of design which is the most important thing so..

Each member who signs up (please wait for the sign up button on the new site, coming soon).
Anyway, you get a locked copy of the engine that has your callsign imbedded in it. You should not share the engine with anyone else as this invalidates my tracking of the changes. I will stop providing updates to the owner if the engine appears from more than one location. Seems harsh I know but imagine trying to track each user if their reports start coming in from totally different areas of the zone, pandemonium I tell you.. shear pandemonium.

One caveat to the updating of the existing engine is the better use of todays more sophisticated streaming methods and also ramdisk for extending the memory capabilities..

Hope to start this phase very soon!

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 11, 2015

Rats, rats, rats

There are three types of rats in SS:
NS rats are in the all.spawn and do not have a consistent name and always spawn.
AMK respawns in the original 13 levels.
My dynamic spawns which unless the rats have a specific purpose can be reduced in the modders script.

Using the population controller will reduce them by removing the excess (greater than amount set) on level entry. This is good for machines with less memory as crows are way overdone in NS and although runaways are pretty much a thing of the past, this prevents them.

Rats are one of my best achievements in SS and they work better than in any mod I have checked out (which is a lot). true there are too many right now but that was because the coefficient was too low, now they should be more reasonable. Another thing about my dynamic spawns is that they are always removed on level changes, that is what makes them dynamic as they reuse the same ids each time. and cannot accumulate

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 11, 2015

Update

While verifying the new ballistics and fine tuning the coefficient system I have also tweaked some things:

Kruglov timers so that he does not immediately go through tunnel.
Conversation with scientist should end properly also.

Added several npc to the 'no looting' scheme so that they stay where they should or progress as they should in battle.

The coefficient system now has an option in the modders script that will allow you to control the rate of spawns/difficulty increases. It was at 2500 which was the NS default but because I will have doubled the play through time by the time I am done, it is now set at 5000. This effectively cuts the anoms/infests and rise in difficulty in half. The larger the number the longer it takes to ramp up, I estimate it will take from 1000 to 1500 game hours to max out at 5000.

For those that are not sure what the coefficient is:
As you play your rank goes up, as it goes up difficulty and mobs increase. To spread this increase over a period of time you take the maximum amount of anything and multiply it against 1 / (rank * coef). Of course the algorithm is much more complicated but this is a simple explanation. By making the coef larger the multiplier becomes smaller: ((1/2500 = .0004) * rank(600)) = 0.24
So if the maximum number of anomalies for a level is 1000 then you would get randomly between 24 and 240 of them. A coefficient of 5000 would produce 12 to 120 of them.
It works pretty much the same for all things like bullet accuracy, strength and cunning of enemies, size of infests, load outs, loot and artefacts..

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 8, 2015

Update

I am trying to get a few more requests done before the patch and it takes time to test. I will get one out in the next day or two so I don't fall too far behind schedule (sorta)..

As Grimwald probably knows by now there are some weapons that need adjusting and this is why;

Somewhere way back when someone made a compensation for a mistake in the engine by forcing the min max to always produce a fixed value. Knowing this fixed value they and others pushed k_pierce to extremes to get the same results..

They really did not as they ended up forcing modders to second guess why their settings weren't getting the results they expected and thus tweaking and balancing became constant..

Then the engine was fixed but the modding community (maybe GSC) obviously had no idea, probably because of COP which was in development.

After examining my profiles and the source code it became obvious that the ranges work properly now and the right combination of k_hit and k_pierce produce very predictable results.

Another 'fix' I have discovered has to do with buck shot which was multiplying the hit by 6 each impact. This helps explain why they are so effective against tanks.

I won't have the weapons done by this patch but by 90 for sure things will work much better in ballistics and advanced AI if you don't disable it in the modders script.

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 7, 2015

Update

I was about to post the patch when a thought hit me..

Most of the places where I have npc in the wrong place or not responding to their assigned spot/action they usually looting or walking around aimlessly..

After a little experimenting in the Garbage I discovered that the method for searching for loot (watcher_act.script) was actually motivating the npc even if no loot was in the search radius.

I created a list of npc that were not in the right place at the right time like:
The two npc with beth, one should be at the chopper and the other should be standing next to bes. They are not as they are looting and then wandering around. Now they are exactly where they should be when the bandits attack.
Vampire will no longer wander into the garbage until after you have found strelok's hideout.

I won't get all the key npc in for this patch but so far I have it done through saving Mole. Now the road soldiers stay away and the Spetznaz wait the proper amount of time before attacking you.

There will be a patch out this weekend for sure.

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 5, 2015

Update

I have changed the anomaly system so that it ramps up much more slowly than before.

Fixed 'remove from inventory' so now the proper amount of items are taken in all quests and trades.

The ballistics are now much different due to the correction of the collision hit min/max values. There is definitely more action coming from npc during fights.

RPG now gives the right amount of damage to tanks.

Ammo looting now under control.

Several more dialog improvements and a few quest fixes.

patch will post tomorrow afternoon.

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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June 1, 2015

Update

I was doing a final review of the weapons.ltx file and came across something strange;

In the bullet manager there are two values:
collision_energy_min
collision_energy_max

Thing is that min was set to 0.8 and max was set to 0.5..

I did some research and found that all mods are this way so I went to the xr_game source code and found that someone reversed them somewhere in the past.

what this did was lock the collision energy of a projectile to 0.5 no matter how close/far you were from the target. This explains why shot is more powerful than single projectiles! Especially far away which has made balancing weapons a very futile endeavor..

I am testing and trying to determine what characteristics are effected in the configs and should have the fix out tonight. I already have found that it takes 6 shotgun blasts to the head at close range but only one from an AK47, both at close range.

More later today..

-TecnoBacon -via STALKERSOUP Steam Forum

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