S.t.a.l.k.e.r.

[alan8325]

So how will this game manage to have such big maps with every building you see enterable? Are the maps really about the size of HL2 maps with portals such as hallways between them?

Maybe there won't be many physics objects around as these are so CPU intensive to render. Also, the locations of all the physics objects in every map would have to be saved so that if you move something in one map and then leave, it is still there when you come back. I don't see how they can do it with the density of objects in HL2. Also, it looks like their lighting system will take up a lot of processing power, leaving less room for physics calculations.

Still looks like a good game though. The life-simulating NPC system they talk about looks like it should provide a lot of replay value if they can implement it well.

 

[lans]

Also, GSC has said that the Dx .9 mode will have parallax mapping, and full real-time dynamic soft-shadowing, along with all that.

I'm starting to doubt, Stalker will live up to all those great things, and still be a bugless, optimized software...

 

[KagePrototype]

The publisher's gonna assert itself sooner or later, and force the damned thing to come out; I can't imagine them being very happy about it being pushed back again and again. It'd be shame though; I'd love to see play STALKER as it was intended, rather than really buggy and unoptimised (which it undoubtedly will be).

 

[The Dark Elf]

Why is it so hard to believe Stalker will have the things it claims?

When you write your own engine, you make it do what you need it to do. Large maps, etc. not a problem

parallax mapping, meh shader effects, easy for a coder. Real time dynamic soft shadowing. Seen it done, with an engine geared towards it, its easy enough (Doom3 didn't from _choice_ not a technical limitation for the effect)


As for the saving the position of physics objects in maps you later come back to. Why is that hard? You just snapshot the position and rotation of an object and store that in a file for when you return, you don't need to keep any other information on that object as the physics engine takes over soon as its required and further calculations use the physical properties the object has in its original file anyway, so all you've done is make a file saying where all the physics objects are at that moment.. a few numbers per object. Tiny tiny tiny file, eg..

( position in world XYZ) (rotation HPB (heading, pitch, bank)

123, 753, 03 -- 45, 68, 0

just lines and lines of the above type of information is all the engine would require to know where the objects are. Then once everything is activated within a new region. The physics engine allows the objects to behave correctly using the settings they had in the beginning anyway, probably stored in the object file itself.

There's also no reason to record data of some physics object moving through the air, cause why would it still be moving through the air if you threw it an hour ago and came back.

So again, nothing difficult there.

realtime soft shadows HL2 style. Well we know those work easy enough. There's a hell of a lot DX9 can do, lots more than people seem to think. And the more that does, the more its doing it hardware based, the faster its gonna be.. Get a decent video card, your sorted.

all the foliage, well farcry showed its perfectly easy.. The leaked Stalker demo showed the foliage works perfectly even back then, so its not even a question of can or can't it.. Same goes for the large maps come to that, it had a large map, used a very simply method of creating the map too, resulting in quick loading. Wouldn't be all that hard to make it seamless loading between maps neither, judging by the edges of the maps in the leaked one, thats what they are probably intending to do.

Back to the lighting though, they can easily fake the environment lighting/shadowing from world objects even if they don't do it the full way.. But even then, its quite possible to get near perfect realtime lighting, with soft shadows and radiosity. Take a look at Spherical Harmonic lighting for instance.

So really, everything stalker is doing is quite realistic. If people complain it doesn't run well on old machines, yeah well thats not the developers fault, its 2005 soon ffs, anyone playing these types of games need faster machines, its progress.

 

[destrukt]

the stalker alpha, which has some rather large maps [filled with some buildings/scenery/forests etc] ran suprisingly well.

i agree with tde.

 

[The Dark Elf]

the stalker alpha, which has some rather large maps [filled with some buildings/scenery/forests etc] ran suprisingly well.

i agree with tde.

That leak one actually fan as fast on my lil old 1gig geforce4mx as it did on a decent machine. Granted it had no shaders or fancy DX9 stuff in it, but it looked great, ran great and one of the maps was massive, with tons of detail in it.

I was very impressed.

 

[destrukt]

the system i tried it on was an old 1.2 ghz amd duron [ew, duron], with 256 ddr [pc2700, or slower] and a 128mb geforce fx 5200.

i remember one map where you spawned in a small area with a few buildings, sort of up on a hill, and i walked to the edge and looked out and it was really big, lots of trees, some tunnels [under a bridge i htink] and stuff.

i tried all the maps, and they all ran fairly smooth except for the map with the rats .. no matter what comp you had, if you look @ them for more than a second or 2, the computer freezes.

 

[The Dark Elf]

the system i tried it on was an old 1.2 ghz amd duron [ew, duron], with 256 ddr [pc2700, or slower] and a 128mb geforce fx 5200.

i remember one map where you spawned in a small area with a few buildings, sort of up on a hill, and i walked to the edge and looked out and it was really big, lots of trees, some tunnels [under a bridge i htink] and stuff.

i tried all the maps, and they all ran fairly smooth except for the map with the rats .. no matter what comp you had, if you look @ them for more than a second or 2, the computer freezes.

the rats bug got me originally too, but fiddling around with the console it was possible to stop it breaking when you saw them enmasse. I think the same map also had a clipping error with the player start, but again that was easy enough to fix with a bit of tinkering.

Really did look nice, had a lot of atmosphere to it, even if it was very early and didn't do an awful lot. It looked amazing. Reminded me of the Yorkshire moores, windswept, chilly, feeling of being completely alone.

 

[jimbo118]

this game is the reason i got back into pc gaming,i came across it last year while browsing gamespot and immediately got me,the setting was very atmospheric,some screenshots of soldiers standin in corn fields with the sun goin down were almost melancholic,it was beautiful lokin,ive lost interest over the last few months coz of the delays but hope it will live up to its expectations,the only thing i get from readin the head developers q & a sessions is that he likes to talk the talk but so far hasnt shown it,for ex he says that when the game begins 200 other stalkers will begin the game also and try and complete the game b4 u etc,also that mutants will access the danger of situations etc and will have to sleep etc,but this could just turn out to be a simple case of spawnin a stalker asleep,spawning a mutant etc in situations,thier 'life system' seems a bit too far fetched

 

[jimbo118]

Really did look nice, had a lot of atmosphere to it, even if it was very early and didn't do an awful lot. It looked amazing. Reminded me of the Yorkshire moores, windswept, chilly, feeling of being completely alone.

definately agree with you there elf,thats 1 of the most interesting things for me,just wandering the landscape lookin for stuff

 

[oberGeist]

the game is delayed another 6 months, so it looks like the publisher and the developer really want to deliver 100% finished and perfected game. I read on the official site that Stalker was delayed to polish the code and fix all the bugs.

With the game expectation bar set so high and the team so close to achieving their ambition, we didn't want to rush the product out, and will work now on ensuring it is stable, balanced and fun-to-play on every level before releasing it

that's some good news, because in the leaked demo there was no working physics (as I remember), A.I. was completely undeveloped and the game crashed every 5 minutes. but what we could see was very impressive.
like HL2 - it's a very ambitious project and needs plenty of time to get it's final shape.

like TDE said - it's not so easy to achieve such amount of objects, effects and map's dimensions in the game today. what's really hard to do is to ensure that the game will run on MOST of today's systems. VALVe put much effort into developind Source as a very scalable engine, that will run even on lower-end computers. as for X-Ray engine it doesn't scale down as much as Source, so it can have more stuff implemented at the time of the release. that's why they are delaying it so much - to polish the code and gameplay, but also to wait for next generation of video cards that'll showcase all of X-rays benefits. by the time the game ships more of us will have sufficent specs to run it smoothly and with all the graphical gizmos than now (or a year ago, when Stalker was going to be originally released).

 

[KagePrototype]

Why is it so hard to believe Stalker will have the things it claims?

Because many games have come and gone, that have promised a lot and delivered very little. You can't deny that STALKER is one of the most ambitious games in development right now, and it all seems like they're in over their heads a bit. Obviously, I would love it if they managed to finish it properly, but there's still that nagging feeling.

 

[Unfocused]

I'm surprised I didn't hear of the leak. Seems it wasn't as loud as the HL2 one. When was it leaked?

 

[Asuka]

Why is it so hard to believe Stalker will have the things it claims?

When you write your own engine, you make it do what you need it to do. Large maps, etc. not a problem

parallax mapping, meh shader effects, easy for a coder. Real time dynamic soft shadowing. Seen it done, with an engine geared towards it, its easy enough (Doom3 didn't from _choice_ not a technical limitation for the effect)


As for the saving the position of physics objects in maps you later come back to. Why is that hard? You just snapshot the position and rotation of an object and store that in a file for when you return, you don't need to keep any other information on that object as the physics engine takes over soon as its required and further calculations use the physical properties the object has in its original file anyway, so all you've done is make a file saying where all the physics objects are at that moment.. a few numbers per object. Tiny tiny tiny file, eg..

( position in world XYZ) (rotation HPB (heading, pitch, bank)

123, 753, 03 -- 45, 68, 0

just lines and lines of the above type of information is all the engine would require to know where the objects are. Then once everything is activated within a new region. The physics engine allows the objects to behave correctly using the settings they had in the beginning anyway, probably stored in the object file itself.

There's also no reason to record data of some physics object moving through the air, cause why would it still be moving through the air if you threw it an hour ago and came back.

So again, nothing difficult there.

realtime soft shadows HL2 style. Well we know those work easy enough. There's a hell of a lot DX9 can do, lots more than people seem to think. And the more that does, the more its doing it hardware based, the faster its gonna be.. Get a decent video card, your sorted.

all the foliage, well farcry showed its perfectly easy.. The leaked Stalker demo showed the foliage works perfectly even back then, so its not even a question of can or can't it.. Same goes for the large maps come to that, it had a large map, used a very simply method of creating the map too, resulting in quick loading. Wouldn't be all that hard to make it seamless loading between maps neither, judging by the edges of the maps in the leaked one, thats what they are probably intending to do.

Back to the lighting though, they can easily fake the environment lighting/shadowing from world objects even if they don't do it the full way.. But even then, its quite possible to get near perfect realtime lighting, with soft shadows and radiosity. Take a look at Spherical Harmonic lighting for instance.

So really, everything stalker is doing is quite realistic. If people complain it doesn't run well on old machines, yeah well thats not the developers fault, its 2005 soon ffs, anyone playing these types of games need faster machines, its progress.

I agree completely. At 1st i wasnt interested in this game but now it looks very interesting.

 

[cadaver]

GSC is currently working on testing and balancing the game. the engine is supposed to be finished this month. this is the game I`l be upgrading for.

 

[<RJMC>]

too bad that game will not run in my PC ;(

 

[The Dark Elf]

this game is the reason i got back into pc gaming,i came across it last year while browsing gamespot and immediately got me,the setting was very atmospheric,some screenshots of soldiers standin in corn fields with the sun goin down were almost melancholic,it was beautiful lokin,ive lost interest over the last few months coz of the delays but hope it will live up to its expectations,the only thing i get from readin the head developers q & a sessions is that he likes to talk the talk but so far hasnt shown it,for ex he says that when the game begins 200 other stalkers will begin the game also and try and complete the game b4 u etc,also that mutants will access the danger of situations etc and will have to sleep etc,but this could just turn out to be a simple case of spawnin a stalker asleep,spawning a mutant etc in situations,thier 'life system' seems a bit too far fetched

The AI thing is just developer talk. Gives an image of how things will behave, yeah it probably wont be really amazing AI, but the way they'll use it, it'll work how they claim. Valve claimed Source AI could do this and that, ok you don't see it much in HL2, because of the way things played out it wouldn't always be a good idea. But its available and in there for the mod teams to use. For a decent team, it would be quite possible to create NPC's that go about their business, do various things, react in a convincing manner to events around them.

It is actually pretty simple for a coder to give the impression of advanced AI without actually having anything too advanced in place. Look at Valve's method. Ok in the case of HL2, they _had_ to have set pieces, there's no way around it because its not an open ended game. So to have everything running on its own would risk spoiling how the map should play out. But the AI in place is advanced.

The way Source works, is just to use hints for the AI. Which really is similar to how the human mind works anyway, only far far simplified. If someone is shooting at us, we'll quickly look for a place to hide to avoid being hit. The hint nodes in Source simply act as beacons to the AI saying "hi, come over here, I do such n such" and the AI then makes a choice.. Go there, or go somewhere else. Then, simple instructions to tell the AI when its more vulnerable, reloading will tell it to find cover in most cases. The regular hint nodes tell the AI where it can and can't go. You "could" just set things up for the AI to go where it wanted to, but with games you don't want to make the AI too clever. It'll be a strain on the cpu to do that anyway, so hints n such make it less stressful to calculate everything at once.

So with stalker, they'll just have a system in place that behaves in a certain way. Using specific things to trigger reactions. sounds, sight, touch and so on. Then like Source, add varying degree's of it. And then fine tune it to different NPC's to get different reactions.

It is definately possible though, take a look at massive. The crowd simulator used in Lord of the Rings. Granted that works by giving each object its own brain, using masses of simple commands and reactions to various events, and it gives the impression of "life"

Wow I babble lol

 

[oldagerocker]

If this game comes out relatively bug-less, and works fine on the systems it claims to with the features it claims to have. It will be a bigger game than half-life 2.

And i hope it turns out that way...

 

[Unfocused]

I wonder... piracy is illegal, but what about using leaked versions of games?

 

[KagePrototype]

I wonder... piracy is illegal, but what about using leaked versions of games?

They're illegal as well.

 

[Alig]

My expectations for STALKER are big. I didn't think HL2 is that good to be compared to future FPS. STALKERS main competition will be FEAR(by the looks of it), HL1 and FarCry.

I'm sorted anyway..got an x800 so it will run fine on my PC regardless if it isn't out yet . The game might be bigger, more detailed and more realistic looking than every other FPS but just look at Doom3...everyone thought that was 'gunna run like turd on anything less than a super'duper PC...but it can actually run, and look amazing on a real old PC, with cheap and nasty hardware.

 

[NikolaX]

whats the console commands for starting alfa ver ?

 

[Asuka]

If this game comes out relatively bug-less, and works fine on the systems it claims to with the features it claims to have. It will be a bigger game than half-life 2.

And i hope it turns out that way...

Story and depth wize i dont think any game but Deus Ex can even come close to hl2.

 

[blahblahblah]

Story and depth wize i dont think any game but Deus Ex can even come close to hl2.

I feel the opposite. The story in HL2 is sub-par. I found the story in Doom 3 to be better. To each his own.

Story is good, but atmosphere is better. A great game doesn't have to have comprehensive background fiction (but note that most great games do have good background fiction), it just has to have an amazing atmosphere.

 

[Alig]

Story and depth wize i dont think any game but Deus Ex can even come close to hl2.

HL1 and HL2 had a story worth telling? :hmph:

...And for the hell of it, WoW makes a joke of them two games story wise and depth wise...but thats my opinion. So do all the FF's...and just about every other RPG out there.

 

[Cole]

...And for the hell of it, WoW makes a joke of them two games story wise and depth wise...but thats my opinion. So do all the FF's...and just about every other RPG out there.

But thats cuz blizzard are story people.
D1 had a decent story(if you read the manual\played the singleplayer)
Sc well I loved that story personally. BW left one insane cliffhanger for the secret level. Wc3(never really played wc2 or wc1) well I liked the story. Wc3 I wasn't to focused on it but Wc3x's one I easily understood and was quite nice. Personally I love HL2's story. It leaves so many questions that must be answered. Great story according to me.

 

[DeusExMachina]

STALKER is shaping up to have a pretty good story from what the script writer says. apparently, your a Stalker who's lost his memory and has flashbacks of something he did in the Zone. So, its a mystery of who you are, what you did, and whats going on.

And there's also a STALKER literature contest. I entered last year and was even 1st place for awhile ^_^. But now, they don't use that anymore and now the authors have to vote for best stories. its all good. If anyone would like to see my STALKER story, I'd be happy to provide a link.

 

[Unfocused]

They're illegal as well.

Then why does a Super Moderator admit he's been using the leak? I'm confused. When someone admits he is using pirated game copies everyone is flaming him. In this thread at least 2 ppl admited they used the leak and no one said anything about it.

 

[KagePrototype]

Then why does a Super Moderator admit he's been using the leak? I'm confused. When someone admits he is using pirated game copies everyone is flaming him. In this thread at least 2 ppl admited they used the leak and no one said anything about it.

Yeah, kinda odd that in one thread, TDE says "no excuse for pirating anything", whereas here he admits to playing the STALKER leak. Meh, go figure. It's not as if that many people on these forums care anyway.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Because the stalker leak was a publicity stunt by the developers when they saw the publicity Valve got when they really did get screwed over.

please people, keep up

So just to clarify, play the stalker leak. I've no problem with that, as for the doom3 leak. meh little point playing that I would say lol. The Source theft, different story entirely, not to mention the rules of this site are still against the stolen build and as staff I have to follow them just like the rest of you.

Other warez, no go, and I will ban you for it..

Abandonware, gray area, providing it IS abandonware your DLing then I wont have a problem with that cause companies are ok with it on the whole. So long as there is no other regular means of getting old software.

 

[destrukt]

alot of leaks go unnoticed.

did you know there was an alpha of painkiller leaked ? when i found out about that, i never saw it once on a forum.

the leak for stalker though, was out 6+ months ago.

i want to get it again, try it out on my new system.

i might have to get your config tde

 

[blahblahblah]

Remember, leaks don't mean jack performance wise. AFAIK, the Stalker leak barely has DX 8 features implemented in the game, much less DX 9. What you see in the game is not representative of what the game will look or play like.

Several of the less reputable hardware sites have benchmarked the Stalker leak. Even a ATI Radeon 9600 could break 100 frame per second easily at full detail levels. Like I said above, the majority of the features were not implemented in the leak.

I don't like to play leaks. When I bake, I don't take take a cake out of the oven half baked and expect it to taste good. Same principle goes to games. I guess I'm weird like that. :bonce:

 

[Top Secret]

alot of leaks go unnoticed.

did you know there was an alpha of painkiller leaked ?

Why, yes. Yes I did.
:afro:

 

[Tork]

alot of leaks go unnoticed.

did you know there was an alpha of painkiller leaked ? when i found out about that, i never saw it once on a forum.

the leak for stalker though, was out 6+ months ago.

i want to get it again, try it out on my new system.

i might have to get your config tde

Yup and there was actually two leaks of stalker, 1098 and 1096, one with 3 maps and another with 1 aztec map, and maybe more that i dont know of.

 

[destrukt]

alot of leaks can fairly represent the final performance [just imagine it being more optmised], it just depends how far along the leak is.

 

[Unfocused]

It's so damn hard to find any torrent for the leak. I've found maybe 2 that weren't working and that's it.

 

[The Dark Elf]

i might have to get your config tde

I went and deleted it months ago to save some space

 

[CptStern]

When I bake, I don't take take a cake out of the oven half baked and expect it to taste good. Same principle goes to games. I guess I'm weird like that. :bonce:

nah you're weird cuz you admitted to baking cakes!! you homemaker you

can I lick the bowl?

 

[Alig]

When I bake, I don't take take a cake out of the oven half baked and expect it to taste good. Same principle goes to games. I guess I'm weird like that. :bonce:

nah you're weird cuz you admitted to baking cakes!! you homemaker you

can I lick the bowl?

Can i lick the spoon?

alot of leaks can fairly represent the final performance [just imagine it being more optmised], it just depends how far along the leak is.

Nah ..just look at the Doom3 leak, it ran shit on anything and was'nt even close to how doom3 played.

 

[destrukt]

Nah ..just look at the Doom3 leak, it ran shit on anything and was'nt even close to how doom3 played.

it just depends how far along the leak is.

yeah, go doom 3 alpha.