Today I've been able to merge together a nice collection of mods. I am not sure whenever I'll upload it or not, but so far it's kinda sweet if you ask me. More about that in another post.
But for now, I'll talk about something else.
Simple mistakes
Something that happens to me all too often while merging mods for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat. One fo those occurred to me while I was merging OWR 2.1 lite with MSO 1.01. In MSO, the mod has a really nice feature: NPC's shoot AP ammo. And yes, you're damned when one of those bullets go trough your armor. However, to let NPC's use special AP ammo, they need a special gun variant in their w_<weapon>.ltx . For example, this variant has the ability to shoot special ammo, and spawns with an ap ammo clip inside it:
[wpn_ak74u_ap]:wpn_ak74u
ammo_class = ammo_5.45x39_ap, ammo_5.45x39_fmj,
But when you forget to include one of those, your game will crash, the crash report is luckily clear enough to let you know that the missing weapon was the error, you fix it, wait three minutes (I am using an intel PRO SSD, mind you ;P ), and repeat. Also, don't forget that these special kind of weapon variants need to be added to mp_ranks, inventory_upgrades and stalker_upgrade_info.
It might be annoying at first to make those simple mistakes and to not know how to fix them, but eventually they get more fun to deal with. Getting angry at that your game crashes because of a bug won't get you anywhere.
Most of the bugs I've got to fix when merging are within ltx or xml files. It's not much fun to go trough 9132 lines of code to find a goddamn error (I am looking at you, character_desc_general). So, CTRL + F and sleepless nights will quickly become your best friends.
I think I'll tonight try to merge the newest AI Tweaks I could find (version 2.1) with MSO 1.01 and hostile_relations (from APP 1.00), and see if it will resolve some internal bugs, enhance the experience within the game even more (smarter AI). At last, I'll try to activate the whole AI smart terrain (a switch_distance of 1500 in alife.ltx should be high enough).
I'll let you know if something interesting comes up.
Stay safe in the zone, S.T.Al.K.E.R.
