disabling the AI staggering animation Thread - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Chernobyl mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

When playing the game it has always been annoying to me that when you hit an enemy AI there's some chance it will enter into a long "staggering" animation during which the AI is either very resistant or near invulnerable to bullets. It has always been a pain especially when trying to balance weapon damage vs ammo vs armor vs etc.. as it would get in the way for testing.

Google searches seemed to hint at this animation being related to critical hits.

So testing with the m_stalker.ltx (found in configs\creatures\ ) several values with critical_wound_threshold only resulted in disapointment as even when i was setting the value to 0 , the "staggering" animation still happened.

Then as i noticed the following sections :

[critical_wound_head_section]

[critical_wound_torso_section]

[critical_wound_hand_left_section]

[critical_wound_hand_right_section]

[critical_wound_leg_left_section]

[critical_wound_leg_right_section]

that are defining where are located the character model sections that can actually trigger the critical hit, so i was wondering what would happen if i deleted all the "bip01_blablaba" entries under those sections (but still leaving the sections [critical_wound_blablabla] themselves in the file to avoid crashes).

After loading my Duty save and heading to the Freedom base and killing dozen of freedom guys , reloading the save and trying killing dozen of them again with a scoped akaban rifle, i noticed none of those AI used the "staggering" animation.

So it seems this was the solution to disable this annoying feature.