A little status update for the holidays! news - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
from Dezowave
Without going into details, we are still alive, and kickin'. However, just like last year, we were silently working on the Developers Cut we announced back in Q4, 2014. Since then a lot had happened, if you are following us here on Moddb or on Facebook, you surely know about the 'changes log' which we usually update, when something special / significant happens. For those, who aren't aware of that log, here is a qucik link to access it: Dezowave.com
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So let's see what we did so far, and what we are up to at the moment If you read through the log, you can see we re-implemented the skill module, which we had in Lost Alpha back from 2012 till early 2014. It had to go, because we did not have the time to finish it back then. Now it's here once again to give a bit more RPG feel to the game. We carefully selected the most important perks, just to name one, the endurance. The basic carry-weight limit was reduced to 35 kg, and you can raise it up to 75 kg in the end. The barter skill will help you to get better prices at traders, or unlock special merchants who sell only unique items. You will gain points as you make progress in the game, but you won't be able to max all your skills, so you'll have to choose wisely. We don't want to spoil it more, so let's move on. We implemented HUD system from Call of Pripyat, which was a long requested feature. However we had more items and weapons in Lost Alpha, so we had to create the missing huds, textures for each. Not to mention this all collapsed the old upgrade system, which we trashed, and moved the one from Call of Pripyat, just changed it a bit to fit more to the universe of Lost Alpha. All traders, artefacts and upgrades were rebalanced, and AI is more aware now of the surroundings due to the removed restrictions we added back in 2013 to make a failsafe storyline. Have to add, the alife is still not unscripted, because either you make a freeplay game, or do a storyline, and let the player wander freely after the story ends. As we chose the 2nd one during the design planning back in 2012, we had to keep the balance and playability. I guess we all know it's real hard to find the golden mean, but we are all trying to do that. We recompiled many levels, not just to update the vegetation, but also to fix some old bugs which our players reported since 2014. EMPTY LINE

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We created many new smart terrains on almost all levels, which means we have a lot more alife we had previously, but it's still not ruining the design plan. We created tons of new tasks, even if some are simple, others are a bit longer, they will definitely make the game a bit more worth to play or re-play. Could tell a lot more, but it's faster to run thru the log to see the full list of changes we made since 1.3003. What we still need to do? We need to finish the translation of new dialogs and task descriptions, we need to play through the game several times from different aspects to find the new bugs, which we would like to fix before the release. Why are we so slow? Because we are humans, and this is our hobby. How many active members we have? Only 6 active devs, and maybe 5 active testers, so it's not that much we had in 2013-4, but it's enough to finish the developer's cut. When do we plan to ship it? As soon as our testers can finish the game several times without serious story-breaking issues. This shouldn't be much, so we should have a real good spring next year! If you have more questions, feel free to ask, we will try to answer as soon as we can.
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As the New Years is coming, with greetings of peace and prosperity, the whole dezowave group wishes the very best for you during this special time. May You enjoy all the best now and throughout the coming year. 2017 will be a cool year, from now it's not a secret we are working on our next project as well, which will be announced soon. We are also hiring for new members, such as coders, modelers, game designers, shader programmers, artists! Feel free to contact us via e-mail info<=at=>dezowave<=dot=>com, or on Facebook (search for dezowave)!
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