(Early) April News - Radium mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Yes it's almost April 1st, no this does not contain any April Fools jokes ;)

Radium is doing better now than ever before. We recently have had a huge influx of people join the Radium team, so let me introduce them.

mp5lng joined the team (The Armed Zone) and is helping take care of our vast arsenal and improving it. We're also exchanging some content from our respective mods.

Gefos has joined to do various models/animation work for us.

We also have several former ROH team members joining us.

Platoon will be doing various modeling work.

Ripflux will be working with music/sounds.

We also have three other members that will be working on the storyline and quests for the mod, which is going to dramatically speed things up. They are DokoMaster, Airzez, and d4v33edz.

Welcome them all to the team :)

All of us have been making use of Discord to more effectively communicate with each other, and ever since we adopted it the productivity of the entire team has made a gigantic leap forward. I highly recommend this to other mod teams as well.

Not too long ago you can see that we adopted a new banner for our page, and the name of our development team is now Kivari. We've got a public forum available so you can write to us, or you can simply leave a comment on that page if you'd like.

Loner recently overhauled the particles in Radium, and they look better than ever. You can catch a glimpse at some of them in the Dynamic weapon sound video.

lafugix is working on the AMD-65 right now, as well as helping with various model porting for us.

burguois has been sick and taking some time off, but I believe his current plans for what's next involves offline alife actually doing things such as getting into skirmishes, and various situations, some of which you'll find out about through the dynamic news system.

We are also interested in having multiple start types. There will be the standard start type with standard equipment and spot, and then there will be a few others with different background stories, they may effect certain missions in new ways due to your background, and equipment will be different.

I've been working on a variety of things, the main one being visual enhancements at the moment.

Nvidia was kind enough to make HBAO+ open-source (well, you have to register as a Gameworks dev, but still), and because of that I managed to cut out all the external library and dll junk and make it so that you can use it on both Nvidia and AMD cards. It'll be enabled by simply selecting the highest quality setting when you have HBAO enabled.

I also recently added FXAA to both DX9 and DX11 (thanks avbaula) which doesn't cause much blurring at all, so I may not even bother with SMAA.

I've also added a different tone-mapping technique. I plan on making it so you have a choice of tone-mapping through the options menu (standard, Reinhard, etc).

I'm also interested in knowing: is anyone interested in optional Dynamic DOF? If not then I won't waste any more time on it.

That's all for now. We haven't forgotten about the gameplay video, but it's going to be a little longer.

As a side note: we are currently in need of animators. Quite badly actually. We could get by with what we have, but we want to have quality animations, and currently lack enough animators. So if you're interested, please let us know!