July news - Radium mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

We've all been busy bees.

Heiker is working on reflective wet surfaces, 3d shell casings, and a little secret (partly secret because it may not work out).

Darryl has implemented new sounds for the bear, it sounds great now!

Loner1 has finished the 2D scopes for the mod and will provide resources for 3D scopes if/when we do that.

Alundaio has been a huge help to this mod. Because of him we now have sound layers, just like the Battlefield series. There are several layers: the shot, the bang, the mechanical noise, and the echo. In addition we have different shot sound types: snd_shoot, snd_shoot_actor, snd_shoot_cycle, snd_shoot_cycle_actor, snd_shoot_distant, and the silenced variants of those. This has also allowed me to seperate the pump/bolt sounds for shotguns/sniper rifles so that NPC's don't play them as loud as a shot anymore. He also has been letting us use many of the scripts from Call of Chernobyl, so at the very least it will be very easy to merge this mod with COC when the time comes ;)

Burguois has done a ton of work as usual. Some features include:

• Controllers that screw with your mind more (they can take control of NPC's to fight against you, and if they get shot and spasm they'll make you do the same)
• There's a new achievement related to using excessive force against surrendered NPC's
• A prototype Combat Exoskeleton has been implemented complete with an auto-doc feature.
• Poisoning from certain creatures that can be cured by visiting a doctor, taking appropriate medicines, or drinking lots and lots of water. This will be expanded into a whole other feature later on.
• Tons of various scripting work, gameplay changes, secrets, and importation of some better models for various creatures :)

I've been the slowest of the bunch, for the most part working on sound design for weapons. Layering the sounds creates a little less work than just having the new sound types, so it's helping me complete things faster. Manual reloading has been added as an optional feature (thanks Alundaio), and as you probably know by now most actor sounds will now be in stereo, with npc's still utilizing mono sounds.

In terms of sound design, a big thanks goes out to Koma who has provided me with a massive library of sounds for me to work with. He also has made an absurd amount of sound variations for the G36.

I have also started work on overhauling weapons and their properties. The current idea is that weapons will have a hit-power in-keeping with their real Muzzle energy (in ft-lbs.). Armor piercing will also work differently. Good luck piercing an Exoskeleton with 9x18mm FMJ or JHP, they won't even take damage from it at first. However, NPC's are getting their own version of "suit condition", so you can wear down their armor and eventually kill them with weapons that don't normally defeat their armor. Now the ammo-type you choose is going to make a huge difference. Armor-piercing rounds are going to be very important, whereas hollow-point rounds will be important against lightly-armored NPC's or against mutants.

I'm also revamping accuracy and recoil of weapons with more realistic values. Weapons will have a game-representation of MOA for their accuracy, which changes based on recoil, wind, gravity, and air resistance.
It doesn't create laser-accurate weapons as you might think, simply due to the various factors, and your accuracy is only good when carefully aiming down your sights.

As you can see in the video, more work has been done on the sounds. The pretty water you see is by Grifon, sounds are from a variety of authors, with scripting magic from Alundaio and Burguois showing up :)
There was a slight error when shooting the video where the NPC's weren't able to throw grenades, but I'm fixing that.

You may have also noticed the decapitation. I'd like to have decapitation, but it depends on a few things. First the code needs some fixing as it can cause a visual glitch to happen at times. Secondly we need someone to model a gory neck stump that we can add to the model once the head vanishes, otherwise it just doesn't look very good.

We currently are looking for animators (both weapons and npc animations), modelers (the decapitation effect), and C++ programmers.