Its about that time again for a features update, I could go into a lot of detail about how this and that works but instead I'll do a bullet style and let your imaginations fill in how things could work / pan out ;)
- V3.5 AI gulag changes. Many NPCs and mutants will roam gulags now, how interesting and varied this becomes will vary on how many are lucky enough to survive in The Zone, which of course, is decided completely at random by AI behavior.
- Created and added Wolfhounds March pistol. This is mainly just to tie in events better between the other games, but yeah, its a pretty cool new pistol :D
- Added "finishing touches" to HD textures, still a couple to do, but pretty much done with retexturing the game now.
- Refined weather system. Probably the most thought out weather system of any mod, its definitely not the most complex but thats by design so it fits into the "scorched Earth" atmosphere. The intent is to bring back as much of that dark, brooding atmosphere of all the wonderful teaser videos prior to THQ fucking the game up.
- Realtime fog particles. I need to work on this some more, its design is to bring some much needed atmosphere to certain areas in the game ;) Performance shouldn't need to be a concern if you are running a OC'd system with a OC'd HD5830 or better.
- Recalculated normal maps. A unique, custom approach I invented to creating normal maps, far more details are contained than are otherwise possible in regular maps due to varying factors.
- "Rebuilt" unfinished areas in certain maps. This is NOT what you all may suddenly jump to thinking, when I say "rebuilt", I mean adding and/or updating of textures in textures.ltx that for whatever reason THQ skipped putting into the file. End result is a much more detailed environment.
- Added flexible armours feature. Armours are now not generic one-step-up-the-ladder improvements, all armours have had a feature added to them that gives varying carry weight bonuses based on the "class" of armour. Best short example: One armour may not have as good protective properties as another but it may allow you to carry that bit extra gear.
- New sleep system. You must find secure areas to sleep you can't just roll out a sleeping bag anymore. When you discover and sleep at each secured location a map marker will be added.
- Fine tuned AI behaviour, perception and stealth elements.
- Added gun metal UI. Its Still SoC, but gun metal and generally nicer.
- Changed HUD. Meant to encourage survival instincts, theres no counter displaying ammo in the current mag, mini-map is just that, mini, and general tweaks for compactness for immersion purposes.
- Fixed all known mod related bugs and glitches.
- Created custom detail textures, some textures are multipurpose and
needed a custom detail texture a generic one size fits all just wasn't
appropriate in some cases.
- Some sound tweaks for immersion purposes including all new thunder sounds.
- You can drag any mutant now.
- Improved physics. Some of the most notable changes include lamps in certain areas that will now actually wobble and flail around when shot, in the vicinity of a explosion, strong wind / draft etc.
- Whole host of other very finely tuned adjustments, both on the surface and behind the scenes.
Sounds great, I like that you added March. The Armour feature is better aswell, I don't know how many versions you can have in SOC but with COP I did the different Seva alternates with different night vision's aswell as varying stats and limits, so the best oufit differs from user and use like you said, That'd be nice to have in SOC if you can use more than good and bad nv. I don't know what you can do with SOC though as I've never modded it.
Armours are pretty customisable, in theory its possible to create a infinite number of variations of any armour in SoC but I haven't gone that far, I've just given different armours different carry weight bonuses.
Looks pretty cool. Does this mod include new maps?
Theres no new maps added yet, thats the phase after the RC build hits final build status although you could say each vanilla level is a whole new level in itself because the game responds totally differently to the vanilla SoC and due to all the HD textures the levels do look quite different. If I had to give a description of them I'd say they are familiar but transformed.
Thats a hugely impressive list of work you have put into this Ket, I hope this is a great success for you, you deserve it :)
If people like what I do thats great, but I do it because the unfinished state everybody got SoC in absolutely disgusted me which is why I decided to go through the entire game with a fine toothed comb fixing everything that was wrong with it. That process is now almost complete, but that doesn't mean I'm finished rebuilding SoC ;)
wow, that's quite some list of new features! No doubt TK is getting mature :-)
I'd say I've just finished doing the ground work, the next phase will depend on how much time it will take to get done. All the HD textures I have done are very much to upgrade X-Ray and hopefully buy enough time for the second development phase so the game still looks visually impressive.