The next update is 78-80% done. news - Zone of Alienation mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl

So with about half of the factions done, and most of the weapons added and incorporated into the game, I now have to focus on finishing things up. Most of this is rather tedious stuff like icons, adding descriptions, etc. After months of modding I'm sort of worn out from this stuff, so the little things really don't get me in much of the mindset to continue, but I'll finish it.

Things I've already done are some changes to armor durability, but I am still going to be adding a repair kit mod next, with the possibility of them spawning seldomly on NPCs, much less often than other items like rucksacks and GPS locators.

At the moment I have a number of problems to contend with, and they might not in fact be fixed in time for a release, as I'd like for them to be. For one, altruism is broken, the player can't really heal NPCs at this point because the new medkit system doesn't work like the old one, medkits don't have healing properties by themselves. However, both the xrs_medic.script, and the xr_wounded.script have been modified so that NPCs can be healed (and heal themselves) by the items spawned from medkits, and since only the actor can use conventional medkits to spawn items, I've given NPCs their own set of medkits which behave like the original. My plan is to modify the xr_wounded.script or whatever it is that has the player heal NPCs by exchanging the player's medkit for the NPC medkit, and healing them with that.

In addition to this, I still have bugs with the AI merge I'm using, in particular NPCs hand grenades still not exploding when thrown, and I still have that old bug with dynamite boxes spawning filled with weapons. I think it's an issue with rx_wmgr offloading the extra weapons that spawn on NPCs, Natvac said something about how they should be spawned at -300 under the level geom, or something like that.

Aside from that, I've done some decent work in properly modding in dynamic weather now, thanks to Tecnobacon's help, weather cycles transition smoothly now, and I've modified the blowout textures, and decreased their interval, which cuts down on the spawning of mutants. I've been playing in one game as a merc and I've only had to kill 1 controller, I did see a chimera in the Wild Territory that was dead, I assume the bandits by the railyard killed it.

On the nature of blowouts, I'm still working on trying to change their duration, and damage, since at this point they lack the potency that they may have had in the past.

Even with a few things to iron out, so far the mod feels better than the older iterations, I've had tons of fun playing it, and there is much less predictability to what your enemies will be armed with, and more preparation required just to stay alive.