Its been a long road, at times utterly infuriating, but the years in the making (about 9 years now) fabled final build of TK - Singularity is finally on the horizon. The old saying its about the journey and not the destination is indeed true, this project has taken far longer to see out than I could of ever imagined but the more I dug the more I found just how half arsed and incomplete the retail release of SoC was, and we deserved better than that, much better.
Thats why I've kept at it, I was not going to let SoC die the undignified death the devs condemned it to - one man in particular at the old GSC (theres your first hint!) who sold out, and another who just did everything he could to castrate and ruin Stalker. The good news is the latter of these men would have karma get him as he likely found himself out of a job for at least a while when THQ sunk (theres your last hint readers!). Google should help you piece the clues together ;)
Anyway, I'm getting a little ahead of myself now theres a few more news updates to come before the project is fully tied up with a neat bow so I'll save the nostalgic stuff for that very final news entry. To date here is what is being worked on before the playtesters get to put TK through its paces and a few other things in general before all of you will get it, I want to be sure all known bugs are dealt with to deliver the best possible experience right out of the gate.
- Revamped story
Yes, this has been something I was never sure if it would make it into the final build due to time but I have instead found somebody who is willing to revamp the SoC story, build up the background, put some Zone "lore" in for all the diehards, fix continuity problems and generally make the story massively improved. You all owe CrimsonBloodGaming a beer, and possibly d4v33edz too ;)
- (possibly) New main menu
Even I don't know what this is going to be, its something hopefully d4v33edz is going to be doing. It'll give a nice fresh face to a main menu thats always screamed "beta" where to be honest I've just not had the willpower myself to create something nice with all the other texture work I've done. dav33edz knows the score though I'm sure if he does do it it'll be good, certainly better than my kinda lazy attempts.
- Re-enabled PDA news feed
This is something I'm looking into, its never been that clear to me exactly what needs doing to re-enable this feature but then again I've never looked at it that closely. If its what I think it may be though, its a easy feature to add back in and it'll really make you feel like a part of the zone seeing all that PDA chatter.
- Added artifact activation with overhauled particles
You can see a video of this in the videos section, its something I just added as a way to have a little fun without breaking the "lore" of the Zone, but at the same time it can also be argued this feature is tactical. Got a big area of enemies or mutants to clear out and not much ammo? Activate a artifact and place it down then lure your victims to their horrific death :) As for the particles, I've literally gone through every_single_particle_effect in particles.xr, overhauling and optimising every single one.
The last thing to do is the blowouts but before tackling this feature I want to be absolutely sure everything else is rock solid stable thats why its being left until last
Good luck in this, this mod will be great upon release
Looking forward to this being released it sounds great, and obviously a lot of hard work has gone into this Mod, so thank you very much for the time effort and love that you have put into this project.
Incidentally I am playing Shoc at the moment with (TK:Singularity build 1-3-14). Now I can have this mod fully maxed out as I have recently bought a new Amd 4 gig graphics card, now combined with 12 gigs of Ram and an i7 processor runs as smooth as silk.
;)
Thats the way the mod is intended to be played ;) While TK scales nicely if you do have to reduce settings I've always aimed to have the highest possible framerate at the highest settings to ensure most people can play it maxed out. Even now if you tried to play TK with maxed settings at a resolution of 2560 or above the most powerful systems would still struggle. You can forget all about Crysis 3 being a PC killer with TK about :p
Who this that's gonna ruin my S.T.A.L.K.E.R lore?
Oh wait, that's me...
Haha yeah so you only have yourself to blame if theres something in the story you don't like :p
Nice one, looking forward for the final release!