I've been silent for a while so I figured it was about time to post a news update for you all. The reason for me being silent lately is due to various reasons but the main reason (which also slowed TK development to a crawl) was that the CPU in my development system died. I'm happy to report however that I now have a shiny new i5 3570k and my development system has been up and running for a week or so now and development on the RC build of TK has resumed. To date, here are the changes the current internal build of TK has vs. the last beta build release (3-10-12)
+ Optimised engine paramaters under certain weather conditions leading to a FPS increase of 30% - 78%.
+ Fix weather bug where lighting changes caused by thunderbolts could be seen in the underground bar and similar areas / conditions.
+ Fix weather bug where its raining but sky is clear
+ Added parallax mapping shader fix
+ Implemented new blowout
+ Added cut mutants (they spawn on each blowout)
+ Updated medic scheme
+ Updated NPC grenade scheme
+ Tweaked NPC and traitor variables
+ Fixed bug where bandits slaughter eachother
+ Updated NPC & mutant files. In the case of mutants, they are much faster now and won't give up on their "meal" (YOU! XD) anywhere near as easily. Mutants are also more aggressive now.
+ Adjusted dead body time for mutants before they are cleaned up by X-Ray (7 in-game hours)
+ Slowed down in-game time (in-game time passes more slowly)
+ Reduced amount of ammo dropped by enemies
+ Updated description and effectiveness of radiation drugs to real life entolimod results.
+ Update properties of anomalies, they are something to now be feared. A lot will deal crippling damage or instant death.
+ Toughened up most key NPCs so they don't die as easily
+ Added fix for object collision physics bug
+ Added fix for NPCs retarded aiming
+ Added workaround for empty stashes
+ Removed some logic properties for the bar, you should now be able to kill enemy NPCs without issue.
+ Completely overhauled english descriptions for weapons, ammo & armours.
+ Corrected all spelling (to british) mistakes, as well as grammar errors.
+ First revision of enhanced vanilla story (adds more details, expands in other areas, etc)
+ You are now a associate of Streloks group called Jackal.
+ Added new HUD, minimap is very localised making you LOOK for your enemy rather than just look at the minimap for the red dot.
+ Adjusted AI switch distance, should make it do less of the weird stuff now.
+ Tweaked tree & grass sway, its much less violent now, giving a much more natural looking effect.
+ Removed some non-issue X-Ray background engine "rattling", end result is less log spam.
+ Removed some invalid parameters X-Ray tries to use, updated parameters in rspec_extreme
+ Adjusted level of bloom in-game slightly to give the sky a more realistic look
+ Changed some level terrain grass textures
+ Optimised scripts
+ First revision of gulag changes. This has got to be one of the more interesting changes for the RC TK build, gulags are no longer limited to just one or two types of NPCs, most are now capable of having three, four or five different types of NPCs. This will lead to the player running into some extremely interesting entirely random events (witnessing, or taking part in firefights) along with genuine random general events. Eg; Bandits may take over the rookie village, you may find that bandits have taken over the farm in the dark valley, or you may find fleshes or bloodsuckers have cleared out the stalkers at the abandoned farm and claimed it for themselves. I plan to add a lot of depth to this feature, NPCs huddled around those camp fires you find randomly scattered in the wilderness, mutants and NPCs attacking eachother in ways you have never seen before, etc.
+ Added some shader tweaks for even better visuals
+ Finished totally retexturing the entire game and making normal maps with 3D data and parallax mapping.
+ Adjusted height of lightening bolts so they A: look much nicer, and B: So they aren't constantly in-your-face.
Theres a lot more features and improvements to come, as I have more to tell you guys about I'll post up videos, screens, news updates etc, so watch this space ;)
Stay safe out there stalkers,
~ ket
Impressive progress, keep it up!
Roger that ;)
Indeed, impressive.
This is going to be incredibly graphically impressive. Looking forward to seeing if my laptop can hack it.
How well your laptop handles TK depends on its memory, CPU and GPU. If you have a gaming laptop you should be able to run TK with almost everything maxed. Progress is going quite well the only thing thats getting to be a pain is the fact I need to check my profile and mod page on a daily basis to delete any troll "guest" comments. Moddb really needs to disable the "guest" feature everybody I know with a moddb account is getting "guest" spam.
Great work!
Thanks :) The RC build continues to progress well and I'll soon be sending out links to the playtesters to test the pre-RC internal build while I try to chalk off the remaining few things for the actual RC build.
Thats a truly exhaustive list, the screens you posted showing the parallax mapping you implemented certainly improve the level of detail, making the game increasingly immersive. Then theres the new shaders as well...thats a whole comment box conversation in itself.
Thats what stalker modding is all about, (at least in my book) fix as many problems as possible before moving on to something else. I've still got some issues to tie up and some adjustments here and there to make but things are falling into place quite nicely.