Update soon, fellow stalker. news

I was not satisfied with my test build, it was slow, overly-complicated, and completely unnecessary despite the few benefits it had, namely being a new night vision system that made the NV device separate from suits, and had NV scopes too.

But this system had two major drawbacks that I didn't like. The first was that it cloned every weapon 3-4 times, and the second was that although it used a proper model for the night vision scope it added, they only attached to the vanilla models.

So I've decided to scrap it altogether, although I might salvage parts of that build in the future, for artifact detectors, and new scope models, for the most part it was a disaster.

Since then I have started more work, based on the last release of the mod. I have more or less shoddily added a new weather system, that replaces SWO, but is still very far from being a true "dynamic" weather system. As it still follows AMK's horribly implemented weather which I curse every time it transitions suddenly. I don't have any plans of releasing this system yet. I'll probably talk to the author about getting permission to use it.

Aside from that, I have also made changes to the way that NPCs treat weapons, and increased their accuracy. NPCs now fire many of the fixed stock assault rifles on semi-auto, which eliminates their poor ability to correct recoil, and the interval between shots they take has been increased so that they will be better with follow-up shots. This change alone makes NPCs very dangerous, since they are more likely to pull off a headshot on the player.

Another one of the things I had to do, specifically because of adding the feature above, was change the loadouts that certain squads of NPCs spawn with, so that the more accurate NPCs are intended to act as marksman while other ones, armed with carbines, or folding-stock rifles are to direct fire.

Still, this isn't the end of what I've been working on, so far I have changed just about every NPC in the bar area to spawn with better weapons, mainly shotguns, and 7.62 AKs for stalkers, and I have given Duty more Saigas, as well as more specialization in weapon types regarding rank and armor used. Hopefully this will fend off dogs better.

I worked on new textures for NPCs, there are about 4 different textures for the stalker suit, 4-5 new textures for the novice jacket. 3 textures for bandits, and 3 new ones for mercenaries. I still have to edit many more of the game's meshes for these to be implemented properly.

And finally, in relation to the whole matter of mutant spawns, I've made many changes to the monster respawn configs, but I haven't tested them yet and have no idea how they will actually work in-game, or if they control everything mutant-related.

And the very last thing I'll mention, is that I de-compiled Zone of Alienation's all.spawn. which I'll be uploading here soon.