Presky v0.4 Thread - STALKER - PreSky mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

When is gonna be released ? this month ?

I'm not too sure. I have to finish adding everything in and testing it all. I've already come over some bugs and fixed them, as well as a few things that I've missed during initial development.

Also i wish you can change some things in the v.04 like:

-In cordon remove military where is the Parking place on right
-Also in broken bridge remove the military jeep with open doors(thats captured commander jeep in clear sky,i mean its long time commander captured from May 2011 to September 2011 clear sky)
-Change dialogs with Yoga,Krylov(to not say same as from Clear Sky when they talk)
-Put more cat mutants in the mod

Yeah and also put more faction missions
example if i join Duty (to do more missions like cleaning more mutants, bandits and that stuff)
Dont forget to put more cats in presky 0.4 xD

Xen-28 wrote: -In cordon remove military where is the Parking place on right

I'm keeping the Military as it is one of the two chances to grab some decent gear before heading deeper into the Zone

Xen-28 wrote: -Also in broken bridge remove the military jeep with open doors(thats captured commander jeep in clear sky,i mean its long time commander captured from May 2011 to September 2011 clear sky)

I would like too, except it would involve editing the level geometry and recompiling it, something I don't have the time to do, and it would take my computer a week to do that, and I use it on a day to day basis, so not right now.

Xen-28 wrote: -Change dialogs with Yoga,Krylov(to not say same as from Clear Sky when they talk)

I have corrected a few dialogs in the next version, and rewritten a few of them

Xen-28 wrote: -Put more cat mutants in the mod

The cat was a late addition, and as such missed out on the mutant smart assignment. I'll redo it, and put the cat in a few places.

Xen-28 wrote: Yeah and also put more faction missions
example if i join Duty (to do more missions like cleaning more mutants, bandits and that stuff)

There are more missions like SoC has, mostly delivering items. I've had a bit of trouble with eliminating smart terrain camps with this system, I'll look into it and see if I can get a workable solution in. This will require a bit of updating/modifying some scripts, so It'll push back the release time if I try and do this.

I'm trying to work as much bugs as possible out of this version, so Its taking me a while to do it all. I'm busy adding stuff in, then testing it thoroughly, then adding in more stuff. Some parts of v0.4 have really held me up, not to mention I'm quite busy with RL.

Edited by: Setakat

What would it take for some one else to use their computer to edit and recompile the map? I am sure my computer can do it (core i7 980x, 6GB ram and a GTX 480) How big of a file would need to be sent back and forth?

Anywhere between 24-48 hours for a HQ build, 12-30 for a medium, and under a few hours for a draft (most likely in minutes).
You'll need the v0.6 Stalker SDK, and I'll need to send 200-300mb of files to you (mainly the new textures so the compiler doesn't choke) initially as well as the level files themselves. After this, any changed level files should be in the low MB range.
Once compiled, you'll need to send 200-300mb worth of compiled files back to me for me to distribute.

I am going to be away from home for most of May, but I can go ahead and try to prep my computer with the SDK and stuff and try to figure out the best avenue for sending files back and forth, I have no clue if my email has a MB limit or anything..(last time I worked on a project with my buddies from school, we actually sent CDRW's back and forth, and for awhile I sent them through the mail!) but if my computer could help to make PreSky more unique and time line believable. Such as changing up scenery to make it look like its taking place before Clear Sky happens... then I will help!

Best bet would be a FTP site. Gmail limits attachments to 25MB, and if I upload to a filesharing site (such as mediafire) then anyone can access it. My problem lies in the fact I don't have the time to sit around and wait while my computer calculates the DX8 lightmaps. I can do the rest of the compiling work no problem.
Redesigning the scenery is a little bit beyond my current skills at the moment, so its just working on the SoC levels so they fit in the Clear Sky properly.
I have a choice - either recompile, and get 100% complete lightmaps for dx8/dx9 (partially), or try and manually convert the SoC lightmaps to CS/CoP equivalents by reverse engineering the CS/CoP->SoC lightmap procedure. It wouldn't be complete, but its better than the SoC ones.
That and for Clear Sky/Call of Pripyat doesn't run on dx10 mode, so I have no way to test the converted levels work properly, but I've been assured that its the engine that adds the dx options of the chosen shader type to the level, so all I need to do is add the correct shader combinations to each level object.
Anyway, I don't have the time to work on PreSky, and I'm taking a break from working on PreSky once I get v0.4 fully debugged and released here. I'm still persuing other mod projects though, mainly modelling work.

Fluffy, what element on your current PC is making it slow to compile a map? Is it your video card? Because I might have a spare Nvidia GTX 400 series card that I could sell... Or would it be more the CPU or RAM that would speed up map compile?

DX8 Lightmap generation, which is mainly RAM intensive. I can do low quality lightmaps in about half an hour, but medium quality on the same map takes several days. Don't want to try a high quality lightmap compile - might crash saying I don't have enough RAM. There is also a method out there to enable the transformation of SoC lightmaps to CS lightmaps. Given the graphic editing tools I have, I cannot completely convert the SoC .dds files to be compatible with CS, so while most lighting in this would look normal, there will be a few sections with odd lighting in DX8 and DX9.
I've got the holiday's coming up, so I might mess around with recompiling then, see if I can sort something out. Geometry compiling doesn't take long compared to lightmap generation.
The only other thing holding up work is my current GPU - which is an NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G. For some strange reason Stalker doesn't want to run in DX10 mode, so I cannot test the dynamic shaders required, but I recall before I started manually updating my drivers and on a older patch, where NVIDIA was the recommended graphics card I could run in DX10 - I don't know if it is the engine wanting DX10.1 (My card can only provide DX10) since that is what patch 9/10 uses or if it is the result of the manual driver updates. Once again, something to look into during the holidays. If I can roll back to an earlier patch and get DX10 mode working, then we might see some work on this front. If it still doesn't work then I know its a driver problem. My next laptop should have a GPU that supports DX11, so testing in DX10 then shouldn't be a problem.
The rest of my games are happy to run in DX10 - Just not Stalker :/

I love this mod, but I have a few questions about it since I can't figure it out by playing:

1) Where are the sleeping zones? I assumed they were beds in camps, but I don't get any sort of indication that I can sleep in any particular area.

2) How do I find upgrade data? I'm currently sitting on a nice suit I'd like upgraded, but the only person who can upgrade it has absolutely no data to do so. I don't know if the drives are even able to be found with this mod, though I assume they would be a random drop?

3) Isn't this mod supposed to tweak the AI so it spams less grenades?

4) I read somewhere here that you have an addon for this mod that adds a sprint upgrade to exoskeletons; do you have it uploaded anywhere? I'd like to have it

Edited by: Pillow_Talk