Return to the Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Wormwood, a high-difficulty survival-oriented realism modification for GSC Game World’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat. Wormwood builds upon the core Stalker experience, enriching the latest in the cult game series with brand new survival mechanics, intense and realistic gunplay, new missions, levels, fleshed-out building interiors and much, much more.
Something we've always wanted to do was increase the amount of vegetation and foliage in the Zone. Having been there myself, I know just how lush and green it is, especially in Pripyat.
Because of this, we're replacing one-for-one the vanilla, low-poly, poorly textured and just generally bad foliage models with Cromm Cruac's excellent ones, as featured in Lost Alpha.
Additionally (and as you can partly see in this image), we're adding new foliage to each level, bringing the world much more in line with the real-life Zone.
Performance between old and new foliage appears to be identical, meaning there should be no FPS hit from replacing vanilla foliage.
That said, adding more, additional foliage will increase the polycount and drawcalls, meaning there will likely be some sort of performance hit for the trade off of a much lusher Zone. We'll be working on making sure this isn't too large!
One thing that always bothered me with foilage in vanilla Stalker and most mods I've played (Misery, Autumn Aurora etc) is the awful aliasing on the edges of leaves and twigs that creates this nasty shimmer effect when there is lots of foilage in close proximity.
A lot of newer games seem to have solved this issue (I am no artist so I don't know how they did it, perhaps alpha-to-coverage is something that helps?) and it would be lovely to see it solved in Stalker as well.
As for the comparison, it looks great!
Will there be any effects when walking through new foilage? ie: drag, noise. I noticed both in LA and wanted to know if there addable to COP. I added the CS water drag to COP all be it with a bit less drag but I think it would be a lot better if you also got slightly held back when running through bushes etc. Also I noticed a lack of noise with a lot of the foilage additions when you ran through them in AN3 meaning it was like they were not there which was disconcerting.
Really like the new trees - much more lifelike!
Looking really good beac! Lusher is better!
Wormwood just got even better. Keep up the good work! :)