Hi all!
I'm MarteenDee and I joined the team recently.
My experience isn't huge - but I have extensive knowledge about game mechanics in .ltx files and basic knowledge about LUA scripting. I'm also proficient in using Photoshop, Maya and Blender as my everyday job is freelance graphic designer.
Some of you might know me from GSC forums as I was active there for some time about two years ago and involved in development of few global mods: Oblivion Lost, Rebalanced and my own unfinished project Chernobyl:Torment.
Things I want to address in my contributions for L.U.R.K. are basically grouped into two main streams of activity:
- work on HUD effects which would let to get rid of any "unnatural" gameplay elements like icons, bars and numbers on the HUD - to improve immersion;
- think and include gameplay tweaks and ways to increase realism without loosing any balance and staying in overall internal consistence of the game world. I am both huge fan of internally consistent worlds and "realism junkie" so these are my priorities in development of any game or game modification.
I've already done few tweaks considering HUD and first steps are done towards removal of such HUD elements like health and stamina bar, hit indicator, new post process effects for hit and monster attack.
Next issue would be to move ammo count to inventory screen instead of main HUD and removal of all informative icons from right side of the screen and to changer them into some more immersing elements.
Early alpha is already in testing and I can include link for it if needed.
Second part of making L.U.R.K. more realistic would be to change the way how mod handles economy and specifically - armours.
As it is now (I'm playing RC 1.0552) armours found in the world are changed into bandit jackets and only higher grade armours are to be bought from traders.
I think it's tad wrong as I would like to see possibility of finding every type of armour which enemies may wear on every stage of difficulty. To prevent economy from turning into total mess and to keep the need of earning money for upgrades I'm proposing that all armours found in game (from corpses, in stashes or from quests) would be heavily damaged (not more than 20% of lifespan left), wear faster (not as fast as in vanilla though) and repair prices rise to the level where finding broken armour and repairing it would have similar costs like buying the new one.
That can spawn two important types of player behaviour - first would be to carefully plan his steps in future ventures and less likely to be engaged in pointless combat. Secondly - to come back more often to central points of the game world for repairs and restock instead of being many days in the wild.
I would gladly hear opinions of other team members about this issue and any other ideas considering overall realism of the game world. Thank you for your attention.
May The Zone Be With You!
MarteenDee
I think your armor idea sounds terrific, providing stalkers the ability to really scavenge. The real purpose of scavenging is to take used or unwanted items and use them for one's personal gain. I believe the ability to get armor in the field, but have it be greatly degraded, would heavily push this aspect into the focus of the zone.
My ideas on the matter:
- Change the name of the armor to make it apparent that it's a worse version; something along the lines of adding "damaged" to the beginning of the armor's name.
- Optimally we could replace all of these used armor inventory HUD icons (the one that appears on Strelok) with a more "worn" icon. Of course, this takes time and we might not have the abilities, so that would be lowest on the priority list.
- I think we should make them financially worthless, maybe 100 rubles. If they're worth anything, then it'll become a grinding game, making stalkers gather armors and sell them to traders.
- We should make the droprate of these armors rather low. Otherwise, a stalker could just get a new one the moment their current damaged armor became useless, removing the necessity for an upgrade.
That's all I have to say at the moment, let me know what you guys think.
I think Holden's idea for 1.1 was to replace all the armour in the game with artifacts, forcing players to buy new armour or to get it as quest rewards.
While I like your idea in being able to scavenge armour off fallen NPCs, I don't think it will fit into the current picture for L.U.R.K 1.1. In the end, having every set of armour have an essentially needless counterpart doesn't seem worth it.
Most players will likely prefer to keep their bought armour which would be, most of the time, repaired to near-complete and thus have greater protection, rather than pick up armour off bodies which degrades faster, is worthless and takes a lot of money to repair. In the end, all it would do is serve as clutter, or worse, break the flow of the game by forcing even more frequent backtracks to traders. This would be irritating, especially during Red Forest where you have to shut down the brain scorcher, this mission takes a long time and there is little opportunity to backtrack to a trader.
I never said that armours from fallen NPCs would be useless worthless after repair, mind you.
All I said was that armours found on opponents would be broken and not "as new". Also, in my opinion, armours which nearly doesn't wear are a bit unrealistic, no?
Lets consider this kind of scenario:
I'm fighting some mercs and one of them drops severely broken merc armour. Its protective quality when broken is nearly as good as my old, worn leather jacket and (that's part of my another idea I'll elaborate later about) has more inventory grids due to having more pockets.
On top of that I can fix it for a little less money than if I would buy new and save some RU to buy one extra medpack.
That's what I call *scavenging* which should differentiate S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from other FPS games.
This - with decreased spawn of medicaments of any kind - should make The Zone more rough and unforgiving place instead of walk in the park with medkits dropped here and there...
As to the first comment - I wouldn't make two sets of armours. Armour IS armour no matter if it's picked up from the fallen enemy or bought in the shop. Only difference is that one taken from the body has bullet holes in it...
That when way over my head..... Go for it, I'm just the animator.
I'm not sure about getting armor from corpses or removing the ammo counter, but less HUD elements sounds nice.