**The Official S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow Of Chernobyl Thread**

drunkenmaster said:
i keep saying, stop looking at the very very very top settings, with a decent core 2 duo and a 8800 card you will not be breaking 100fps with dynamic lighting on at 1680x1050, so what, as has always been the same with all game, backing off a couple sliders one place hardly effects the look but drastically improves performance. because you can get 90% of the quality easily, the last 10% needs a lot of power but theres little to show for it.

its only dynamic lighting killing performance. my 8800gtx goes from 60ish fps to 200fps without it. i forgot to check on it, i did kinda get into the game, its kinda fun though so far i've only come across two none "normal" enemies and all the others are fairly boring. if you drop full dynamic i would imagine most cards x800 onwards should be able to provide the "upper" levels of texture, shading quality without to much of a problem, i haven't checked performance of dynamic lighting on objects only (a middle option) but i don't know if either options for dynamic lighting seem stable in vista 64, maybe its that, or the nvidia vista drivers i really don't know.

i would point out maybe FEAR as an example, soft shadows absolutely killed performance and offered little to no benefit and didn't actually effect the texture quality or anything else. it was just an additional effect that you can live without, though in FEAR i always thought the "soft shadows" actually looked worse.
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Hardly from what ive seen people have gained 100-150 fps with dynamic off with G80's, i havn't seen this with every game :confused: , infact it's very very odd.
 
You think fear was creepy , try the lab level in this game.... You are the only one down there in some secret lab. Sparks go past you and they have creatures inside , things get thrown at you.. Monsters run past or try to kill anything in there path. Oh and to make things worse your heart keeps beating fast ( ITS VERY DARK )


Errr why doesn't spoiler work :mad:

:eek:
 
Tom|Nbk said:
Hardly from what ive seen people have gained 100-150 fps with dynamic off with G80's, i havn't seen this with every game :confused: , infact it's very very odd.
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not really, its the only particularly hard effect the game does. i don't know what bit-tech are on about great textures. vegetation textures are pitiful, characters aren't very detailed, guns are not very good at all. walls and things are about as good as it gets and, well, they aren't that impressive at all. and what do you mean you haven't seen it with every game, i didn't say you would. but with every game i said if you dial back detail a TINY bit you'll get a normally fairly big boost in performance, as i said, 90% is fairly easy , its the last 10 % of stuff thats difficult.

it seems the lighting is just done inefficiently probably, its like with a physics engine, say you're trying to accurately calculate a bullets trajectory, you can do very simple physics, initial velocity, initial vector, gravity and calculate what it will hit. or you can do all that, and calculate the effect of drag factor, bullet size, wind speed, how much speed it loses going through a small branch and where it goes after. you can simplify and get almost identical results, indistinguishable to anyone but its still more accurate. i would say they do too much with the lighting and thats why its such a killer, where as a similified version would look almost the same. its life. they went overboard on the lights and forgot to make the AI work.

i went through a building area earlier, went up on a roof, 3 military guys below, standing still(though the rest were looking for me and fighting other guys). i popped one in the head, he fell down infront of the others, they didn't move. a 4th further away heard the shots, and proceeded to shoot at the wall beneath me never aiming higher. WOOO
 
Neil79 said:
You think fear was creepy , try the lab level in this game.... You are the only one down there in some secret lab. Sparks go past you and they have creatures inside , things get thrown at you.. Monsters run past or try to kill anything in there path. Oh and to make things worse your heart keeps beating fast ( ITS VERY DARK )


Errr why doesn't spoiler work :mad:

:eek:
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cough, tunnels after fighting military guys i mentioned a second ago? if so, something down there tried to rape me in the head(mentally, not physically, calm down people). lol, that was weird, not sure if its the same place, could be, sure the tunnels are taking me towards a research station.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Macabre said:
*snip*
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Steam is a garbage program and always will be. Hackers will and have cracked Steam to bypass it, once before people with pirate copies were able to play on legit servers, now that it was finally patched, all it takes is a few people who know their stuff to get round it. Valve suck, their security sucks I mean they got hacked and had HL2 source stolen great security eh? Now they are putting IGA into CS 1.6. Another EA if you ask me, but worse.
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Macabre said:
drunkenmaster said:
Steam is a garbage program and always will be. Hackers will and have cracked Steam to bypass it, once before people with pirate copies were able to play on legit servers, now that it was finally patched, all it takes is a few people who know their stuff to get round it. Valve suck, their security sucks I mean they got hacked and had HL2 source stolen great security eh? Now they are putting IGA into CS 1.6. Another EA if you ask me, but worse.
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microsoft got hacked, hows your windows?

All it ever takes is a few people who know their stuff.
When problems arise on steam, which they inevitably will, as they do in all games and software really, they get fixed fairly promptly. Right now steam is paving the way for developers to cut out publishers, ripping themselves as us off. Obviously valve become a publisher now too, but in all fairness, its not such a bad thing, they're hardly as bad as EA.
Steam is better than crappy EA link etc. So how exactly are valve worse than EA?
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peetee said:
Macabre said:
microsoft got hacked, hows your windows?

All it ever takes is a few people who know their stuff.
When problems arise on steam, which they inevitably will, as they do in all games and software really, they get fixed fairly promptly. Right now steam is paving the way for developers to cut out publishers, ripping themselves as us off. Obviously valve become a publisher now too, but in all fairness, its not such a bad thing, they're hardly as bad as EA.
Steam is better than crappy EA link etc. So how exactly are valve worse than EA?
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Put it this way, least EA link doesn't FORCE you to use the program in order to play their games, your arguement is invalid.
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my point about steam was more distribution, the amount of people who decide to get a game purely because they can get it without waiting is probably pretty large. worldwide releases would help with that, not having disc's out at publishers with people working there selling/stealing them and getting them to release groups would be a step forward. getting it out, on the internet for same time release everywhere, with little to no chance of them being cracked/available before you can buy the game = getting rid of a certain amount of piracy JUST there. steam itself isn't a anti piracy device really/ish, its more about the distribution and maintaining of games IMHO. there are other ways to help stop piracy, and IMHO one huge one has to be making sure a game won't work without a serial key, and you'll find stalker does not require one, and also to stop producing millions upon millions of excess working keys, because that has to be one of the single most retarded things ever.

you don't want any old person to download and install it then be able to activate it with a key, stop there being so many excess keys. du'h.

i love fanboys, or anti fanboys, i said the word STEAM, and thats entirely the ONLY thing you read.
 
Macabre said:
peetee said:
Put it this way, least EA link doesn't FORCE you to use the program in order to play their games, your arguement is invalid.
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lol, can you please please tell me exactly how running steam is ruining your gaming experience? to be fair i've never had issue with Steam or EA link which i bought BF2142 on recently(very bored weekend, needed a game quickly). actually, i'm not 100% sure i can open up BF2142 without EA link opening, as you get a different .exe file with the downloadable game to the dvd version. so infact, your point is utterly invalid as some games do require EA link to make the game work. either way, so what. seriously, so what? do you have other programs open when you play a game, i leave WMP open, windows explorer, firefox, IE, grabit, fraps sometimes, anti virus, does another program affect me in any way at all, NO.
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in the end i think ANY software can and will be pirated, making it harder to pirate is a good thing, for them, for end users it normally results in being a bad thing. more irritating getting into a game, more effort to activate, though personally connecting to the net for 20 seconds when i'm on the net all day isn't a big deal at all, and well, if you don't have the internet, you probo don't havea computer capable of playing the game.

the best way to keep the numbers of pirate's as low as possible is to make it as completely as easy as possible for the legitimate buyers to get the game, to have it first, to have it the same time as everyone else and to not feel cheated. removing the temptation will do more than you think.


anyway, people have been saying for years, mp3's will destroy music, no one will buy cd's anymore, no one will buy mp3's, no one will buy dvd's, no one will buy vhs's blah blah blah blah blah. i'm bored, its not true, its never true. people , almost everyone i know, cheap poor students, people working with plenty of spare cash, they all download stuff and if they life it, buy it. if RIAA, and all these other people get that through there head and just start making stuff cheaper, easier to get a hold of and reduce costs of distributors pumping up prices EVERYONE will be happy. not seen a single release group of any stuff NOT tell you to buy the game/dvd/album if you like it.
 
cheets64 said:
Order Placed: 16 December 2004 @ 23:38

Thats when I placed my pre-order, not that long ago.
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tell me about it

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl - Limited Edition Tin (Stalker) (PC Games)

PRICE £17.99

ORDER DATE 17/03/2004

3 years on and its NEARLY here. :)

got my order upgraded to the LTD ed one for free though. I guess because its been on order fo so long :confused:
 
"The Official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Thread Rant," A.K.A. "The Facts" By Ulfhedjinn.

RE: Piracy...

Nobody in this thread is talking about where to get werez or cracks and as far as I know only a couple of people have even claimed they're playing the game, even I haven't made that claim, so leave the moderating to the moderators and let us just talk about a game we've been anxiously waiting for the last five or so years.

RE: The performance issues...

8800GTS gets 30-50fps in this game maxed out, and I define maxed out as full dynamic lighting and all advanced sliders to the right (apart from AA since the last notch on that is blurry, the second to last notch is 4x.)

If you lower the grass density bar to half and/or turn off sun shadows and/or turn off grass shadows then you will get a more comfortable framerate of about 50-80.

The dynamic lighting in this game is the killer. Turning it down to objects only which I think is the middle settings, works wonders.

Considering the game looks so poor, I do not consider this good performance and can't wait for patch support.

RE: The graphics issues...

Anyone who says this game looks good is, in my opinion, either a fanboy or has low opinions of what constitutes "good graphics" after such horrible delays. From what I said in my performance section, you would think those are very good framerates, but when you take into account how crap the game actually looks then it's simply not the case. I get similar framerates in Oblivion, and that game looks a lot more impressive from a technical standpoint.

The textures are flat and bland, yes even on maximum settings, minus the odd ones like in underground bunkers with floorboads. The lighting is great overall, no complaints there. The character models look like something out of Morrowind, and they are glitchy as hell when walking/running and when drawing/holstering their weapon. The only thing I've seen these character models do right is stand up straight, or sit and play an acoustic guitar.

RE: The audio issues...

While the music in this game is fantastic, the speech is awful. The English translated dialogue has a very strong "tacked-on" feel, and is out of sync half the time. The weapon sounds are good, and the implementation of EAX and srurround audo are quite commendable.

RE: The artificial intelligence issues...

The AI in this game is fantastic, but it is extremely buggy at times. While rival stalkers will retreat, take cover, and work together to trap you somewhere, they will also do very idiotic things at times. Sometimes one of them will split off and get lost somewhere, usually far away stuck against a tree stump model. A lot of the time they will aim through walls at enemies they haven't even seen yet, if stalkers were supposed to be psychic then I would be impressed, but I am not because if the AI can see eachother through walls then no doubt they can see me too.

RE: The interface issues...

While most of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. head-up display is very informative and very well laid out, I have to express my dismay at the "PDA" screen which has your maps and missions etc. on it. This little GUI is an absolute pain to use, the buttons are glitchy at times, items scroll back up to the top at random, and zooming in and out on the map is a total pain in the bum at best.

So there you have it. I don't really care what anybody else says, even IGN or wherever you're reading your reviews, because I just stated the facts.
 
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