The first moment that comes to mind when thinking of the original Stalker (we'll dispense with 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R.' If that's alright) is from my first playthrough.

I'm descending into one of the toxic Ukranian underworlds and come across something that makes me stop and laugh. A paint-pot is levitating, bouncing against the ceiling and twitching spasmodically. I'm playing it in a room with fellow journalists, so call them over to have a giggle at Stalker having one of its very special moments.Everyone has just enough time to gather before it comes hurtling at my head causing a mass panicked jump and me diving at the controls to run back the way I came.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a prequel set a year before Shadow of Chernobyl. The game world consists of a mix of old, redesigned areas and completely new levels. The updated engine supports the Inverse Kinematics animation system, allowing more and better animations. New effects such as volumetric lighting were also included. Toggleable HUD for Stalker Clear Sky. A small script that allows quick concealment of HUD to help make better screenshots and at the same time it doesn't hinder the gameplay.

It wasn't a bug. It was a poltergeist.

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To me, it kind of sums up the best of Stalker - its sheer vigour and determination to summon a world completely overwhelming your expectations (and experience) of technical foibles. Stalker overcame its weaknesses. Clear Sky - while interesting in half a dozen ways - ultimately doesn't.It's a graphically improved prequel that integrates a mass of things that were promised for Stalker with assorted game tweaks that - on paper - sound as if they'd improve the immersion of the game considerably. In practice, it mainly shows that there are no good or bad ideas: only good and bad executions.The core of the game remains the same. You play an eponymous stalkyguy operating in the Zone around Chernobyl where reality has been rent apart as reality tends to be. Mutants roam the land. Anomalies dot the landscape - often invisible counter-natural singularities which maim or kill anyone who walks into them.

However, they also act as portals by which artifacts have arrived - and it's these alien items which have brought the Stalkers to the zone. Various factions populate the area, each acting according to its own desires. Need for speed most wanted pc download completo. For example, the Bandits are only after wealth, but Duty are trying to fight against the increasing insanity of the Zone. It plays much like any realistic-edged FPS does, but with minor RPG elements (you can improve your equipment or equip ability-improving artifacts) and it's in a living open-world. It's basically Oblivion with gu.

Oh, we've used that one before. And there's still a load of bugs. The opening swamp's actually the best demo for the faction war sections.It's understandably familiar. As a prequel, there's a lot of visiting areas you met in the later game and seeing them in a different light. Putting aside the graphical improvements (in short: the graphics have been improved), the biggest changes are an increase in character-customisation and reworking of its A-Life system, which manages the simulacra of life in the Zone.

The most obvious effect of this is that there seems to be a far greater sense of a war being fought, which is pretty much because there is a war being fought between one faction and another. Units of each will head off to try and secure or defend mission points, often generating an on-the-fly mission for you to go and try and help. You'll regularly - well, constantly would be nearer the point - have people shouting that they're about to be overwhelmed and need help. Like, quickly and stuff.The character-customisation is equally welcome. Weapons simply have many more options available - you're able to repair and improve them in multiple ways with the help of specialist characters, spending incrementally more money to improve a gun's accuracy, magazine size or many other aspects, often in ways which preclude a further advance in another area. Or in crude terms: if you make an assault rifle more suitable for sniping, you'll be excluded from the advances which develop it into a close-quarters storming weapon.

Similar advances are available for the armour, and some of the higher-tier abilities require you to locate a flash-drive with the plans. Without going fully RPG - which would break Stalker completely, I suspect - this is about as powerful and interesting system you could integrate.

This guy's called Forrester. He lives in a forest.The other half of the character-customisation system has been downplayed in importance, however - well, not 'in importance' but 'as a core part of your experience'. The original game was criticised for having artifacts far too easily available, often littering the floor near anomalies so you could easily gather and sell them for enormous profits, keeping the good ones for yourself. This time, obtaining an artifact is an actual achievement.

First, they're invisible, so you have to locate them via a detector, which tells you their proximity - and, I believe, you have to be looking right at them. Actually, that's not first, it's second, as you have to actually get close enough, which means working your way through (also mostly invisible) anomalies which you detect by lobbing nuts ahead of you and surviving whatever radioactive/chemical/psychic hazards are in the area by having good enough armour or anti-rad drugs or whatever.On the surface, both of these seem splendid additions. The first means that there's plenty of stuff to spend your cash on and the latter means that artifacts become meaningful, strange and spooky.

It did seem odd that anyone was trying to rob one another in the first game's Zone when there was this fancy stuff lying everywhere.

Just Standing Within the game world of STALKER was often a captivating experience: listening to distant howls of mutated dogs and listening to the gentle clicks of a Geiger counter. No other game has delivered such a free-form, AI-driven landscape (or at least such an excellent illusion of it), so it's easy to assume that STALKER has stolen a march on the vast ecosystem of Far Cry 2 by its inclusion of realistic predator behaviour - the latter with nary a lion or hyena in sight.Not so, patiently explains GSC Gameworld's AI programmer Dmitriy Yasenev, because the complexities of self-governing behaviour run far deeper than that 'Basically, creatures in the STALKER systems are just imitating hunger and acting upon it - trying to hunt,' he explains. 'To construct a true system where creatures feel hunger and can die from it would be inordinately difficult to balance - how do you make sure all the creatures find food and don't die? Messing up the balance could result in deserted levels littered with creature corpses that have died from starvation - as such, in a game world like STALKER'S all the creatures are hunting for food but never die from hunger.' Therefore, while Far Cry 2 sidesteps the issue by nixing non-human predators altogether and implants AI routines to suggest that the occasional lioness is ready to pounce from the long grass, everything in STALKER is at the top of the food chain. This isn't to say there aren't a few AI clevernesses to give the impression of a real ecosystem though.' If you watch wildlife programmes you'll never see animals eating their prey in the open,' explains Yasenev.

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'They always look for cover in trees, bushes or some caves. The same thing was programmed into the monsters' AI to make it more realistic and atmospheric to observe. After detecting a corpse or hunting down prey they'll look out for the closest appropriate cover and drag the food over.' Fight For SurvivalWhen STALKER was first touted, the mutated wildlife of Chernobyl would not only react in these ways, but also behave differently according to weather patterns, smell and occasional violent mass-migration due to reactor blow-outs.' Yes, in the final version we only had sight and sound-based behaviour, and a few additions such as a day/night dependence where some monsters would sleep at night,' confirms AI diva Yasenev. 'With something like smell, it simply wasn't being used on the level of gameplay in the final product.

Objects in STALKER have no smell, good nor bad, so as it turns out there was no need.' But what of the open world AI advances of STALKER: Clear Sky? Well, most of it lives and breathes within the strictly boys-only members clubs of the various warring factions of this Chernobyl prequel. The rather primitive factions of the first game have been given a complete intelligence revamp, alongside more distinct encampments and bases with various commanders, mechanics, traders and gruff barkeeps therein.'

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It's all driven by A-Life,' explains Yasenev. 'The factions fight over important points' within the Zone, whether it's territories, resources or scientific knowledge. You'll join your chosen faction and see and feel how your actions can help in their Zone-wide war. In fact, your actions and the A-Life system will create your various tasks through what's going on at the frontiers and how advanced you are through the faction's ranks - leading up to missions where you'll be leading assaults on enemy locations, possibly even trying to capture the base of a rival faction.' We've also worked on a lot of the peaceful AI to make it work hand-in-hand with the environment,' adds Yasenev. 'There's a whole bunch of animations to liven things up and make NPCs behave more naturally in camps -they bend over campfires to see food being roasted, back off when they're in sudden danger, look up at you as you approach, walk around the camp to find somewhere to rest, patrol the area., and on top of that we've slipped in some nice little extras, specifically with artefact generation, weapons and gear upgrades that are all influenced by A-Life.'

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Clear Sky's clear intent is to mature the sometimes stilted gameplay and AI idiosyncrasies of the original (you won't be able to neatly sidestep a pack of marauding hounds this time for example, the AI will now be able to predict your strafing capabilities and limit canine turning circles) while simultaneously conjuring up something user-friendly and less obtuse.At this stage of development, with GSC repeatedly assuring us that the game will appear on time and in complete form, it's hard to act the cynic. Sitting ducksMagnanimous in victory? Well, not really.One of tlie coolest AI behaviours in STALKER: SOC was the way that after a battle between stalkers, tlie victors would calmly proceed to finish off the wounded with blasts to the head.

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How did that come about?' At first we liad no wounded state at all, people were either alive or dead,' explains AI programmer Dmitriy Yasenev. 'But then we added the wounded state and faced a new problem - sometimes stalkers would scurry around trying to find that one wounded guy during combat. Hie next step was to make them ignore unconscious enemies if there were other enemies around - but once combat was over the victors would all rush to the wounded to make a final shot. It was really funny - this five-man group scurrying around trying to find one nearly dead and motionless enemy to shoot Ultimately, we created a system that chose just one stalker to finish off the enemy.'