S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Fan Club - Page 245

A Kevlar vest, true, it is only designed to stop low calibre pistol rounds, and then the protection on it degrades somewhat quickly if shot in the same location. It is also very effective against knives.

Ceramic plates or steel plates on the other hand are more designed to stop rifle rounds from a distance. When you stack kevlar and plates together and then reinforce it with steel you can take rifle rounds somewhat effectively.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNY1MtsVwG8

The only thing though is even the latest high tech stuff is heavy.
Even though the plates will stop the bullet you also need padding to nullify the impact, which adds weight and holds in heat.

Note - I have no played the mods you are mentioning, just thinking out loud.

You have to balance personal preference for realism and enjoyable game play. This is a game where you drink vodka to negate radiation poisoning, and sprint for miles on end @ 30 mph without tiring, provided you keep drinking energy drinks. If they attempted to treat things as realistic as the body armor aspect, radiation, hunger, fatigue and weather would prevent you from playing the game in any enjoyable fashion.

Of course weapon realism is fun and knocks up the survival aspect. However in a real life situation, surviving an encounter against 3 armed foes is completely unrealistic. And STALKER is built around the situation of fighting MOBS of people at the same time by yourself. Even when you rock excellent stealth, all it takes is stepping on a bush or crossing one person's path and you would be dead instantly. There are so many situations where you are forced to firefight with numerous foes that I don't think realistic weapon damage would be enjoyable at all.
Edited by _02 - 6/12/12 at 5:55am

Playing Priboi Story Overhaul for SoC right now. On Master difficulty the "realism" aspect is pretty good. One or two hits with low armor and your dead

The biggest issue with the engine in terms of realism are the animations. The animations themselves are pretty good but if a baddy is keeling over from being hit and you send three more rounds at him that are not headshots sometimes it seems like they don't do anything at all.

Just little things like that which can take away from the gun fight, but overall I think it is pretty good.

They are wrong, and I'm not. I'm sorry to put it this way, but it is what it is. Why?

Game balance and adding stuff for stuff's sake.
The problem with SS is that its a plethora of mods all glued together without a proper director nor any sort of quality control. This means that there are a thousand stuff in there that won't work properly but nobody bothers to fix it, although its obvious even to the naked eye.
For instance, nobody even bothered to create a "change-log-****-READ-IT" so that you aren't completely lost once you try the mod, and the problem is that the game is so complicated in every possible way that you NEED to look at guides all the time which makes the gameplay kinda meh :/ simply because you have no clue how to follow up.
Also, and this is very consistent with the gameplay feeling, we have the ballistic MESS, that doesn't work nor they want to change it because they have no clue about what they want to do, nor know how to balance it. And yes, its all about balance, if they want to make a "realistic" mod they are free to do it, what they can't do is pretend SS is when it clearly ain't..and this is why:

Bullet-proof vests: they pretend that in real life yada-yada-yada. Ok. If so, why bother including like 50 different outfits if none of they make, according to them, any difference in real life?!?! Why complicate something that in their own words is super simple: "in real life bulletproof doesn't matter... you die most of the time". Its a very poor excuse and hugely affects gameplay and, as far as I know, exoSkeleton's aren't used and I'm sure that if they did they would be VERY resistant to any sort of damage, something that ain't reflected by in-game stats because they are a tad more protective than a simple coat ( ) and you still die with a simple 5.45 round ... or by a simple noob with a shotgun at 100 meters (I'm not kidding).
Also, and this is something they don't get, there is no balance in the game, whatsoever. The fact is: mid to late game, and with enough artifacts, you are god-like. Where is the balance there when you can carry so many artifacts that you break the balance they "pushed" for no reason at the beginning?

Seriously, If you want to make a realistic mod, and a very hard one... then go the LURK route (its a MUST if you've never tried. The Zone was never harder... ) and go all in. But don't try to go for realism and then handling 30 artifacts that are powered up because then there is no fun whatsoever: you die all the time at first (and I mean... ALL THE TIME, and that ain't fun) and once you have the good stuff you just don't die. For instance, the difference between having a Saiga and not having it was like this: I could cross Rostok non-stop or I had to hide like a chicken in a high place and snipe people and mutants from as far as possible. Why? Saiga is a 1-shot-everything glory that reloads very fast and shoots even fastest. If you compare its DPS against any AR its like 20x or 30x times higher... and thus it breaks the balance.

You know, one day I may take Stalkersoup and mod It my own way, with the damage values I feel like are needed, and with the health values and all the other stuff that is needed... but this requires a huge job and the mod needs to have a lot of parts scrapped any way. Still, what I don't truly understand is how the devs are that blind not to see what they are creating, because they could at least offer some options so to play the way you prefer it.


Well, nothing is black nor white. The fact is that if you go for realism (like LURK and Misery... but realism in a Stalker meaning, not in ARMA 2 one ) you should try to draw a line and stick with it, no matter what. The problem with mods like SS and Oblivion is that, in the end, you are god and thus they gameplay and everything else goes to hell...

That is the hard part about equipment scaling in a non scaling game. Stalker is 1 difficulty across the whole game. As you get better equipment the game gets easier.
I do agree that the level of difficulty should level off based on player level, matching the AI as best can be to the player. Playing on Master difficulty can help level off the end-game when the player has high level equipment and artifacts.

I think CoP has better tools to help balance the end game, giving experienced AI poor quality guns makes for a "tense" combat situation, while Fully upgraded guns on experienced AI makes "AI cheating" scenarios. However puting High upgraded guns on rookie level AI is an easy engagement, easy loot for the player.
SoC however was much for "tense" as special loot had to be found. This made getting to the high level end-game take much longer. You either had to find a stash, kill a stalker, or wait for a stalker to die to get that Silenced Rifle no one else had. This gave the game its own special balance.

In the end I think I will always appreciate SoC non-upgradeable system more. CS and CoP it is too easy to "tech up" beyond the AI and easily dominate them. - talking vanilla game.
How devs modify the upgrade system I think has a huge impact on game difficulty longevity.

The player will always be better than the AI.

EDITT////


So apparently I downloaded SGM 2.2 Eton Edition. What is the difference between this and regular 2.2?
Edited by Aparition - 6/12/12 at 10:46am

Hmm if i just delete the gamedata folder in one of the games does that simply get rid of the mod and i can use a different one just like that?

Just want to know so i dont need to keep deleting the game and then redownloading it :/

Nope. Doesn't work that way.

First make a backup of the base game, Steam > Backup & restore games. Now you can conduct all the experiments in the world on it. If anything goes wrong, just delete the steamapps/common/stalker call of pripyat & restore the game.

Well i may start again on something, Might play clear sky idk...

I work alone mod does great things for survival and that but really im after new content.

That is incorrect. Yes, you can simply delete / rename the Gamedata folder.
Stalker looks at "Gamedata" for the mods, so if you rename it the file path will not match and will not take affect. I have multiple Gamedata folders with different mods I just rename them as such:

Gamedata
Old_Gamedata_Misery
Old_Gamedata_Vanilla
Old_Gamedata_SGM

The only one active is the "Gamedata" folder.

Its not that simple. The big mods change even the .exe alont with some .dll, which means that you need to make far more changes than just renaming the gamedata folder.