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Making STALKER pretty?
Loata
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What exactly do I do to make S.T.A.L.K.E.R. look like it does in the screen shots? I have everything set to max with full dynamic lighting and it looks a little better than the first Half-Life. :x
I bought an 8800 primarily for this and Crysis. Any help on this would be the best thing ever.
I bought an 8800 primarily for this and Crysis. Any help on this would be the best thing ever.
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I just want my game to look like the screenshots I have seen. I mean, this is the first time I can play it lag free (I replaced my 7300 LE with the 8800 GT) and I can actually see the sky and everything now. Now I am wanting it to look like it does on the back of the box.
If you could point me to the mods you were talking about, I guess I could give them a try.
That has a few tweaks that make the visuals a tad better but as mentioned above me, mods are the best way to make s.t.a.l.k.e.r look more "shiny".
Float 32 is a fairly good example.
Oh and the Let's Play for S.T.A.L.K.E.R >>> http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=38213 contains a list of mods as well
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
It was very, very drab and ugly without dynamic lighting, and I want to say that Float32 improved the overall picture as well, but maybe just the lighting and shadows. I can't remember.
[EDIT] Was Stolls even running dynamic lights? It has that fullbright look, which kind of does look like Quake era games in a way. But it shouldn't look too bad with shadows turned on.
[EDIT2] Wow, there's a lot of shit I never noticed when I first looked through the Tweakguide a while ago. Like this: Might be worth playing with those settings.
Download the Float32 shaders, and enable motion blur and global illumination in the user file. There're guides out there for this sort of thing. I can't remember much else.
Edit: Oh but I did love that game something fierce.
first off, its making my proccessor thermal margin plummet something fierce. But my main issue is that it crashes all the time. Is there any way to avoid a crash? It usually does it when i go to save. Which, as you can imagine, is the most frustrating time.
But otherwise, it is great, and it doesnt look too shabby to me.
if you're on vista, no.
its something to do with the amount of memory the game is allowed to have, enforced by windows, and then the game gloriously stepping over those bounds.
or something.
You can fix that by turning the lighting model onto static. It only crashed in a few maps for me, so most of the game I still had dynamic lights.
I wouldn't say it looks incredible - certainly nowhere near Crysis - but the lighting does a fine job of adding to the game's already grim atmosphere, and textures seem a bit more gritty and real with the way lights flicker and flash around. After gunning down the first bloodsucker under Agroprom, a soldier's light hit me from behind, throwing my shadow and that of the stepladder next to me against the wall. Nighttime during a storm looks suitably spooky, having to use gunflashes and lightning to spot targets without giving away your position.
Granted that mods are damn near essential, though I don't think Stalker was ever really supposed to be pretty. Still, it has a way of pulling you in, if you can let it.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Not Crysis-oh-how's-everything-pretty, but it looks real.
Looks awesome to me. Those are screenshots I took.
I had turned Global Illumination on. It had a big performance hit later on so I had to shut it off.
The OP should also note that the engine's AA is a little weird, so unless you have a newer Nvidia card (I think), you'll still get some jaggies.
My relevant specs are:
XP Professional
GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB
Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4 Ghz
2.5 GB of RAM
I'm running it at 1280x1024 with details set pretty high and full dynamic lighting turned on. I realize that this is a middle-upper range system at best, but I was under the impression that I should at least be able to run it at high settings with dynamic lighting turned on. Is there any sort of magical tweak that could fix this problem? Does this one camp have a particular problem with frame rates? Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Oh, and I have updated drivers and such installed, as well.
I have no idea how to fix it though.
No no, this is exactly the wrong advice and misinformation which has been floating around for ages. You need to extent the memory Windows assigns to applications. Usually 32bit Vista limits the available memory for applications to 2GB.
Following command line (boot option) will fix it: bcdedit /Set IncreaseUserVa 3072
You'll need 4GB RAM through, the other 1GB is used to address various HW in your system. Before I did this I had exactly the same problem (nearly every second save attempt bounced me back to the Desktop). If your system becomes unstable change it back to the default 2048. BTW you have to run the command prompt as administrator.
You also need the latest Patch for Stalker.
This might also fix similar problems in other games + Vista 32bit as well (Gothic 3, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic with texture quality set to "very high")
I'd like to think it was the right advice as it worked, and you didn't *need* 4 gigs of ram for it to work. Also, there's some hotfixes out there that fix a lot of the vista issues. http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8821027804/m/7521018755
I second the Oblivion Lost mod, passed the game once and put it away for a fair few months, came back installed the OL mod and I can't stop playing the game, the fun factor went up a lot, two things that make the mod for me is the ability to sneak through an entire bandit camp and knife every single one of them without being seen at night.
Secondly the A-Life limitations have been taken off so everyone is fair game, you'll see bandits migrating to other areas, the immersion is amazing, mods definitely make the game.
http://beta.humugus.com/index.php/auth/register/inv/1966
Did you like Oblivion at all?
Do you like shooters?
Do you like games that try their best to establish a good atmosphere?
Its like you looked into my Soul and saw the real me!
To be frank, the story isn't as central to the game as the atmosphere. There are a few big questions at the start and you do have some say in which ones you're more interested, but the plot is fairly subtle. It's still interesting, but the fun is getting from one plot point to another and seeing what happened for yourself.
Pound for pound, though, it's one of the most immersive adventure games I've ever played. I'm even more impressed that it has a more satisfactory ending (if you're diligent) than a good three-fourths of other shooters, most of them with better coding at half the length of development. I realize that's not saying much, but still.
Well worth the $20 by now. Grab the 1.004 patch (apply 1.005 once more mods have been upgraded to be compatible with it), consider the Zone Reclamation Project, down some vodka and give it a go :^:
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
I'm not sure which version I have (I guess whichever didn't require the CD until it was patched...which I think makes in the US version, but it was shipped from Europe, so no idea). A lot of the problems were memory leaks and saving problems due to spaces in the user account name and weird crap like that.
I didn't have any crashes with 1.0, and I just patched it to 1.005 and played for a few hours without incident (it's choppy/laggy, but my computer sucks).
At least it's still atmospheric without the realtime lighting and the low resolution textures my graphics card can put up with. Also note that the 1.003 patch note cites "10-15% increase in FPS" engine optimization. I guess that means I'm supposed to get 11-11.5 now.
Now, the enemy pop-in, that's another matter entirely. :x