Comments on: Ultro-Mod: Stalker Complete 2009

By: Dark King

Dark King — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 12:17:33 +0000

Played this mod, loved it. And I was one of the few (?) who really enjoyed STALKER on release, bugs and all.

This mod has been updated since this review was published, and an optional add-on released:

*changes to AI to reduce the RADAR-esque NPC ability to hear you at 1km away
*improved NPC AI for general stuff
*optional pack for realistic weapons (one-shot kills are a lot more common now, and headshots on just about any enemy from any weapon will be lethal)

Definitely worth having another look to see the updates.

By: phenom_x8

phenom_x8 — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:50:16 +0000

AWESOME !!
its my second playthrough with STALKER (the first one was uncomplete3 years ago).
Starting with a new game and feels like very different game than what I have been played before!
Its trully like a new experience. Thanks for this article RPS, thats why I <3 YOU so much!

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:59:53 +0000

I think what I did was help kill one guy and then grabbed his rifle. Plus more ammo.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:34:15 +0000

I guess I enjoy breaking games that want to break me.

I’m surprised that no one’s recommended wiping out the town of Cordon and looting all the guns / ammo / medkits from the corpses before you proceed to the first mission.

You’ll earn yourself a shotgun with plenty of ammo and a rifle. Slam the rifle on single-fire mode and proceed to meet up with your friends at the waypoint.

From there, allow your teammates to distract the bandits. You’ll want to flank them while they’re engaged. There’s a hole in the building on the right, iirc, and I’ve found that to be the perfect spot to lean in and take a few life-ending pot shots.

Remember to crouch or walk as you set yourself up for an ambush. The AI in STALKER is not psychic. It will not cheat. It can, however, hear your character and prepare for engagement with you based on sound. The game designers provided you with a sound meter in the top-left of your HUD. Learn to use it.

If things go tits-up, just sprint out of the enemies’ line of sight and do your best to ambush them again.

PS – Quicksave abuse. Save when you’re in an advantageous position. Save after a stealth kill. Save yourself some frustration. STALKER is not a game for the impatient… try to think of each engagement as a puzzle and intelligently utilize everything in your inventory to put yourself on top.

By: Serondal

Serondal — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:20:19 +0000

What I did was go to the military base and wait for the military guys to come out on patrol then hide behind trees and snipe them in the head with my pistol until all 4 were dead. At this point you gotta be fast , run up and get their assault rifles and I believe they’ve got greandes? Another patroll will be coming along any second so you gotta get out of there but if you wait just out of their attack range you can toss grenades and them to great effect and get a ton of ammo right off the start. With an assault rifle the first mission is cake.

By: sinister agent

sinister agent — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:13:45 +0000

The main thing from stopping me getting into STALKER is I can’t get past the first mission. Do I really have to lower myself to putting it on Easy? The starter pistol you get is so puny it seems like I need about 10 hits to take anyone down? Any help would be appreciated.

That mission had me spitting blood, too, and my first instinct in any game is to spend ages carefully scouting and sneaking and isolating people before offing them as quietly as possible. Stalker makes that nigh on impossible, though, while simultaneously making direct assault useless as well. I’m looking for mods to change a lot of things about the game right now, because I’ve been playing it for two days getting more and more irritated by its brokenness.

For the start, though, I found that the best thing to do is to sneak upstairs (or run up there – it all amounts to the same anyway since the bandits are practically psychic and will find you however careful you are) in the building on the left. Kill the bloke on the balcony and then retreat up to the roof, and you should be able to pick most of the guards off from above as they mooch about trying to work out what’s going on.

Oh, and if you’re not two feet away, and can’t go for a head shot, don’t even bother firing – it’d be like spitting at a tank.

By: ReapeR

ReapeR — Tue, 26 May 2009 08:45:01 +0000

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By: tssk

tssk — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:00:49 +0000

NVIDIA 8800GT with 512meg. XP of course.

By: Heliocentric

Heliocentric — Sun, 24 May 2009 16:02:22 +0000

Tell me your specs, if you have a gpu with less than 512 ram(stalker doesnt understand cards having 320 and see’s simply “more than 256″) you’ll need to go without graphics on anything other than a low/medium. Even a high end card if you don’t have 512 memory you are screwed.

But that’s just 1 issue, state your os and rough specs.

By: tssk

tssk — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:51:43 +0000

Getting further. A clean install now results in crashing instead of black screen along with an error message. I did install the mods in the correct order. Was there anything else I needed to install?

By: Anaphiel

Anaphiel — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:48:31 +0000

@Weylund, glad to hear the prefetch thing helped.

STALKER’s memory usage actually makes some sense to me, as the game is so AI-driven… there are literally hundreds of script files all firing off and working in tandem, lots of routines to keep in sync, etc. And mods like this add to the overhead with their own AI and weather routines, not to mention the much larger textures and bump maps. So while I doubt the engine is especially efficient or optimized, it’s also doing a lot more than your typical FPS so I cut it some slack.

By: Weylund

Weylund — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:23:50 +0000

@Anaphiel: it worked. I still get stutters occasionally, but it’s great. Thanks.

Edit: I do wonder about the excessive memory usage I see from some engines. Remember Vietcong [sic] and its sequels? Their engine underperformed and used excessive amounts of RAM.