S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Lost Alpha

Technology and Gaming
#21

Did the leak have CoP-style god rays from sunlight? If not, that might be DX10.

I do know they have stuff like wet surfaces, a new form of AA, and maybe a couple of other things. Not sure what else.

Also, oh god if that’s true I can’t see DSP making it past the first area.

#22

I’m not a big fan of huge polycounts. I would rather see high enemy numbers, or physics items in the world than see really highly detailed objects. I’m not saying low polygon counts, just lower than what a lot of projects have been aiming for the last few years.

#23

The high reqs are probably because of the ridiculous amount of vegetation and objects in each map, coupled with their enormous size.

I mean, a few of the transition areas alone are the same size/bigger than zaton/jupiter in CoP.

Also, holy shit

#24

Yeah, the leak had volumetric lighting. Looking forward to what these things are though.

The sun rays in it were kind of annoying though. I don’t really know how to explain it, but when looking away from where they were coming from, you could see your shadow and then it would be outlined with the sun rays and I thought it looked pretty stupid, but otherwise they looked pretty cool.

Yeah me neither. I mean it’s nice to have high poly characters but I think we’ve pretty much high a limit in the amount of polygons we need in character models in Max Payne 3 and Crysis 3, especially with tessellation. I want more games to have good lighting and shadowing and things like global illumination. Though given the size of the maps I thing this game does have a lot of polygons in general anyway.

Yeah there are a lot of areas and they’re massive. Draw distance is a factor too. This game has a further draw distance/lod than any of the other Stalker games without mods. Also you said something about AA? Because the slider in the leak didn’t work I don’t think.

#25

The AA might be DX10 only.

I’m not sure but if there’s an AA slider that was also in the vanilla games and it never worked, the working AA was the one in the drop down box and it only worked in DX10/11 according to GSC because STALKER uses a deferred renderer.

Maybe its the same situation here?

#26

I never noticed AA working at all in any Stalker game but maybe it did. Do you know if it was post processing?

Also one thing I liked about the leak (and I assume the final game as well) is that everything was able to be changed without a restart. You could even dynamically change the fov when in the game, which I’ve never seen any other game do. Like, while the game is running you type into the console “fov xx” and it’ll zoom the view in or out.

#27

I was just guessing that’s all.

#28

You could do that in Quake and Unreal/UT with the FOV, and I know it also works in Crysis.

The thing about STALKER’s AA is that it only partially works. It works on vegetation, but a lot of times on buildings and other objects it doesn’t seem to.

Though I think that’s okay, because vegetation is a large part of what you see so the AA working there helps visual quality a lot, and for everything else you can force it through the control panel.

I think that’s why LA devs had to implement AA themselves maybe? Because CS/CoP’s was broken like that?

Also that’s cool that you don’t have to restart. I hate when games require you to.

#29

The issue was the game stuttered when applying settings kind of like what happens in HL2, so I hope they changed that :stuck_out_tongue: . Also sometimes on initial startup the game would revert to lower than low settings and I had to fix that but again that sounds like something that might happen in a buggy leak beta thing. And forcing msaa through the control panel works so I’ve been doing that in most Stalker games.

So excited, they need to hurry up and put the download up.

#30

700 series for all maxed? Dayum son. I mean I have a 670 so it’ll handle most things on hight but still. I rarely play with all max settings in games, but that’s just…wow.

I guess it’s only a surprise since I feel not too many games ‘require’ such powerful cards (yet, anyway).

#31

Not happening tonight. There’s a post on a Polish forum about the game saying that the zip file was compressed wrong and that they need to do a bunch of stuff to recompress it and that that’s even what they’ve been doing for quite awhile now I guess. (shitty)Translation is

https://forum.stalker.pl/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=4484&start=3360#p286689

#32

It’s up

https://gameupdates.org/details.php?id=5770

torrent version

EDIT: the torrent is kinda slow, this guy’s links went fast for me

https://www.moddb.com/members/mad123/comments

#33

Torrent is going incredibly slow, which is weird. I’ll try the other link.

Edit: Bloom, HDR, and sun glow is ridiculous. Try these settings:

r2_ls_bloom_fast off
r2_ls_bloom_kernel_b 0.01
r2_ls_bloom_kernel_g 7.
r2_ls_bloom_kernel_scale 0.5
r2_ls_bloom_speed 100.
r2_ls_bloom_threshold 0.889

r2_sun_lumscale 1.
r2_sun_lumscale_amb 1.3
r2_sun_lumscale_hemi 1.2

r2_tonemap on
r2_tonemap_adaptation 1.
r2_tonemap_amount 0.3
r2_tonemap_lowlum 0.0001
r2_tonemap_middlegray 0.5

#34

Double post for letting people know that LA’s version of Xray had its source code leaked. Prepare for much more indepth mods and even potentially full games using the engine.

#35

Cool as it could be to see more games on the engine, wouldn’t GSC take action against anyone trying to use the leaked version?

#36

We’ll see I guess. I was thinking that too but considering GSC is essentially just Sergej I don’t know how much he could really do. I suppose he could hire a bunch of lawyers but since he’s not really making any money right now he might just want to not waste the cash on that.

And it is a custom version that was used to make a free game but I don’t know how much that would affect it.

Edit: Seems someone made a kneejerk reaction about the source code. The bug catching program says it’s SoC’s version of the engine, plus there’s only r1 and r2 files while LA goes up to r3. Still a cool thing, but not as cool. And someone could still improve it.

#37

https://www.mediafire.com/download/luxs9thrxh9v87a/STALKER_LostAlpha_patch_1.3001_.exe

First patch is out

#38

Nice. What does it fix?

#39

Now available on windows xp

#40

I’m going to be really surprised if my 580 breaks a sweat running this mod. After all, it runs Crysis on full settings without slowdown. Unless the mod is specifically making use of some technology that nVidia introduced in their 700 series cards, I’m guessing this is another case of people not understanding how nVidia and ATI name their cards. The 700 is the series, and the last two digits are the model within that series. The higher the last two digits, the more powerful the card. Each series gets a bit more powerful than the last, but generally, the 580 performs about as well as the 680 performs about as well as the 780, and ditto all the way down.

It’s funny to me that they just recommend a 700, because if I were running, say, a 750, their mod would probably eat my card alive on full settings.

EDIT: Jesus, only one person is seeding the torrent?

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.