Still dividing my time between trudging through the Chernobyl exclusion zone in STALKER: Anomaly and perusing scripts and configs to resolve conflicts and crashes as I either discover them or provoke them by continuing to either tweak existing mods on my list or add more to the pile.
I get like this frequently with modding, I don’t know if it’s a latent perfectionist streak or just your garden variety hyperfixation but I tend to lose myself in the desire to make everything just right and get stuck on that over actually playing. But I think I’m having fun with it as I’m hacking my way through making compatibility patches so maybe it doesn’t matter?
It would be fun to actually finish the Mercenary storyline though. I haven’t even progress past the starting areas of Cordon/Meadow/Garbage yet…
There’s a reason why heavily moddable games tend to bring comments like “yeah, so I played the game for 3 hours and spent 20 modding it” - the latter can be just as fun as the game itself.
I’d be curious about more of your thoughts about Anomaly as you continue your playthrough. While I’m not planning to jump back into Stalker any time soon, I’m always on the lookout for what to do when I do so more info could be useful. No pressure though!
This is far from my first time in Anomaly, so I think that’s a reason my posts have been a bit briefer than my usual rambling. But I can try to be a bit more elaborate going forward. What to do in Anomaly is so heavily dependent on what modpack (or custom modlist) you’re running though. They can play out completely differently and sometimes have entirely different approaches. Like, playing GAMMA and playing EFP are entirely different animals.
Anomaly? Never tried it. The only big Stalker mod I played was Call of Chernobyl, other than that I dabbed with small balancing mods, gear additions etc.
Besides, all of my Stalker modding experience happened 5 or so years ago, I’m sure things changed quite a bit since then.
Best way to think of Anomaly is as the successor to Call of Chernobyl. It’s really an incredibly impressive project. As I’m sure you know from your time modding the landscape used to be a complete clusterfuck with CoC and Misery and hundreds of forks and submods and what have you. Anomaly basically collected and unified everything into a single stable common platform to work from.
At this point the modding scene of STALKER is probably on the level of non-Skyrim Bethesda games and there are not only thousands of mods but dozens of high quality precompiled modpacks that let you plug-and-play modlists with hundreds of mods without issue. Or you can be a deranged nutter like me and setup your own modpack.
If you used to play close to vanilla CoC back in the day you’ll be amazed what the community have been able to wring out of this old ass engine.
I only heard a little bit of Anomaly in the past but I’m glad it got to such point now. Looks like I’ll have plenty to play with once I get back to it.
Does Anomaly use the updated open source version of the engine or is it running on the game one?
Yep, Anomaly is built on the 64-bit Xray-Monolith engine, which is derived from GSC open sourcing the X-ray Engine back in the day. Though a lot of work has been done on it over the years at this point. Hell, there are two recent further engine forks being worked on right now that will hopefully be merged into main one day: one implementing dual-render PiP scopes in a very smart way with negligible performance loss and one implementing rudimentary multithreading that can give particularly weaker systems a huge performance boost.
The engine guys working on Anomaly are wizards. Those and the guys making custom shaders. The game looks absolutely fantastic these days, almost as good as STALKER 2 - and that is UE5.
Sounds exciting, especially the multithreading part since CPU has always been my main bottleneck. Hopefully it’ll make it in by the time I decide to give it a shot. Not gonna lie, while I was hopeful about Stalker modding in the early days I didn’t expect it to go this far. It’s a nice surprise.
CPU has been a bottleneck for CoC/Anomaly forever since Xray was originally made in that time when people thought super fast single core processing was the future. So GSC optimised it for that idea. Instead it turned out clock speed has pretty much flatlined since then and multithreading was the future. Plus it doesn’t help that all the offline simulation of what the world is doing in the background offsceen is incredibly CPU heavy.
STALKER modding is absolutely crazy, not quite as large as Skyrim but also harder to quantify since in addition to the by-now massive Anomaly scene there is also a massive scene that’s still spread out over other older offshoots, particularly in eastern Europe. They’re very big on modding and remaking the original trilogy there (STALKER is huge there in general). Hell, I actually have Oblivion Lost Remake installed and ready to go, which is a fan-recreation of the original vision of Shadow or Chernobyl, recreated from design documents and early dev builds that have been leaked. GSC famously had to cut down their vision massively to get the game out the door and OLR 2.5 has been described by many as the closest thing we’re ever going to get to what they actually wanted to make (Oblivion Lost was the original title before it became SoC).
Still dividing my time between trudging through the Chernobyl exclusion zone in STALKER: Anomaly and perusing scripts and configs to resolve conflicts and crashes as I either discover them or provoke them by continuing to either tweak existing mods on my list or add more to the pile.
I get like this frequently with modding, I don’t know if it’s a latent perfectionist streak or just your garden variety hyperfixation but I tend to lose myself in the desire to make everything just right and get stuck on that over actually playing. But I think I’m having fun with it as I’m hacking my way through making compatibility patches so maybe it doesn’t matter?
It would be fun to actually finish the Mercenary storyline though. I haven’t even progress past the starting areas of Cordon/Meadow/Garbage yet…
There’s a reason why heavily moddable games tend to bring comments like “yeah, so I played the game for 3 hours and spent 20 modding it” - the latter can be just as fun as the game itself.
I’d be curious about more of your thoughts about Anomaly as you continue your playthrough. While I’m not planning to jump back into Stalker any time soon, I’m always on the lookout for what to do when I do so more info could be useful. No pressure though!
This is far from my first time in Anomaly, so I think that’s a reason my posts have been a bit briefer than my usual rambling. But I can try to be a bit more elaborate going forward. What to do in Anomaly is so heavily dependent on what modpack (or custom modlist) you’re running though. They can play out completely differently and sometimes have entirely different approaches. Like, playing GAMMA and playing EFP are entirely different animals.
How much have you played before?
Anomaly? Never tried it. The only big Stalker mod I played was Call of Chernobyl, other than that I dabbed with small balancing mods, gear additions etc.
Besides, all of my Stalker modding experience happened 5 or so years ago, I’m sure things changed quite a bit since then.
Best way to think of Anomaly is as the successor to Call of Chernobyl. It’s really an incredibly impressive project. As I’m sure you know from your time modding the landscape used to be a complete clusterfuck with CoC and Misery and hundreds of forks and submods and what have you. Anomaly basically collected and unified everything into a single stable common platform to work from.
At this point the modding scene of STALKER is probably on the level of non-Skyrim Bethesda games and there are not only thousands of mods but dozens of high quality precompiled modpacks that let you plug-and-play modlists with hundreds of mods without issue. Or you can be a deranged nutter like me and setup your own modpack.
If you used to play close to vanilla CoC back in the day you’ll be amazed what the community have been able to wring out of this old ass engine.
I only heard a little bit of Anomaly in the past but I’m glad it got to such point now. Looks like I’ll have plenty to play with once I get back to it.
Does Anomaly use the updated open source version of the engine or is it running on the game one?
Yep, Anomaly is built on the 64-bit Xray-Monolith engine, which is derived from GSC open sourcing the X-ray Engine back in the day. Though a lot of work has been done on it over the years at this point. Hell, there are two recent further engine forks being worked on right now that will hopefully be merged into main one day: one implementing dual-render PiP scopes in a very smart way with negligible performance loss and one implementing rudimentary multithreading that can give particularly weaker systems a huge performance boost.
The engine guys working on Anomaly are wizards. Those and the guys making custom shaders. The game looks absolutely fantastic these days, almost as good as STALKER 2 - and that is UE5.
Sounds exciting, especially the multithreading part since CPU has always been my main bottleneck. Hopefully it’ll make it in by the time I decide to give it a shot. Not gonna lie, while I was hopeful about Stalker modding in the early days I didn’t expect it to go this far. It’s a nice surprise.
CPU has been a bottleneck for CoC/Anomaly forever since Xray was originally made in that time when people thought super fast single core processing was the future. So GSC optimised it for that idea. Instead it turned out clock speed has pretty much flatlined since then and multithreading was the future. Plus it doesn’t help that all the offline simulation of what the world is doing in the background offsceen is incredibly CPU heavy.
STALKER modding is absolutely crazy, not quite as large as Skyrim but also harder to quantify since in addition to the by-now massive Anomaly scene there is also a massive scene that’s still spread out over other older offshoots, particularly in eastern Europe. They’re very big on modding and remaking the original trilogy there (STALKER is huge there in general). Hell, I actually have Oblivion Lost Remake installed and ready to go, which is a fan-recreation of the original vision of Shadow or Chernobyl, recreated from design documents and early dev builds that have been leaked. GSC famously had to cut down their vision massively to get the game out the door and OLR 2.5 has been described by many as the closest thing we’re ever going to get to what they actually wanted to make (Oblivion Lost was the original title before it became SoC).