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Dangerous Rays : S.T.A.L.K.E.R like

Major_Blackhart

Codexia Lord Sodom
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Well, it's just an engine, etc right now.
And he's done a SHIT TON so far that's insanely impressive for one guy.
 

Durwyn

Prophet
Joined
Oct 29, 2006
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Erewhon
So the trend for procedurally generated survival games continues. This one looks cool albeit pretty bare-bones in terms of actual gameplay activities. I especially like the weather simulation and hope that making major fuck-ups like starting a full-blown forest fire will be possible in future.

On the other hand, I wonder how many of the likes we will have until the market over-saturates. It started with Minecraft, then Terraria, Starbound plus various KS additions like Frontiers, Planets3 and many more, sometimes blatant rip-offs which names I don't recall at the moment.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
Release got delayed. The dev says he's gotta sleep after 22-hour coding marathons (and rewrite some stoff, like the AI).
What we get is pricing information (13 dorra for the alpha and any future versions, 24 if you want a forum title or just want to throw some money at it) and a quick and dirty presentation of the pathfinding AI.
 
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spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
Release update. First version is due tomorrow, during the day, list of features in the thread:
http://forums.lonelybitsgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=76

short version - no game saving yet, but procedural generation is there, along with rudimentary combat.
So, for now you can do some forest hinking and bash some zombie heads (just one model) or shoot them with guns.

The survival aspect is not in yet, and other stuff is largely WIP. Interestingly enough, there is basic mod support.
 
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spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
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So, 28 years after the Chernobyl accident (probably unintentionally but eh) the first alpha got finally released to the public.
Since I discovered I have a spare 13 dorra on my paypal, I decided to bite it and give the early alpha a whirl.

First hotfixes and updates are also underway, been playing with update 2, update 3 is underway as we speak, mostly with compatibility fixes.

Not surprisingly, the thing is a very early alpha, there's not a lot to do at the moment, and what you can do still needs quite a bit of polish.
Played for about two hours, I think I saw most of the stuff that is there to see.
For what it's worth, it looks promising. If you saw the vids in this thread, you know what to expect, at the moment there's nothing more and nothing less in the game.
Didn't get any game breaking bugs or crashes yet, which is pretty impressive at this stage. Though I didn't really bust my balls trying to "break" it, to be fair.

A short review of what to expect & first impressions:

Exploration
> You can generate various world sizes, even the basic 32x32 feels pretty big. It takes less than 5 minutes for it to load. Its 14 000 square kilometers according to the game, and you can go much bigger (haven't tried it yet)
> Hard to tell if the figure is bull or no, but it took me close to an hour to reach the edge by following the road and the game generated another "zone" of the world for me.
> There's no minimap, so hard do say if I spawned close to the edge)
> The scenery is nice (if a bit dull), all you get is trees, some roads leading to the samey house and barn combo where you find loot.
> There are some nice touches like broken cars, irradiated trees, ponds, edible mushrooms, and an occassional zombie. More features will be added later, so this aspect will get better, but you can still do some serious hiking.
> The random generation sometimes goes bonkers (I saw the occassional levitating rock and grass growing inside the house.
> Loot is totally random, one time you get a can of beans and a glowstick, another time you get a fireaxe and a G36.
> The world is not saved yet - if you quit the game or die, you have to regenerate it from scratch.

Survival
> The bare bones are implemented - hunger, thirst, radiation, stamina and exhaustion. Not all of them seem to have actual effects implemented, apart from exhaustion and hit points.
> You technically can scavenge for food, water and pick shrooms in the woods, but it is totally random and it feels like a very rough draft.
> You can chop down trees (first gotta luck out and find an axe) and start the fire like in the video. I only saw fire propagate from one log to another,
> Other than lighting and marking areas with smoke, the fire doesn't seem to have much use.

Combat
> There's one enemy type at the moment, the female zombie. It has an AI (reacts to sound and being shot at) and comes at you to bite you in the ass. Sounds and animations are still wery WIP.
> Zombie spawning depends on your luck, sometimes you get two at a time, other time you can travel for 20 minutes without seeing one.
> They aren't particularly dangerous though, unless you have absolutely no luck finding weapons.
> Killing zombies in melee is not as fun as it could, due to missing animations. Guns are much more fun to shoot (you saw the ballistics vid, it's basically like that, and I gotta say, both the Skorpion and G36 handle nicely).
> Fair warning though, unless you get lucky, be prepared to do some serious hiking if you want to go ballistic.
(Most I could find was a G36 with 30 rounds and a 50 round ammo box, found a submachinegun with roughly the same amount of ammo on another play. It may be the RNG hating me, but when I actually had the boomstic, I had trouble finding zombies to shoot it with, though I eventually managed to do some "sniping" at ~150 meters, pretty satisfying even though there's no animations yet to show hits).

Controls
> Standard fare FPS and you can rebind them.
> You can change stance (which doesn't seem to do much atm), interestingly enough, jumping isn't in yet. You can only climb the barn ladder.

Sounds
> Being a tone deaf oaf, I can't really say much about all the promised 3D environmental audion, but is is still very WIP, sound volumes are mismatched and lots of the sounds are missing or placeholder.

Visuals
> Looks more or less like the vids, maybe slightly less impressive in action.
> Most textures are very WIP.
> The UI is very barebones, with no clear descriptions yet.
> All the lighting and day/night effects are there. I also saw some lightning, but no rain effect, unfortunately.


Here's some screenies:
10oionl.jpg


Your typical scenery in the alpha.

qpf7de.jpg


Another typical bit of scenery, this time with a road.

4notv.jpg


The enemy, slowly shuffling in our direction


29c2kok.jpg


Another typical bit of scenery, a house with barn as well as a car wreck. You can also see a bonfire I made in the distance.

Jesus fuck, I can't decide which I hate more, photobucket or tinypic...


TL;DR

If you saw the vids, you more or less saw all what's there to see at the moment.
Procedural generation is there. Looks promising so far, but what you get for 13 dorra is an obvious alpha build.
 
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Azazel

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 4, 2012
Messages
481
Well, at least it looks more functional than DayZ:SA. Hopefully the zombie is a placeholder, I would dislike to have to fully toss this in the dustbin of "Another fucking Zombie sim, fuck!"
 

Major_Blackhart

Codexia Lord Sodom
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Jersey for now
This looks very good, I gotta say.
Wonder what games will come out with this thing.
Is he building just an engine for other people to make games or is he making the whole shebang?
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
Is he building just an engine for other people to make games or is he making the whole shebang?
I think he wants to pull a Mount and Blade - the base game will be STALKER-lite with random content, and the modders are free to dick around with it, make total conversions, et.
though it's yet to be seen how much is possible to mod (not a whole lot at the moment).

Also, from what I read, it's no longer a one-man project.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
I've yet to make a "stress" test with 100 zombies. So far, I have shit luck with their spawns and all I could muster was a crowd of four.
If I get my hands on some console commands, I'll be sure to take it for a spin.

Thus far, I'm pretty impressed, 24 hours after the launch and there were already 3 bugfixes.
Like I said, not a lot to do ATM apart from hiking, but I've made a few screenies for your pleasure. Turns out the game actually has some colors other than gloomy and doomy, it's just that I lucked out and my first few games began with stormy or overcast weather.

Still gloomy, but I got myself into a nice wooded hill, surrounded by a flat plain.

2vkko4p.jpg


There are small touches like this scattered around by the random algorithm
6p9qmg.jpg


And here's the wooded hill.
14o23w3.jpg


The other side of the hill
im4imv.jpg


And a moon
j5wbxg.jpg


I decided to crash and awoke in a much more colorful world:
x56psp.jpg

2dhd3lx.jpg


Down the road, I see some farm buildings with possible phat lewt
2dhfdvq.jpg


There's actually some flowers here and there to give a touch of color.
2w4edlz.jpg


Textures are pretty much WIP, but here's a nice pond with rocks,
2l9qq0m.jpg


And some dead trees marking irradiated areas. Getting close gives off a familiar crunch from the rad detector.
igkyz8.jpg
 

Major_Blackhart

Codexia Lord Sodom
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Jersey for now
Hmm, not bad. I doubt without console commands you could do an engine crunch.
The way things are right now, it seems more about the environment than about numbers.
I'd like to see what the AI becomes for later stuff, humans and shit.
 

Siel

Arcane
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Aug 25, 2013
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885
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Some refined shithole
Bought the game today. Played for about 2 hours.
I must say I'm quite impressed by how it looks so far (apart from the models that were obviously just placeholders) and how it runs for such a large world with a decent draw distance.
The procedural stuff works rather good too : a few problems here and there like houses being generated on roads but nothing game breaking and it overall looks coherent and logical.
I'm now interested at what the guy will do about the gameplay and especially the radioactivity. I would love to see some S.T.A.L.K.E.R inspirations like anomalies, mutants or emissions.
 
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spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
The alpha is getting 1-2 updates per day, each one brings small improvments, but mostly its about ironing out the bugs in the world generation algorithm and fixing crashes.
Though I have to say, I was really suprised, no crashes, game breaking bugs or compatibility issues for me --- from the very first build.

It's hard to say where it'll go, it has the physics and dynamic lighting to handle destructive environments, but wouldn't it kill the framerate? Hard to say. It's still early enough in development to make that kind of call.
Most likely, all the structures and object would have to be totally redone (no biggie, they're still early versions or placeholders).

The most needed feature atm - zone saving - is currently being worked on and should be up in one of the next updates this weekend.
 
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Siel

Arcane
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Some refined shithole
One thing is adding rain weather would be a plus to the athmosphere, especially during stormy days.
I also heard thunderbolts are actually physical elements and can strike you (meaning death). This is cool.
I'd love to see undergrounds, mines or caves. Don't know if it's planned.
 

Major_Blackhart

Codexia Lord Sodom
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Jersey for now
Thunderbolts striking you at random? Fucking awesome.
This engine looks great, and I'm glad to hear they're releasing updates regularly.
At least they seem to have their shit together.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
Update time.

So far its 9 updates in, it's mostly bugfixes and are now able to save the game.

Biggest news is that he recruited a supposedly well known Half Life 2 - Mxthe (he's worked on the UnderHell mod, never played HL2, so can't really say much).
Mxthe is now charged with making new building models and he's also giving another pass to all the existing textures. New update no. 10 featuring these should be up later this week.

There's some WIP screenies over here:
http://forums.lonelybitsgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=182
Definitely an improvement.
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
Well, I'll go buy it right away. It looks interesting enough and it's certainly seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of The Dead Linger with how frequently they're updating. It seems like one of those paid-for alphas where we might actually see the game release in the near future.

The real potential sounds like it lies in the modding, which I'd also like to have a gander at once that's available.
 

spectre

Arcane
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Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
Well, It doesn't look like a typical vaporware, so I'd say it's worth it if you want to throw some money at the dev. If you're looking to actually play it, it's still alpha (a very decent alpha, but still...), the gameplay is not there yet, apart from some shooting and lots and lots of hiking.
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
It played about 15 minutes and it looks promising. Not as performance intensive as I thought it would be based on what they said on the website, bit it's pretty anyway.

Sadly, I couldn't test it out for longer than that because the horrible head-bob was making me motion sick, even though I never get motion sick in games. I hope they fix that.
 

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,380
Update 14 will be rolling out next week. Previosuly it's been mostly engine upgrades, optimization and bugfixes, but from now on we should be getting some actual content and gameplay.
Here's a changelog for what's been happening in Alpha 2 to 13:
http://forums.lonelybitsgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=189

The current roadmap seems to be as follows:
http://forums.lonelybitsgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=282
Update 14 - new building models, new usable items, boomsticks and melee weapons, destructible crates that give loot.
Updates 15 -16 - will focus on the enemies we should see some added variety as well as a complete overhaul of navigation AI.

Update pace seems to be steady - one update per week, two weeks if there's been a major ovehaul of something.
 
Self-Ejected

Excidium

P. banal
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Aug 14, 2009
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Third World
Looks more like DayZ than STALKER. All those vast swathes of nothing whatsoever
 

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