[Mod] STALKER Complete 2009

This poster was created entirely from in-game screenshots, except for main character, this is what the game really looks like with SC2009.

Version 1.4.3 (660MB)

[language patch]

If you haven't played 2007 most immersive, atmospheric shooter, or you're back for replay, this mod is for you. The world of STALKER like you've never seen before with graphics 2.0. It significantly updates the game, while preserving the original story and gameplay. The game that took almost 10 years to make is finally finished and complete.

What makes this mod different?

It was designed by professional graphic artists with rich experience in the field, following industry standards for creating interactive 3D environments. It features work by many authors from Stalker community under one art direction, redesigned with new visual qualities and offered as one convenient package to reach user base beyond modding community.

STALKER Complete 2009

Version 1.4.3 by artistpavel

This mod has been created with a thought of bringing the beautiful and immersive game of STALKER from the last generation era, when it was created to an up-to-date experience you'd expect from games you play in 2009. I did not try change the game beyond recognition, but rather enhance it while keeping the core elements that made it so great. The following list is the carefully chosen essential collection of most advanced and aesthetically pleasant modifications, created by talented modders, concept artists and programmers in the past 2 years. These are meant to technically and artistically enhance the game without compromising the original feel and atmosphere developers meant you to see. You'll notice every single detail has been retouched and has a polished feel to it.

This is ideal for first time players or people who beat the game when it first came out and now are coming back to replay it on new rig with higher resolution and better graphics.

Natural lighting, vast panoramic views, depth of field, parallax mapping, SSAO, over 900 reworked texture files, including vehicles and armor suites with manual bump editing, you won't believe it's the same game.

Summary:

Developed by a professional art studio, the weather system in STALKER Complete 2009 is the pinnacle of visual game design. It features work by several artists, including challenge winners from conceptart.org, the biggest concept art community producing work for games and movie industries. It's based on the same elements and principals found in representational art, such as aerial perspective, composition, balance, color theory, to name a few. The key features include:

• Natural multi-phase day and night transition, based on daily observations, photographs and studies by artists from Dolgov Studio.
• Vast distant views, creating large open world around player.
• New multi-phase moon design authored by our studio.
• Proper sun travel according to date (01.05.2012) and geographic location (Ukraine).
• Enhanced High Dynamic Range lighting and Sun effects (including realistic sunsets and sunrises).
• Number of weather cycles multiplied.
• Different types of storms, fast and slow.
• Wet surfaces during rain.
• High resolution star constellation map.
• Improved water animations.

(authors: Dolgov Studio, Argus-textures, Trojanuch, Sergy172)

This mod takes full advantage of Shader Model 3.0/4.0 and introduces advanced shader technology first seen in Crysis and now being adopted by recent games, creating close-to-life illusion of true relief and depth, plus additional rendering techniques creating an enormous difference in the way the game looks:

• Parallax Occlusion Mapping - gives 2D textures the illusion of 3D geometry, can be clearly seen on surfaces such as brick walls.
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - a shading method, approximating the way light radiates in real life, creating soft shadows in corners and hard to reach places.
• Depth of Field - a gradual decrease in sharpness, determined by the subject distance, for example a distant landscape will appear blurrier compared to near by objects.
• Motion Blur - a streaking effect frequently used to show a sense of speed, when camera moves fast.
• Particle system - enhanced rendering of fire, explosions, smoke, muzzle, sparks, falling leaves, anomalies, fog, etc.
• Water Shaders - improved water effects ported from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky.
• Fire Dynamic Lighting - fire illuminates the surroundings, casting dynamic shadows.

(authors: Sky4CE, Eggchen, NatVac)

A texture overhaul featuring the "Photorealistic Zone", a total rework of every texture in game by Argus over a 9 month period. Special attention has been given to preserve the game’s original look while textures have been replaced with higher quality versions and manually bump edited files. Textures are heavily optimized to reduce performance drop.

• Locations - all textures replaced with higher quality photographs with partial use of original files and assets from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky.
• Living Creatures - mutated creatures have soaking wet flesh showing through wounds, it's almost disturbing. All humans in Zone have been retouched down to finest details, armor, shoes, wrinkles, faces, even eye balls.
• Vehicles - 20 year old vehicles in the Zone now appear realistically rusty and abandoned.

(authors: Argus-textures, Domestos)

STALKER's notorious reputation of bug-ridden-like-an-anthill title ends here. Over the past 2 years, a joint community effort has accumulated fixes for most known bugs and "crash to desktop" exits left out by developers after patch 1.0005, with release of the unofficial community patch, which in addition adds numerous positive gameplay tweaks, like real weapons names, reduced head bobbing, increased actor's height, expanded carry weight limit, extended quest time, etc. (the list is endless).

(authors: NatVac, Fatrap, Victim, DC-, silverpower, omero, Decane, fitzroy_doll, motiv-8, BobBQ, Snowball, TSL16b, Eggchen, barin, Alex-Tommy, GSC forums...)

Artificial Intelligence received major reworking:

• New abilities - NPCs can avoid anomalies, remove dead bodies from camp sites, throw grenades, change armor, heal other NPCs. You can also give weapons and armor to NPCs by selling or dropping it near them and giving them a privacy to change, they may not accept it based on preferences, if they do, they will use new stuff.
• Early detection - removed the ability for NPC's to notice you at unrealistically large distances.
• Stealth - knife and other critical sounds such as falling dead bodies, grass, footsteps, have been properly commented to reduce their sound radius.
• Death panic - reduced the sound distance of death cries, in original game it was the cause of panic of the whole camp population, once one member was hit, as it was set to 40 meters).

(authors: xStream, BAC9-FLCL, KoGar, Darius6, {imperialreign}, MulleR, Mongol)

Mod replaces massive amount of sounds in game, including weapons, anomalies, equipment clatter, footsteps, nightlife, bullet fly-by sounds and more with quality equivalents. Adds unique ambient sounds for each weather cycle, repetitive NPCs only pronounce their lines once, i.e. "Get out of here stalker", hundreds of additional ambient sounds like bar kitchen cooking, horror night and fog sounds, etc.

(authors: Darius6, {imperialreign}, MulleR, Mongol)

New music collection, featuring 84 additional acoustic guitar compositions added to the existing set plus a few vocal songs in authentic language, unique to each faction. This is the only music mod where compositions have been performed live and recorded specifically for this game by a musician, no MIDI or generic karaoke tracks were used. This is live music with human touch that blends seamlessly with ambient soundtrack and makes you wish spending more time near camp fire. In addition, 19 authentic music tracks can be heard on the radio and megaphones throughout the Zone. NPCs will now randomly play the harmonica as well as the guitar.

(authors: Dolgov Studio, MulleR, Mongol)

STALKER is not exactly a textbook example when it comes to localization. Misspelled words, typos, grammar errors, and humor lost in translation can be charming at times given the context, yet creating unnecessary difficulty when attempting to understand. Most of this mod’s text received a grammar-friendly rewrite, providing a much improved English localization.

(authors: Tharawdeal, Onionradish, Dethtoll)

A successful graphic overhaul mod can't be complete without custom user interface, this is why we are proud to present our very own new Main Menu, Loading Screen, and redesigned HUD, created by a our graphic design firm, incorporating existing in-game art and photographs of real Chernobyl tragedy artefacts, adding unique art style and authentic feel. Certain buttons have been conveniently reorganized for more intuitive access and new shortcuts added, such as ESC+S which works like a “smart quick-save” creating a separate save file with level name, in-game date, and time (example: 01_escape_2012-05-01_0535.sav) each time it’s used.

(authors: Dolgov Studio, NatVac)

• Sleeping Bag - always in the inventory and allows the player sleep in game.
• Faction Change and Reset - now players have the ability to reset hostile status and join factions outside of the storyline.
• Ragdoll Physics - natural death and hit animation, kills will no longer cause corpse ragdoll to fly backwards.
• Bulb tweak - now you can shoot the lights out!
• Gnomus' Scopes - high resolution scopes for widescreen and standard monitors.
• Repair Kit - a special item to the game that allows you to repair weapons and armors out in the Zone. The only way to get this item is to loot it from a NPC's corpse.
• Repair Services - Bar trader and Screw now sell weapons and armor repair services.
• Chernobyl TV - replaced TV animation with actual footage about Chernobyl.
• Elite Nightvision - black & white nightvision based on the psy_antenna postprocess effect. This one really makes you see in the dark.
• ZRP Teleport - ESC+J shortcut lets you jump between the points in the environment.
• Third-Person View - press F1, F2 and F3 to cycle through camera views; numpad + or - to zoom in/out (by default this feature enables camera toggle only, add -psp switch to a shortcut to activate a third-person gameplay, please refer to Technical FAQ page 15 for assistance).
• Other features - authentic food and drinks skins, ability to drag dead creatures' bodies, ability to carry selected explosive fuel cans, barrels, shoot birds, and more.

After your journey ends with "good" ending, you'll get the dialog that will let you continue the game in freeplay mode, allowing creatures and NPCs migrate freely, it will be a living and breathing zone with self sustained A-Life and unscripted events. This feature doesn't remove the ending scene so you can enjoy it. You can skip the entire story line from the start by pressing ESC+T while in game and teleporting to last map or by clicking Freeplay and "equip for level" to start from the first map.

There is also a large number of small subtle changes that make big difference in overall experience. ReadMe contains extended list of mods and their respective authors who contributed to this project.

Designed and tested for STALKER version 1.0005/1.0006. Starting a new game is required!

This mod will run smooth as long as you have a video card with Shader Model 3.0/4.0 and large amount of memory to accommodate textures, it performs better than S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky/Call of Pripyat, while providing similar and often better visuals, it's DirectX9 and the X-Ray engine at full potential.

Screenshots:

Weather, environments, textures, interiors:

[Flickr]

Reviews:

Lighting – the new day-night cycle’s particularly spectacular – and textures are what’s most lovingly touched by the hand of mod, but on the non-graphical front much of the in-game text gets a more grammar-friendly rewrite and the HUD receives a much-needed overhaul.

[rockpapershotgun.com]

[...] the graphical changes are immediately smack-you-in-the-face obvious. It's stunning. Whereas looking at old STALKER made me think of, well, a 2007 eastern European PC title, the texture and shader upgrades in STALKER Complete 2009 made the place instantly come alive.

[gamerswithjobs.com]

Stalker Complete 2009 combines several modifications that improve Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl in matters of graphics, gameplay and atmosphere.

[pcgameshardware.com]

As mods go this is one of the most subtle imaginable. It does not attempt to change the atmosphere or effect of the game world, but simple to enhance it. 900 new textures, an improved sky and weather system, and the introduction of expanded graphics options make this one of the most exquisitely beautiful experiences ever to grace a gaming system. [...] this is, finally, the finished and complete version of Stalker - as good as it could possibly have been on release.

[eurogamer.net]

This is the "STALKER Complete 2009" mod [...], which does an admirable job of making the game look like it was, well, made in 2009. New textures, new lighting and new weather effects help get the game looking ship-shape...

[kotaku.com]

New main menu art based on real photographs from Chernobyl zone, I placed items one by one as I was looking through pages of disaster documentaries. Contains references to labs X16 and X18 and in-game items.

Download:

Version 1.4.3 (660MB)

[language patch]

Technical FAQ, please read all, contains answers for many common questions. Updated regulary.

Compatibility:

• Retail DVD versions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl game with 1.0005 (also works with v1.0006) patch
• Direct2Drive digital copy with Digital Distribution 1.0005 patch
• Steam (launch & exit the game at least once, check for version 1.0005 and install the mod)

For languages: Czech, Hispanic, French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian, please download and install the international patch, otherwise your game won't start:

[international localization]

Check this thread regarding the upcoming arsenal of new weapons: [new weapons]

Credits:

Designed and compiled by artistpavel. Thanks to all modders who contributed to this project:

Argus, Trojanuch, Combragol, Sky4CE, Lucian04, Atrocious, Don Reba, EggChen, Natvac, Steel, Wobosh, Domestos, BAC9-FLCL, XiaNi, {imperialreign}, Hades, Gnomus, sergy172, Autologic, Hectorol, Darius6, MulleR, Mongol, Idoe, Nandersen, Shebuka, xStream, KoGar, OcramX, Tharawdeal, Onionradish, Zero_3, Dethtoll, MacroN, GadGett, eveNT.

Special thanks to tweakguides.com for providing an essential information, which laid the basis for creating this mod.