Articles - STALKER Complete 2009 mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl

The Complete mod was designed by professional artists experienced in creating believable 3D environments. It features artistic and programming works from many community members, unified under a single art direction. The game has been redesigned with new visual qualities, and is offered as a one convenient package meant to be accessible to a user base beyond the hardcore modding community. This mod has been created with a thought of bringing the beautiful and immersive game of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl from the previous generation to an up-to-date experience you’d expect from games being developed today. You’ll notice every single detail has been retouched and has a polished feel to it.

This is an ideal package for new players or people who finished the game in the past and are now coming back to replay it on newer, more powerful hardware with improved resolution and graphics.

STALKER Complete 2009 defined the standards for making S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods, and its successful formula has inspired many similar projects.

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

Version 1.4.4

Developed by a professional art studio, the weather system in Stalker Complete 2009 is a pinnacle of visual game design. It’s based on the same elements and principles usually found in representational art such as an aerial perspective, composition, balance, and color theory. The key features include:

• Natural multi-phase day and night transitions, based on daily observations, photographs, and environmental studies
• Vast distant views, creating a large open world around the player
• New multi-phase moon design and space objects authored by Artistpavel
• Proper sun travel according to date and geographic location
• Enhanced high dynamic range lighting and sun effects creating picturesque sunsets and sunrises
• Increased weather cycling
• Different types of storms, fast and slow wind conditions
• Wet surfaces during rain
• High resolution nighttime constellation map
• Improved water animations

(authors: Artistpavel, Argus, Trojanuch, Sergy172)

This mod takes the full advantage of Shader Model 3.0, an advanced rendering technology. It allows to create an illusion of a true relief and depth for a next-gen look. Improvements include:

• Parallax Occlusion Mapping - gives 2D textures the illusion of 3D geometry, most visible on surfaces such as brick walls
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion - a shading method that approximates the way light radiates in real life, creating soft shadows in corner-type places with a difficult lighting sample
• Depth of Field - an effect that creates a gradual decrease in sharpness determined by the subject distance. For example, a distant landscape will appear blurry when compared to closer objects
• Particle system - enhanced rendering of fire, explosions, smoke, muzzle, sparks, falling leaves, anomalies, fog, and more
• Water Shaders - improved water effects ported from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky.
• Fire Dynamic Lighting - fire now illuminates the surroundings, casting dynamic shadows

(authors: Sky4CE, Eggchen, NatVac)

This mod includes a texture overhaul featuring the Photorealistic Zone, a total rework of every texture in game by Argus over a nine month period. Special attention has been given to preserve the game’s unique look while the original textures have been replaced with higher quality versions and manually bump-edited files. The textures are heavily optimized to reduce performance impact. Elements that are improved include:

• Locations - all textures replaced with higher quality photographs with partial use of original files, creating highly detailed outdoor and indoor environments
• Living Creatures - Mutated creatures have soaking wet flesh showing through wounds, creating a disturbingly graphic effect. Also, all humans in the Zone have been retouched down to finest details (armor, shoes, wrinkles, faces, even their eyeballs)
• Vehicles - 20 year old vehicles in the Zone now appear rusted and abandoned

(authors: Argus, Domestos)

The game’s notorious reputation of being a huge bugfest ends here. Over the 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 the release of the unofficial community patch, bug fixes and numerous positive gameplay tweaks are implemented, such as realistic weapons names, reduced head bobbing, increased actor’s height, extended quest times, and more.

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

Artificial Intelligence received a major reworking:

• New abilities - NPCs can avoid anomalies, remove dead bodies from camp sites, throw grenades, change armor, and even heal other NPCs. You can also give weapons and armor to NPCs by selling or dropping it near them and giving them privacy to equip them (NPCs have preferences and may deny the items)
• Early detection fix - removed the ability for NPC's to notice you from across the map
• Stealth - knife and other critical sounds such as falling dead bodies, grass, and footsteps have been properly commented to reduce their sound radius, making the stealth gameplay possible.
• Death panic - reduced the sound distance of death cries (in the original game it caused the entire camp to alert once one member was hit, as it was set to be heard at a great distance).

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

This mod replaces a massive amount of in-game sounds, including weapons, anomalies, equipment clatter, footsteps, nightlife, bullet fly-by sounds and more with higher quality versions. Also, the mod adds unique ambient sounds for each weather cycle. “Repetitive” NPCs will now only say their lines once (such as the “Get out of here, stalker”), and hundreds of additional ambient sounds like bar kitchen cooking, nighttime horror sounds, fog sounds, and more, creating a more immersive audio experience.

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

The mod also adds a new music collection, featuring 84 new 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 the ambient soundtrack, and makes you want to spend more time by the campfire. Also, NPCs will now randomly play the harmonica in addition to the guitar. Finally, 19 authentic music tracks can be heard on the radio and from the megaphones throughout the Zone (Warning: this may trigger YouTube copyright strike, delete the radio music before streaming a Let’s Play)

(authors: Artistpavel, MulleR, Mongol)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is not exactly a textbook example when it comes to localization. Misspelled words, typos, grammatical errors, and a humor lost in translation can be charming at times given the context, but creating an unnecessary difficulty in understanding the game. Most of the text received a grammar-friendly rewrite, providing a greatly improved English localization. A multi-language patch exists for Chinese, Czech, Hispanic, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian languages.

(authors: Tharawdeal, Onionradish, Dethtoll)

A more intuitive custom user interface and a HUD. The interface incorporates existing in-game art and photographs of actual Chernobyl disaster zone artifacts, adding a 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 the level name, in-game date, and timestamp each time it’s used.

(authors: Artistpavel, NatVac)

• Sleeping Bag - it’s 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, and kills will no longer cause extreme ragdoll effects
• Destructible bulbs - you can shoot the lights out!
• Gnomus' Scopes - high resolution scopes for widescreen 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 rare item is to loot it from NPC’s corpses
• Repair Services - the bar trader and Screw now sell weapons and armor repair services.
• Chernobyl TV - replaced the original TV animation with actual Chernobyl footage.
• Elite Nightvision - black & white night vision based on the psy_antenna postprocess effect, helps to balance for the darker night time
• ZRP Teleport - the ESC+J shortcut lets you fast travel between the points in the environment
• Third-Person View - Press F1, F2 and F3 to cycle through camera views and + 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)
• Bandages auto-apply at 10% health (optional) - a more forgiving survivability feature
• Anti-rad injection system (optional) - a smart AI powered scientific suit function
• Other features - authentic food and drink skins, the ability to drag dead creatures’ bodies (Shift+F), the ability to carry selected explosive fuel cans & barrels, the ability to shoot birds, and more!

After your journey ends with the “good” ending, you’ll get the dialogue that will let you continue the game in a freeplay mode, allowing creatures and NPCs to spread out freely in the environment. 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 players will still have the enjoyment of viewing the cinematic completion of the game. You can skip the entire story line from the start by pressing ESC+T while in-game and teleporting to the 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 a difference in overall experience. ReadMe contains an extended list of mods and their respective authors who have contributed to this project.

This mod will run smooth as long as you have a video card with Shader Model 3.0/4.0 and enough VRAM to accommodate high quality textures. This is the DirectX9 and the X-Ray engine at their full potential and the best looking mod for this game.

Someone wrote:

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]

Someone wrote:

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]

Someone wrote:

[...] 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]

Someone wrote:

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

[pcgameshardware.com]

Someone wrote:

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]

The time has finally arrived, the moment everyone on ModDB has been waiting for. After countless days spent voting, promoting and deciding it all comes down to this. 10 final placements for the very best mods that 2010 has seen. The victor will be able to stand tall against great mods like Project Reality, Natural Selection and MechWarrior! A big thanks to all those people who voted, its been a hell of a year and what better way to end it then announcing the Mod of the Year 2010.

To qualify for the top 10, the mod must place higher than it has in previous years and must have had a significant update in 2010. Otherwise an honorable mention is given, which these teams have received:

It is hard to knock a good mod down, that mod without a doubt this year is Project Reality. However being previous winner means Project Reality has reached the highest point, so they cannot place again. Thats just how good PR really is!
While Renegade X might be moving away from the modding scene with their UDK version players still decided that Renegade X would place high, just not high enough.
While MechWarrior: Living Legends may have already placed the highest it possibly can, it never stopped people from voting. To bad you can't beat being one of the top mods.
It has been a while since GoldenEye: Source has managed to place in the top 10 since the release of 1.0 popularity seemed to skyrocket! Lets hope they keep it up for next years event!
Always the brides maid never the bride Sven Co-op has been in every single MOTY event coming really close but never placing high enough to win.
Placing very high again this year Zombie Panic: Source just missed out placing once again this year.
Another mod just missing out on the top spot is Star Wars Mod: Galactic Warfare still well within the top 10 for Honorable Mentions!
The only mod to miss out on getting a spot in the top 10 only because they did not have any updates this year is STALKER Complete quite an accomplishment!

10Eleven Eighty Seven
Almost a decade after the black mesa incident which opened up the portal storms you find yourself trying to cope with its aftermath. They came without warning and swept the world. For no apparent reason you've been approached as in a dream by a man in a suit. Having no idea of what's going on all you can do is try to stay alive.
9Half-Life 2: Wars
brings the struggle between the human resistance and their Combine overlords to a real-time strategy setting. It features 3 game modes: Antlion Skirmish, Antlion Capture the Point, and Overrun, showcasing the Antlion and Combine playable factions. Future releases will include skirmish matches between Resistance and Combine.
8Blitzkrieg
touts a impressive list of new features such as a much more realistic Weapon damage system, many new skins for infantry and tanks (and wrecks) also including many own made tank skins, many new units for all factions, modified and enlarged Commander Trees (now 16 Upgrades!), new abilities, new sounds and recommended new maps included.
7C&C: Shockwave
aims to make Zero Hour a more interesting game with more diversity between the generals, making you think twice before you select a certain general, and overall provide more choices, diversity, and strategic freedom than in Zero Hour - while keeping the spirit and design direction of the original Generals game and storyline.
6Nehrim: At Fate's Edge
is a Total Conversion for the RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It is a self-contained game that bases upon the Oblivion game engine, but has no relation to Oblivion's lore. It is a world in which neither Tamriel nor any other TES based name exists. The continent itself on which the game is situated is called Nehrim, it is completely independent from the base game.
5Eastern Front
is a mod for Company of Heroes. Following the ethos of mimicking a Relic Entertainment expansion pack, Eastern Front has succeeded in adding a full Soviet faction packed with unique and exciting units to the existing armies - a feat never before achieved in the Company of Heroes world.
4Multi Theft Auto
is a multiplayer mod ("modification") for the Microsoft Windows version of Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that adds an otherwise absent online multiplayer component.
3Third Age - Total War
is a total conversion modification for 'Medieval II: Total War - Kingdoms Expansion' that brings you into the world of Middle-Earth. The Production has been going since March 2008 and the mod is still well under development and boasts a variety of new features.
2Nightmare House 2
is a total conversion for Half-Life 2. You wake up inside an abandoned hospital with no understanding of how you came to be there, only a vague memory of the girl from Nightmare House haunts you. Soon it will be difficult to determine between a dream and reality. How long will it take you to realize that escape is not an option?
1Forgotten Hope 2
is a mod for Battlefield 2. It aims to portrait World War II in a way no other multi-player first person shooter have done before, with a focus on historical accuracy and tactical gameplay. You can play as represent many different countries as a soldier and utilize an extensive arsenal of weapons and vehicles that accurately portrait the assets available in the real battles.

Three years ago when the 3rd generation of consoles launched many said "PC gaming is dead" along with mods and indies. Two years ago at the 2008 GDC conference, I attended a presentation by Introversion Software (makers of the great Darwinia game among others) who claimed they were "the last of the bedroom programmers". Last year Modern Warfare 2 shunned PC gamers and modders, but not before taking all of their best ideas. And yet here we are, stronger and more relevant than ever, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and the efforts of independent developers like you, who continue to push the bar and create great games and mods which cannot be ignored.

We have a feeling 2010 is going to be a brilliant year (we hope to change the game by publicly releasing Desura), but before that happens let's look back at the year that was 2009. This article is merely a warm-up piece before the big show (i.e. presenting the years best mods and games as selected by the editors and you, the players), so check back in a weeks time for the good stuff. In the mean time, here are a few fun facts for you to discuss, before we roll out the red carpet.

Hordes of zombies... braaaaaains!

What do Left-4-Dead, The Ball, Zombie Driver, Killing Floor, Zombie Panic, Zombie Slayer, Flesh and Situation Outbreak all have in common? Zombies it seems and plenty of them (sorry you don't get a cookie for answering correctly).

Ye of little faith

When the English version of Cube Experimental came out, I thought it would amount to little more than a few Fallout 3 colored kill boxes... boy was I wrong. You can read about my discovery in this WSIP article I wrote after it had just come out.

Success is only a stones throw away

Nothing warms our heart more than seeing a mod rise up and take the games world by storm. This year thanks to Tripwire Interactive, the UT2004 mod Killing Floor did just that, dominating Steams selling charts (outpacing L4D for a while) and is mostly loved by all that play it.

The year of music

Last year had many solid releases, and many released OST's (official soundtrack) along with them. First we saw the release of the NeoTokyo OST which had a lot of care both in sound and packaging, then we had The Nameless Mod OST. There where many others but these two stood tall, thanks to the incredible amount of care and effort put in.

Get out of here S.T.A.L.K.E.R

Back in May of 2009 artistpavel released a S.T.A.L.K.E.R overhaul pack called Stalker Complete 2009. What followed is hard to believe... 6 brand new profiles all doing the exact same thing, all trying to take one step more than the last, and mold S.T.A.L.K.E.R into their own rendition.

A Rock Star without Rock'n'Roll

Lets talk about Decadence, the 2v2 Half-Life 2 mod that burst onto the scene this year, with innovative ideas and the potential to pack a punch. Fast forward a few months, and the school team that made the mod have moved on and the multiplayer-only mod cannot be played even if you want to. The post mortem is the only remaining evidence that it even existed in the first place.

So what was your highlight / lowlight of 2009?

Please enlighten us... comments, discussion and debate welcome! Oh and sit tight, because in a weeks time we will begin announcing the 2009 Players and Editors Choice Mod and Indie Game of the Year.

2009 has been a fantastic year for modding and indie gaming. With the highest amount of recorded featured releases ever on ModDB it can still go over the heads of most of our visitors. Even with the help of the monthly ModDB Spotlight and the brand new Why Should I Play feature it still can be tough to soak in all the goodness that our dedicated community of Modders seems to be able to come up with. So as a last ditch effort to help bring out all the mods you SHOULD have played here is a year in review.

October 2009

With the spookiness of Halloween taking over, October was a very odd month for modding. With a very large resurgence of Stalker graphical mods (seriously there would have been at leased 3 different graphical mods for Stalker) October has been a great month for modding.

2009 has been a fantastic year for modding and indie gaming. With the highest amount of recorded featured releases ever on ModDB it can still go over the heads of most of our visitors. Even with the help of the monthly ModDB Spotlight and the brand new Why Should I Play feature it still can be tough to soak in all the goodness that our dedicated community of Modders seems to be able to come up with. So as a last ditch effort to help bring out all the mods you SHOULD have played here is a year in review.

May 2009

A very Unreal month, in the literal sense! With the MSU Phase 3 contest finishing up a large selection of UT3 mods appeared on the ModDB radar for the month of May. Not only is UT3 popular we also have had a large selection of Indie games update/release as well, a very good month for modding!