Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 1 month agoAnomaly? 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.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 month ago
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.
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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?
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 month ago
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.
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.