Is there really no A-life?

[Jesus Tyrone Christ]

I've seen many discussions here about it, but there's also a lot of confusion if the game just spawns stuff at trigger points. I was really looking forward to them expanding on the system, to make it deeper, even more dynamic, and actually tie more gameplay features and incentives around it. But if I understand, they low-key "scammed" people by removing the A-life 2.0 from the product description just before release?

Does the game have no radio chatter? Does it have no patrols? Does it have no faction dynamics? Does it not have a list of nearby stalkers and their ranks? Do you never stumble on an aftermath of a fight that you just missed? Do you never stumble into an ongoing fight? Can you not wait stalkers or mutants to move and attack one another?

Also, is RTX 3070 even enough to run this game 60 fps without looking like vaseline lmao?

[Mr. Mutilation]

Joke: Q. What does the game stalker and the players both have in common?
A. They both need to get A-life

[ecoone]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ᴛᴀʟᴜ 🐦:

I wonder why they even accepted the game to be released without play testing it... Put 10 guys in a room to play the game "Who have experience with old stalker games and popular mods" and have them report the bugs they come across, easy... 90% of bugs found and fixed.

They did playtest the game which is why they added a totally different way stalkers and mutants act then the one they advertised with A-Life 2.0.
They did playtest the game which is why they removed the description of A-Life 2.0.

[Zombine3D]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ecoone:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ᴛᴀʟᴜ 🐦:

I wonder why they even accepted the game to be released without play testing it... Put 10 guys in a room to play the game "Who have experience with old stalker games and popular mods" and have them report the bugs they come across, easy... 90% of bugs found and fixed.

They did playtest the game which is why they added a totally different way stalkers and mutants act then the one they advertised with A-Life 2.0.
They did playtest the game which is why they removed the description of A-Life 2.0.

So they lied up till release?

[Carlos Spicywiener]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Zombine3D:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ecoone:

They did playtest the game which is why they added a totally different way stalkers and mutants act then the one they advertised with A-Life 2.0.
They did playtest the game which is why they removed the description of A-Life 2.0.

So they lied up till release?

More like a tactical retreat

[pillowcase]

Not sure what happened but it looks like A-Life did not get completed in terms of implementation. So they just made a random spawn system which is annoying as I'm noticing the longer I play that enemies just appear behind or to the side of me which is making playing the game and exploring more very frustrating. It will be a long while until its fully fixed which concerns me for the AI enemy behavior it currently has.

[JDumbz]

Walk across the zone yourself and make that judgment. For me, nothing happens. Resorted to use mods for a temp. fix but it's definitely not the best.

[HellGate]

Devs said is there and some code fragments, but wtf cares what the devs said is like CDPR with they CyberCrapPunk 2077 launch and than all excuses and lies after lies and still is they game not what they sold to the public hype hahahahah, but I think GSC devs are more proud about they game series, so is big big chance they will fix it, when is possible on UE5 power hungry crap engine :) Give GSC time to fix it and learn the first lesson on STEAM never Pre-Order and never go Early Access and complain about it hahaha

[Danny_47]

No, at the moment there is no A-Life. Whatever it's not working, not implemented or nonexistent is a different discussion. NPCs and mutants in the world just spawn based on triggers.

Easy to test examples:

- Open a container, enemies spawn behind you or behind the corner:
After the prologue, where the stash is in the downed helicopter. Look around, no dog, open container with a stash, dog spawns to the left of you. Go further down the road, rescue a loner from bandits and go into a fire anomaly cave behind the building. When going out the other side, Fleshes spawn to the left and loners to the right of the exit every time.

- When enter a specific area, not even related to the story:
In the bunker, next to old church in the swamp, walk out of the area and walk in again. Those same 5 rodents spawn literally every time you enter the bunker.

- NPCs or mutants re-spawn right next to you at the beginning of the new day, if you hang around the area you cleared.

- Mutants don't leave certain areas. Not even in parts not related to the story. When you run away, they pursue for a specific distance from their spawn point and then just return to their area.

- If you saved a game just seconds before "a random" encounter with a group of stalkers about 50-100m away from you, reload the save file. They won't be there anymore, which means they actually have triggered spawns and NPCs are not really persistent in the world.

So what is A-Life 2.0 even supposed to be, if the game already relies so much on fixed spawn, re-spawn and de-spawn rules? In previous game A-Life was basically just a system which allowed groups of NPC to move from point A to point B and engage anything which their faction considers hostile.
Anything close to A-Life which is advertised, came in mods like Anomaly/GAMMA, so I wound't be hoping for anything revolutionary in the vanilla game here...

[Mousakka]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von DopeDawg:

There is a vid on reddit. A player scopes in to a tower, there is an enemy standing, then a player takes 2 steps back and this enemy disappears. Then he takes 2 steps forward and enemy spawns again.

That's A life 2.0

That could easily be just the render distance working as intended, the game cant be displaying everything everywhere, otherwise its going to run worse than it already does

It could just also be zone loading working like any other Open- SemiOpen world game

[Zmidponk]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Willow tree bear:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Zmidponk:

This is just wrong. Modders are having problems directly accessing the A-Life files, but they are definitely there. Some mods have had limited success with tweaking A-Life configs and duck-taping things together to fix issues with it like this one:

https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/210

That would not be possible if it simply weren't present.

My experience in the unmodded game is that A-Life is trying to work, but it's not doing it very well. As an example, early in the game, I was trying to get a stash that was guarded by mutated dogs. A patrol spawned in beside me and took them out for me before going on their merry way.

As pointed out by some in the comments attached to this mod, there is still no offline simulation occurring, even with the mod applied. So what we have is a broken system attempting to give the illusion of the system that existed in the old games, but isn't really capable of the same things. If all we have access to is the online simulation components, is it really accurate to say that A-life exists?

Well, which is it? Are the files simply not present in the build, or are they present, but not working correctly? Those are actually two different things.

From what I've seen, both personally playing the game, and what others have shown, A-Life works in a glitchy manner near to you, but, because it's only working near to you, when it tries to do the things it's supposed to, it doesn't really work very well, hence things like enemies spawning behind you from thin air, and so on and so forth. This is possibly due to a conflict between A-Life and a spawn system built in to the UE5 engine, but that's not 100% confirmed.

This mod is a band-aid. A stop-gap. Not a true fix. Even the maker of the mod says that.
Hence why I pointed out mods have had limited success. However, it does mitigate some of the really annoying issues with the unmodded game, and improve the A-Life system at the cost of performance by essentially making the spawn and AI director system part work at up to ten times the distance from you that it does in the unmodded game.