The video you sent me pushed me into another marathon of mod browsing so thanks for that… Nah, seriously - thanks! I found another 5 or so mods to try out already, though most of them are gameplay related rather than graphical ones.
I was actually planning to try out the Alife collection for AI changes as they seem like a promising set of improvements. Have you tried them? Are they any good or are there others you’d recommend over (or in addition to) those?
Which is the Alife collection? (EDIT: I see in the description that this is indeed the Alife collection. No idea how it is but I know from Discords that this is very popular atm). I think what most people are playing with now is Alife+, although that got released a few months after I stopped playing the last time so I have no first hand accounts of it. I do have a couple of good AI mods in that sheet I linked, like Semi-Radiant AI and rank-based travel.
Useful Idiots that I already recommended is in my opinion essential for companions (and includes the functionality of the He Is With Me mod you already have installed, I would just replace that with it). Companions Disable Headlamps In Stealth is also good, I’m trying to remember if there is a newer version somewhere though. There might be.
These were just some off the top of my head, I’m probably forgetting something.
Yeah, by collection I meant all of the modules, including Alife+. According to the description it’s more of an extension to the vanilla system rather than an override so it should be compatible with at least some of the stuff you mentioned (probably, we’ll see). Thanks for the links, as always.
I don’t really care for playing with companions to be honest, not at the moment anyway. The only reason I downloaded “He Is With Me” was to test it with a specific situation during a rescue quest. That said, I’ll keep those mods in mind if I start longing for a party.
That’s fair enough. I personally love playing with companions, especially since the TALKER mod with AI dialogue lets you have some really fun emergent narratives and role playing.
Yeah, it’s mostly a mix of “I don’t trust them to act I as I want” and “I don’t like feeling responsible for AI”. It’s not really a Stalker thing either, I just like wandering on my own in games. I’ll most likely give them a shot here just to test things out but that’s about as far as my plans go for companionship at the moment.
I’m always wary when it comes to gen-AI powered NPCs. On one hand I can appreciate the idea and the dream of having truly unique virtual characters, on the other I have rather… strong feelings towards gen-AI (for multiple reasons) and don’t really want to interact with it or support it in any way. At least TALKER has Ollama support so that’s something.
That’s totally fair. Even though I like using companions I don’t always use them, the lonely desolate vibe is definitely part of the charm of STALKER.
I totally respect a dogmatic anti-AI stance. I hate gen AI for most things, in particular art - where I want absolutely zero AI. I personally think dynamic dialogue in a sandbox game is one of the best use cases for it, but I still do hate the intellectual property theft and environmental impact.
I’d love to be able to approach the topic from a more neutral or even positive stance (I really like the idea of AI on a conceptual level) but I simply hate how it came to be and how it functions nowadays. Existence of open source models does help but it’s not easy to change my mind on this with all the other stuff surrounding the tech. Well, that and I don’t have the hardware to run local models anyway.
The video you sent me pushed me into another marathon of mod browsing so thanks for that… Nah, seriously - thanks! I found another 5 or so mods to try out already, though most of them are gameplay related rather than graphical ones.
I was actually planning to try out the Alife collection for AI changes as they seem like a promising set of improvements. Have you tried them? Are they any good or are there others you’d recommend over (or in addition to) those?
Which is the Alife collection? (EDIT: I see in the description that this is indeed the Alife collection. No idea how it is but I know from Discords that this is very popular atm). I think what most people are playing with now is Alife+, although that got released a few months after I stopped playing the last time so I have no first hand accounts of it. I do have a couple of good AI mods in that sheet I linked, like Semi-Radiant AI and rank-based travel.
Otherwise like ReDone Combat AI, RE:Vision, Stealth are popular mods. Probably also want Decreased Enemy Bush Hearing Distance, Zone NPCs Can’t See Through Bushes and Zone Mutants Can’t See Through Bushes and Ghillie Rework. Some of these mods probably need some minor compatibility work for script merging or at least load order management.
Useful Idiots that I already recommended is in my opinion essential for companions (and includes the functionality of the He Is With Me mod you already have installed, I would just replace that with it). Companions Disable Headlamps In Stealth is also good, I’m trying to remember if there is a newer version somewhere though. There might be.
These were just some off the top of my head, I’m probably forgetting something.
Yeah, by collection I meant all of the modules, including Alife+. According to the description it’s more of an extension to the vanilla system rather than an override so it should be compatible with at least some of the stuff you mentioned (probably, we’ll see). Thanks for the links, as always.
I don’t really care for playing with companions to be honest, not at the moment anyway. The only reason I downloaded “He Is With Me” was to test it with a specific situation during a rescue quest. That said, I’ll keep those mods in mind if I start longing for a party.
That’s fair enough. I personally love playing with companions, especially since the TALKER mod with AI dialogue lets you have some really fun emergent narratives and role playing.
Yeah, it’s mostly a mix of “I don’t trust them to act I as I want” and “I don’t like feeling responsible for AI”. It’s not really a Stalker thing either, I just like wandering on my own in games. I’ll most likely give them a shot here just to test things out but that’s about as far as my plans go for companionship at the moment.
I’m always wary when it comes to gen-AI powered NPCs. On one hand I can appreciate the idea and the dream of having truly unique virtual characters, on the other I have rather… strong feelings towards gen-AI (for multiple reasons) and don’t really want to interact with it or support it in any way. At least TALKER has Ollama support so that’s something.
That’s totally fair. Even though I like using companions I don’t always use them, the lonely desolate vibe is definitely part of the charm of STALKER.
I totally respect a dogmatic anti-AI stance. I hate gen AI for most things, in particular art - where I want absolutely zero AI. I personally think dynamic dialogue in a sandbox game is one of the best use cases for it, but I still do hate the intellectual property theft and environmental impact.
I’d love to be able to approach the topic from a more neutral or even positive stance (I really like the idea of AI on a conceptual level) but I simply hate how it came to be and how it functions nowadays. Existence of open source models does help but it’s not easy to change my mind on this with all the other stuff surrounding the tech. Well, that and I don’t have the hardware to run local models anyway.