S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

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Roadside Panic & Reddit Panic

This post on the front page cites my modpage and my claims about the a-life system - funny enough a chunk of text that I was editing at the time of the post was quoted out of context.

Roadside Panic is one of a couple of alife tweaks on the nexus that increases the alife online radius in Stalker 2 with uses janky workarounds to make the broken spawns in the game work better. It is also an unstable mod that probably crashes your game.

Note: I have been called a "clueless bullshitter" for my claims on the Roadside Panic mod page - admittedly I first made a fancy modpage with an offensively ornate “the Director is the zone” bit for a set of cvar tweaks while leaving technical details scant. My documentation of the system on the modpage had been left incomplete - until now. Because of the scant details it might have looked like I was upselling a snake oil “TurnOnAlife=True” tweak - I was in fact not bullshitting, but rather busy actually researching and testing the system with others on the gamma discord (IYKYK). I wanted to be sure of my claims about the existing ALife2.0 system before actually documenting it.

I have actually been meaning to make a reddit post clarifying conceptions about A-Life 2.0 too, but again, I wanted to be sure that my theories were correct. Without access to game code, research was done “blind” by testing the variables called by game scripts, as well as referencing the S2 code header dump on github.

But this is a bit of a difficult post because A) everyone is mad about it and B) due to the nature of testing variables without source code, what I’m saying is a web of both reasonable assumptions and actual evidence. C) it is difficult to convey that the system seems very different and it remains to be seen whether it works as well as a-life 1.0, but it is an ambitious simulation system nevertheless

"What Is A-Life?"

First we must demythologize and desensationalize what “A-Life” really is. Historically I have been a stalker player, not a stalker modder - im not familiar with the inner workings of the old alife system in X-Ray. However, I think this is a decent summary of how the X-ray “A-life system operates.

The “online alife” is a complex - for its time - NPC AI system where rendered NPCs interact with the world based on a ruleset of goals.

The “offline alife” retains information of unrendered NPCs and simulates the actions of NPCs moving across the zone.

This means the “alife system” is not just an AI system for NPCs, but a game world simulation system that creates a dynamic world state based on the outcomes of player action and NPC action - all of this is based on the global persistence of individual NPCs even when they are not rendered. The permanence of NPCs makes old features like the leaderboard, the death of npcs independent of player action, and the change of NPC spawn areas in each level possible. So it means that A-Life as a simulation system is what makes X-Ray Stalker a worthwhile sandbox, as it means that the levels themselves are changing based on NPC actions. In Stalker 2, there appears to be no persistence of random spawned NPCs. Random spawns outside the render bubble - the infamous 80m mark that makes NPCs disappear in vanilla stalker 2 - are permanently gone and do not reappear. The variable that controls the render bubble size is  ALifeGridVisionRadius.  

You can increase the size of this bubble - the “online alife radius” - but you do not appear to be able to retain NPC persistence outside this radius. Which implies there is no “offline” alife simulation of alife. Now, the incomplete mod description quoted in the "dont lose hope for alife" post, allegedly asserts that “persistent NPCs do not exist in Stalker 2”. But the more accurate premises are that 1) there is no functioning spawn persistence in the game right now, and 2) we do not know whether the framework for it exists in the game, and 3) we do not know whether the developers intend to have NPC persistence, and 4)  the spawn system that exists in the game does not seem to rely on or utilize spawn persistence but 5) the framework of the current spawn system can do a lot of the things that A-Life 1.0 did without full NPC persistence.

Confusingly, there are multiple references to an "offline" system of baked in the game files that seem to suggest an NPC persistence system akin to the xray games. For example, NPC spawn commands require an "DestroyOnOffLine" parameter. The implications of this is unknown - this might be a deprecated system ripped out of the game, or it might still be a part of how the Director works. Whether individual NPC persistence like in A.Life 1.0 is intended to be in Stalker 2.0 is impossible to tell.

Occam's Razor's holds that the simplest explanation is the likeliest, but the opposite holds true for STALKER 2. By GSC's Razor, the most convoluted and jankiest explanation is likely the most true. And GSC's Razor might suggest that there was an "A.Life 1.5" system with persistent NPCs similar to the old titles, which was replaced by the new Director which uses a brand new simulation system. And none of it works.

Now the seeming lack of offline a-life and spawn impermanence is a source of outrage, because the impression is that 1) the old system is reliant on NPC record-keeping and 2) the very lifeblood of stalker is the alife system as it makes the game immersive and dynamic.

Because of this, there is a general fear that the state of the game means that alife 2.0 was a lie, and Stalker 2 has been dumbed down with a generic spawner that eliminates the living world that is the very essence of stalker. This fear might be assuaged because part of the reason spawns are broken is because of how convoluted the new system is. The bad news however is that nothing about this new system is working as intended.

"What A Lie?"

What replaces A-life 1.0? For easy mental reference, lets call the online alife of Stalker 2 the Director, and the offline alife the Lair System. The Lair System is comparable to offline alife because it is also running simulations in the background. (The truth is more complicated, because what I call the Lair System is my concept of the extent of what we currently know about the simulation system, and of course within the code the Director is likely the Lair System which is likely a couple of other things too, because they are an integrated system that is collectively branded as “A-Life 2.0”).

The “online alife” aspect of Stalker 2 is currently provided by a preset spawner. The AI Director spawns in random preset encounters within the 80m render bubble, from dogs and stalker squads, and squadvssquad fights and so on. Some of the parameters of the Director are modifiable right now in the game cfg files, while others are not. For example, the director has spawn logic and restrictions that are impossible to force - for example, removing the max spawn limit of poltergeists results in mass spawn of poltergeists in a specific area of Zaton, but it does not make the director spawn poltergeists elsewhere in Zaton. Forcing a poltergeist spawn in the Lesser Zone has proven impossible to me, because it seems the Director is restricted from spawning poltergeists in the LZ.

The “Lair System” is a complicated system that controls the population of factions across the map, with factions being assigned “lairs” they own, and territory expansion based on the lairs they have. According to GenericLairPrototypes, a faction lair has a number of NPC spawns, and NPCs will respawn at the lair, even when the lair is wiped out. (The respawn timer in the base game is 5minutes.) The lair system is convoluted and influences multiple aspects of the game. Factions have goals that are influenced by the Lair System - factions become “aggressive”, “neutral”, or “defensive” based on the number of lairs they have. Individual Agent/NPCs also appear to be influenced by lairs, with “ReuniteWIthLair” being an NPC AI goal.

It is my impression that whereas A-Life 1.0 generates a dynamic world state by the sum of simulated NPC actions, A-Life 2.0 as it appears to exist in the game seems to generate NPCs based on the simulation of a dynamic world. If I may speculate, the Director probably has the means for limited persistence of NPCs beyond the bubble, but I doubt that full persistence of all NPCs across the zone would be a thing, because full persistence would be at odds with how the Lair System operates, since the system is not simulating background NPC interactions but rather simulating the changes in the land itself. Although, I believe a degree of limited persistence beyond what is seen in the base game is necessary for immersion - with the amount of running in circles in this game, it is immersion breaking to have NPCs only a few hundred metres behind you disappear forever.

The logic of the Director is directly influenced by the Lair System. A scenario that the director is predisposed to commonly spawn is a “lair expansion” scenario, where two factions contest for territory. In practice, what this faction war looks like in game is two random squads having a shoot-out in the middle of nowhere, or in a POI. In my tests with cranked spawn rates, this resulted in massive battlefields in the middle of nowhere or at Points Of Interests - when I removed lair expansion scenarios from the scenario pool, I wound up with spawns of far smaller squads dispersed more evenly across the map. So is not so much that the Lair System does not affect the Director, but it seems to actively breaks the Director.

How do we know the Director works as stated? Well, it is quite literally the npc spawner for the game and its cfg variables are modifiable with demonstrable. How do we know the Lair system exists instead of being deprecated code - as we suspected references to offline alife to be?

Well, the Lair System variables are also modifiable in alifeprototype cfgs with noticeable effect on the actions of the spawner, since the Lair System is the brain of the Director. As mentioned above, removing all lair expansion scenarios from the Director completely changes her behaviour. The 5 minute respawn timer of the Lair System also correlates with player reports of agents respawning at POIs when they linger too long in it. Recall the infamous video of the Sphere where infinite spawns happen right in front of the Skif. It is unclear whether the sphere military base is a result of a broken quest script spawn, or in fact if this is the result of a buggy “lair”. The effects of the Lair System as a dynamic faction territory system are not felt in the game because this system is completely broken - not *non-functional* but functional in a way that breaks the Director. In the present state of things, it would be better if the Director was a true random spawner as maligned to be - the presently lobotomized Director is worse than a random spawner because it is attempting to populate the map based on broken and nonsensical logic. In Roadside Panic, I attempted to rip out the the broken logic of the Lair System as much as possible to make a pure RNG spawner (that actually functioned better than the base game Director lol)
The metaphorical angle here is that the Director is an anomaly: it is not spawning things at "random", it is spawning based on a demented logic that is only known to itself, creating patterns that are unmoored from the reality of the actual observable zone.

The Director is also plagued with other issues. The spawner places spawns way too close to the player - and the online radius of 80m is too small to spawn scenarios at believable distances. Spawned enemies have issues with de-aggro, or the lack of it, with enemies unable to be deaggro-ed until killed or despawned.

If there is anything I hope I conveyed in this wall of text, it is the fact that the bugs with the “Director” are nested and intertwined and breaks the system in a myriad of ways. This means that a fix for “a-life” is likely going to take a while, because many interconnected things are bugged or flat-out broken.

Did the developers lie? The developers were not lying when they said that “alife 2.0 is not working due to bugs” - there is a complex world simulation system in the game, which is FULLY broken at this moment. Like the rest of the game, it is probably in an unacceptable state for a game release, especially since A-Life is so critical to the Stalker experience. Nevertheless, there is, as A-Life 2.0 was branded in the marketing material, a complex framework for a supposed "life-simulating system that makes the game world feel alive as never before".

I think what catches my attention about the community manager’s post on a-life is that the word-for-word claims - the simulation of “fights for living space, migrations, and captures of new areas” is a dead ringer for how the “Lair System” is set up to work. In this pre-release interview with a GSC developer, the dev says of A-Life 2.0:

    " It all depends on the faction or type of monster you encounter. Some of them defend their territory because our A-Life 2.0 system is built on several pillars. There is an offline mode where some events take place in the background. And during your passage, you can see the results of either shootouts or battles with mutants and so on. Some factions or mutants have their own habitat, and some of them can just roam the map. Therefore, life in the Zone happens both in front of the player’s eyes and outside of their field of vision. "

The claims in the pre-release marketing matches the Lair System in the game - mutants supposedly having habitats with background territorial wars is a match for how the Lair System is set up in the game. This means that opinions that the devs replaced alife with a dumb spawner are not accurate, nor is the belief that the devs marketed a system that does not exist. The framework for this is already embedded within the game, albeit incredibly broken and also probably unfinished.

Of course, I am being very charitable about the system here, and there are doomers on the GAMMA discord who are more skeptical, who think that the new system will suck compared to old alife without full NPC persistence or that GSC cannot actually make it work. But regardless of opinions on how well the system can work, the common consensus is that the new system is both very very complicated and also completely broken.

Food for thought: there is a scripted hub takeover that happens during the game questline which is completely broken right now. So you can only imagine how utterly broken the dynamic “lair takeover” system must be, especially considering that the system has to account for lairs tied to the questline. For example, the Sphere has to be a faction lair for the military, but it cannot be taken over by any faction because of questline reasons. But at some point in the game it *could* become a static lair. And imagine how every POI in the game must be accounted for to work with both the questline (which are themselves broken) and the lair system. Based on my prodding into the spawn system as well as the general launch state of Stalker 2, I can only imagine how truly broken everything must be.

The developers did not forget about the importance of A-life; if anything the current state of the spawn system is symptomatic of the typical M.O. of GSC Studios - overtly ambitious and tripping over itself, just like the old STALKER games. I was able to fake a living zone with overlapping scenarios from the glorified random scenario spawner. so I think if the lair system and the faction populations worked as intended, "A-Life 2.0" could actually be quite impressive.

TL;DR Takeaways from Word Salad

    Nobody without the source code truly knows the scope of what A-life 2.0 is supposed to be, but it is evidently a complex and ambitious framework that already exists in the game itself, yet is completely broken and/or unfinished at the moment

    The Lair System that exists in the game largely matches pre-release information and community manager claims about A-Life 2.0, even though full NPC persistence across the zone seems improbable with the system.

    The Lair System is supposed to be a background simulation of a territory war across the zone which controls the population and behaviors of the NPCs you actually see in the game.

    The Director in the game is so broken that an a-life fix does not seem easy. This means that an A-Life patch will take a while.

    There are A-Life cfg tweaks on nexusmods including mine which increase online radius as a band-aid fix. But they all have the same issues and "Roadside Panic" probably crashes your game.

Pročitajte i komentare

https://www.reddit.com/r/stalker/comments/1h2dk04/a_weeklong_investigation_into_the_alife_20_system/

To je ovaj mod, probat ću i njega da vidimo kako fercera

https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/210?tab=files

Zapeo sam u main questu ne mogu progresat dalje, ulaz u chemical plant, kod lika na vratima vrti se cijeli razgovor iznova, moram alt f4 igru probam ponovo isto sranje... Jeeeej ^^

i ovaj mod da je OK https://www.nexusmods.com/stalker2heartofchornobyl/mods/446?tab=description

 Moraš maknut prvog da bi instalirao drugog jer će ti se klat tj neće ti radit onda najvjerojantije niti jedan... jučer sam probao neki ali nisam ništa drugačije primijetio... Probat ću danas ova 2

Ma ja to na Game pass igram tak da me boli tuki - ali buraz igra košta 60-120 eur pa ne govorimo od f2p igri ili igri od 20-30eur za koju je navedeno da je early access,, evo da su stavili tipa 22eur i EA  ja nebi a rekao 

Napokon, sad još kad bi samo znao kak da vidim jel je na game pass-u popatchana igra !?

Kolko vidim taj patch olakšava igru. To je isto kao i sa modovima tj. varate tak.

Budem odinstalirao igru i instalirao ju nanovo tak da nebi bilo da je nekaj od modova ostalo - taman bu možda došlo ažuriranje ili mi možde skine već noviju verziju!!

 ne satvit ću mod da mogu trčati tri kilometra sa 150 kila opreme 

Ova anomalija je bolesna, lete žabe okolo

Jel bolje šta nakon patcha nisam stigao igrati? 

Ne mogu ništa reči ne znam jel bolje nisam se makao iz prve zone a igram 14h. 

Nikad mi nije igra pukla nego sad nakon ovoga updejta. Izgleda da su ukenjali performanse sad šaraju prije je bilo fluidno.Kažu ljudi da su popravili 100 crasheva ali dodali 200.Loše moj gsc ništa od igranja.

Meni ok radi, mislim, radi mi isto ko i prije... Sad sam taman u SIRCAA, vidit ćemo kako će biti dalje.