Long story short.
I have the Strugatsky brothers to blame.
Especially, one particular tale of theirs called Forgotten Experiment.
Last time I checked, it has not been translated into English. I actually got my hands on it via a compilation of Soviet sci-fi tales published in Spanish, Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción rusa. Which was okay, since Spanish is my mother tongue.
(And I only knew the barest of basics of English then. I was nine years old. Go figure what a tale about something that matches the premise of the Zone to the letter can do to so young a brain.)
That book was never far. I remember re-reading parts of it now and then.
Then, come 2007 or something, I came across the game we all know and love. Shadow of freakin' Chernobyl.
Nothing short of an earthquake would rock my life like that.
I became an on-again, off-again lurker under several aliases. Even penned a fiction available both at the official GSC forums and fanfiction.net.
But I never went far into the modding scene. (I never went close, either.) Asides from doing some LTX editing, I didn't explore much.
I'm more of a writer than of a coder, I guess.
But this time I actually got the tools, and started looking around, and actually looked for instructions and hacks as I usually do when I code for realz.
(I got into the coding biz and took up the study of Russian because I wanted to join the guys over at GSC. Yeah, start laughing. I did get a -wonderful- wife out of it all. Someday I should make a blog post out of the story.)
So, I guess this is it.
I thought this blog would serve both to document my progress and to spur me further on. And also as a guide of sorts for people to try their hand at it, if I ever get far.
So, where do you start? What do you need? I suppose being exposed to code for a few hundred hours won't hurt.
In my case, I'm a mobile dev. Android specialist, actually. Has as much to do with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as dolls with aircraft engines, but you gotta begin somewhere.
But I digress.
My starting point was coming across a tutorial by 2C.LiryC about Creating basic spawns, how to and requirements.
Actually, nope. My starting point was the following question while playing the -amazing- Call of Chernobyl mod: "if stalkers come to the Zone to hunt for artifacts, how come there are so few to be found?"
(That's probably a design decision on TeamEPIC's part. After all, there are only so many artifacts to go by.)
Then I went on to ramble on Reddit about it. Having some limited game design experience, I had initially guessed that editing some LTX could do something about that.
Well, tough luck. Maybe you can, but to create the places for the damn little thingies to spawn, you need the SDK. That much was clear from my first glance at the tutorial.
Alright, this is embarrassing. FIRST step: CoP SDK.
I wrote the whole part about the CoC files required, then I had a hunch and rechecked the links.
Served me right. None of that stuff is about the CoP SDK, which is of course the absolute basis of anything I'm going to do.
This is easily found, though. Google around and you find this: X-Ray 1.6 Engine SDK v0.7.
Small-ish download, so it should not be too hard to get your irradiated, calloused hands on it.
Sooooo...
I remember posting a question on the TeamEPIC forums asking what did I need. Checked a couple of times, but no replies. Guess I had it coming for being a lazy bastard.
Actually, I had it coming twice fold. The damn links are on the same page where I got CoC in the first place.
Doubly ashamed now, but hey. I'm only human. Laziness is probably part of the job description.
Another condition I learned about humanity: we're a bunch of selfish pricks - I tried downloading the torrent but I got stuck at around 70% because none of the three seeds was available.
So there, I got at least one valuable pointer for you - don't go for the torrent. I'll repost the links for you here:
Don't you go and screw up your download somehow when leeching off MEGA, though. You have a limited amount of available free bandwidth, consumption of which will pause all your downloads for about five hours. Great.
No problem. I'm a patient guy. Besides, I have this great World of Darkness chronicle to run, I can wait for the stuff to download while I torture my players, I thought.
So I got my files. On the third try.
Actually, while reading carefully the tutorial, I realized I was missing something, a scene update. I know you're a lazy bastard too, but do go and grab it.
And also, RTFM. Or, more properly, RTFT, since 2C's is not a manual but a tutorial. (Close enough, but I'm a stickler for detail.) Even more important now, since I realized I screwed up with a link so I had to go back and add another section. Great.
*Reddens with embarrassment* Okay. SDK: check. CoC files: check. Now: deployment.
This is simple enough. Grab the CoP installer, point it to your location of choice, then let it do its work.
I read somewhere it's best not to install it on your C:\ drive. If I ever find the link to the source, I'll post it here. I went ahead and installed it elsewhere, just to be sure.
Next, grab that humongous compressed file you leeched off MEGA or Google Drive and unzip it right on the same folder where you installed the CoP SDK.
Yeah, you should merge both the 'editors' folder the CoP SDK installer creates and the one packaged into that 7z file.
Then go ahead and do the same with the scene update stuff.
Then, supposing you have no complications at all (a happy state of affairs, that is), opening that 'editors' folder and running !LevelEditor.cmd should result in this:
It does? Hooray! It works!
