Though I am happy you got your, as far as I can tell, legitimately owned game to work. Please abide by Subsim policy and not discuss cracks and the like here.

Just ordered mine thtough newegg.com 2 day shipping for 39.99 usd, hope its better than CS, :up:

CS is like Popcorn without the salt towards call of pripyat.

I had heard lots of good things about cop but you never know till you play it for your self, but i allso liked soc and cs so. :D

Indeed ;)

My copy should be coming tomorrow. I was very much looking forward to it until I had what appears to be a major hard drive death a couple of hours ago...:wah:

As it's going to be a few days until i've got the time to check it all out, fix it and swear at my credit card bill I wont be able to get near it because my old computer is pretty much behind the curve.

Can someone post a couple of screenies so I can see what I'm missing? It'll cheer me up at least....:nope:

http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=...pe=xr3&lang=en

as i just installed a new OS i dont have the game installed, but there are some pictures in this forum.

Stalker CoP is one of the best (new) games I played in years. It's got exploration, it's open, in some ways it's as good as or even better than Ultima Underworld or Thief.

The Hunt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk-2Jj2ezPk

I like COP because of its potential. Metro 2033 is my next biggy.. You need a good rig to run it with all the bells and whistles..

http://www.metro2033game.com/en/news/9878

Optimum:

• Core i7 CPU
• NVIDIA DirectX 11 compliant graphics card (GeForce GTX 480 and 470)
• As much RAM as possible (8GB+)
• Fast HDD or SSD :o:timeout:

I absolutely love STALKER. All three of them. The atmosphere is great. I recently read the book Roadside Picninc by Boris and Arkadi Strugatskij (or Strugatsky) and (re)watched the film Stalker by Andrej Tarkovskij. Very atmospheric movie if a bit heavy on the emotional side comparing to the game. But he always did that, Tarkovskij. Same with Solaris.

The book is more in line with the game than the movie is. In fact, the book is one of the best Sci-fi books I've read for years and it had me digging up all sorts of old gems the Strugatskij's wrote. Its not easy to find translations of all their works, but it is doable.

In fact, I managed to read the book about the Forest that Cameron supposedly nicked for Avatar. Good reads, I recommend game, movie and book :)

I haven't seen the movie, but the novel is completely different than the game. It's all about anomalies, not about killing things. What a great game that would be, if they hadn't amends to make to the action crowds.

Nor the movie or the book is about killing anything really. I just find that the concept of STALKER the game comes closer to the mood I got out of reading Piknik na obochine, which is much more action-like and viscerally dramatic. The movie is serene, god damn beautiful and quite introspective, which is typical for Tarkovskij.

Just such a shame this series runs on an ever-aging engine...
i have COP maxed, all settings, looks great but imagine the possibilities with a overhauled game engine!
CryEngine comes to mind, Unreal Engine 3...

To be honest, even those engines are now beginning to show their age. The main problem, and excuse the pun, is how unreal they tend to look.

You wouldn't think so with Unreal 3, it shines in Batman AA...
what a magnificent-looking thing that baby is maxed!

The major obstacles to the future of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. engine were its inherent inability to be multi-threaded, the weak and error-prone networking model, and simply awful resource and memory management which prohibited any kind of streaming or simply keeping the working set small enough for (back then) ‘next-gen’ consoles.

The X ray engine, which is what Stalker is running on should be updated at the very least, if, and i stress the word if they decide to continue the Stalker franchise.