Just a very cheap and nasty clone of "Fallout 3" seems to be my impression so far. And when on sale at Steam, "Fallout 3" and "New Vegas" are not much more expensive than each of the three STALKERs!

Just how much will this help improve the game? http://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-complete-2009/downloads

Will it even work on Windows 8.1? The automatic installer .exe stops at Windows 7 according to the above webpage.

Will it break all my current savegames saved using v1.0006? Ie, will I have restart a new one?

Will it improve the game spoiling, poor English translations? This is so common in Russian and Eastern European games! Why can they not find a decent team of translators instead of just using "Bing" or "Google Translate"?
There's so many great Russian made games spoiled by utterly bollocks gibberish English text, worst are "Cuban Missile Crisis" and "CMC : Ice Crusade", I can understand their French texts more than the English texts - and I do not speak French! "Blitzkreig 2" and "Faces of War" are also great games spoiled by this crap! I thought the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series would have a bigger budget allowing them to use better translators! Yet strangely, all these titles, including STALKER, have good voice acting English translations - it's just the typed out text that is gibberish!

Will it stop the constant respawning of bandits in areas you've only just traversed? It's as bad and annoying as the poorly designed Far Cry 2 for respawning enemies!

Why has the Cordon Trader locked his door as well? I'm not far into the game and definately not completed all business I have with him! My PDA still has him as a "collect your reward" objective target. But his door is closed, and acts like a completely non-interactable cosmetic scenery object. Ie, it now does nothing..... it's doesn't even say "locked", or "come back at 9am", it's just stopped working altogether!

I thought that seeing as Christmas will be round again before any of you lot can be arsed to even bother replying, I may as well try that Complete 1.4.4 mod out.

I was amazed how quick the 700+Mb file downloaded from ModDB! It took less than 2 minutes!
Thankfully it works perfectly in Windows 8.1, it definately improves ambience, lighting and texture effects.
Certainly fixes many bugs, but this game had so many to start with, some small ones do still remain. Such as the dead pseudodog that was being described as "friend" just after it had been trying to bite my balls off!
There's some great features such as the quick teleport, that jumps you to the main locations you'll need in an instant. Without having to trawl through all the repopulated respawned opponents once again - it also doesn't advance the game time..... so you'll get more travelling, a LOT more, done in each day.

Lets hope this same fellow has made equivalent mods for the next two STALKERs! If they're as buggy as this first installment, they will need these mods!

Downside is, yes it DOES break your existing savegames, you will have to restart completely anew! And it makes the game harder too - even on easy difficulty, the game is very frustrating in parts..... and there's no cheats - as usual in really frustrating games that NEED them! There's meant to be a way of modding your stats though, should be as easy as editing a simple .ini file, but I cannot get it to work.

Hope this helps anyone else thinking STALKER : ShoC was a let-down - just download this mod, it's x10 times better with it. Hope you also get replies if you ever use these forums, in less than 6 months!

Thanks for the website. Here's the link:

http://metacognix.com/files/stlkrsoc/

And welcome to gOg.

Thanks very much for properly posting the URL.
:)

Main reason I joined was because gOg had NWN2 Complete, and Forgotten Realms Eye Of The Beholder Trilogy available to buy. I have a copy of NWN2 but not the expansions and haven't ever seen them up for grabs in the stores here following what Atari did during its collapse. I have the CD release of the EotB Trilogy, but since my DOS/Win3.1 486 died in mid '11, no way to play it without it running far too fast on my current system.
Browsing the forums, I saw this gripe thread for ShoC, and figured I could give a Rookie STALKER a few tips on installing.

My own copy of ShoC is the Collector's Radiation Edition. I was lucky to score it VGC second hand in very late 2009, at a local games shop. That got me hooked on the series and I've since gotten CS and CoP, but neither of those two really had the same feel as ShoC. I did my first playthrough of ShoC plain vanilla, then installed SC2009 to make it better. And until the major update to the ZRP a few years back, when it moved from the v1.05 codebase to the current v1.07, it was very much 6 of one, half a dozen of the other, as to which was the better option between ZRP and SC2009.

You kept an old 486 alive until 2011? My last machine of that era died in 2001! 2011 is pretty amazing! I thought I did well to keep even a modern(ish) XP machine going till earlier this year!!!!!

But alas, now I'm stuck with Windows 8.1, which means almost half my entire GOG (and Steam) collection has been wiped out in a stroke.

Why not upgrade to Windows 10 then? Are you not included among those who have been offered a free upgrade? Personally I see no reason not to go for it if on Win8.x

I did upgrade, and was rollingback to 8.1 within the same day. The first game I tried, "Sword of the Stars", would not work properly under Windows 10. And if the first one I tried flumped, that ain't a good sign. And surely Windows 10 is just taking us even *further* away from being able to run older games that need older OS's. It'll wipe out another 30% of my GOG / Steam collection knowing my luck!

There's still 3 weeks left of the free upgrade, so maybe I'll next try it as a dual boot before then. But I'm not really sure how to. And 3 weeks isn't much time left to learn.

I see :-( I cannot say more as I am only now downloading Windows 10. Here is one to hope your games will all run fine.

I did indeed. It was a second hand IBM PC 350 series desktop, with a 486DX2/66 CPU. Problem is those IBM would only properly boot from a specific model of Seagate HDD, the ST3290A, 261Mb. Anything else and the boot time would lag to an insane degree. So when the boot HDD died, that was it, game over for that 486, and for my being able to do DOS/Win3.1 gaming on the real hardware.

Three of my current systems run Windows 7, the fourth is running Xubuntu Linux 16.04 (Ubuntu Linux 16.04 with the XFCE Linux desktop). I refuse to run Windows 10 after, as a Windows Insider testing Windows 10, I had to watch how the OS was redesigned and redesigned by MS to cling tighter and tighter to its tiled UI, always online, touchscreen primary access, Windows Phone 7 roots, for it to ever be a true stand-alone, offline by default, desktop OS.

Getting back to the thread topic, the latest version of the ZRP is well worth having for all its bug fixes.
Item spawner mods are also well worth their weight in AP ammunition.
I use the old Atlas (Spawn Menu) Mod (1.1). I downloaded it from FileFront, but the mod is now available again in the ShoC area of NexusMods. To use Atlas with ZRP, some file editing is needed, and you have to keep 2 versions of the main menu UI script for swapping over as you play. One for ZRP, and the other for Atlas.
In ShoC, my favourite weapons are the Винтовка Снайперская Специальная, Vintovka Snayperskaya Spetsialnaya (known in the west as the VSS Vintorez), a HK G36 which I have a silencer on, the rifle ammunition rebored and chambered Desert Eagle "Big Ben", and the РПГ-7 (RPG-7u in game).

I think it was the power pack fading out, and then going kaput altogether, on mine. It started taking 10 minutes before I could even switch the PC on, after switching the power on at the plug..... it stopped remembering things like the system time also. It gradually increased to over an hour's wait before it would boot.
This happened only after it had been left powered off for a while, say overnight, if it was powered down for just an hour or two, it would boot back up straightaway, and remember the time!
But one day it never came back on at all. I'd even left it with the power on at the plug for 48 hours, and it still wouldn't boot. That was four months ago..... still sat on my desk now waiting for a new power pack.

As for Windows 10, I was thinking of trying to set up a dual boot, so I could also keep 8.1 going on this PC. I tried Windows 10 a few weeks back, and the first game I tried just would not run properly..... not a good start at all..... so I rolledback to 8.1. Trouble is I've no idea how to set up a dual boot, and there's only 3 weeks left for the free upgrade to 10. This is if it is even possible to install Windows 10 under a second boot partition. This free W10 is an *upgrade*, I bet I need the *full install* version to install to a new partition!!!!!

Fave weapon has to be the FN2000 for me (as it is titled using the Complete 1.4.4 mod) - otherwise known as the M8 OCIW - which became an abandoned project I believe! Mainly because it has a 30 rd magazine, whereas the modern Russian assault rifle designs like the Vintorez seem to be stuck with 20 rd, 10 rd even for some of sniper versions! The RPG was too much weight and not enough ammo in the game. They should have put some GPMGs in, PK or M249 etc.

Then there's this fictional gauss railgun. Not even seen it yet. Seen it used against me in Pripyat a lot, all except one of them stayed up on the roofs of the apartment blocks where I could not go and get them. That single one fell down to the ground where I should have been able to piclk it up - but I could not find it anywhere when I went over to look.

I never liked the FN2000 at all, finding it to be inferior to the ОЦ-14 "Гроза" (western name OTs-14 Groza, Tunder S14 in game)

As for the Gauss Guns, there are several you can get, but you need to drop a grenade behind the particular Monolith snipers so they are thrown forwards off the building along with their weapons. Failing that, you have to drop grenades behind the rifles on the rooftops till they fall. To do either, you need the RG-6 grenade launcher (Bulldog 6 in-game). The РПГ-7 is very much the wrong weapon for this job, as it can all too easily push the corpsed Monolith sniper and weapon into an unobtainable position.

The Gauss Gun is a 1 hit kill weapon, if you score a headshot. Its slow ROF makes it useless if you get torso or limbs, as the enemy will clear from the staggered status, with the loud noise of the Gauss Gun, have your location dead centred, and be able to pour the hurt on you before you can get another shot in. And with the Gauss Gun active, you cannot sprint.

Also, the Gauss Gun is effective against helicopters.
I edited the relevant .LTX files and turned all 4 of the ones that buzz the Agroprom when you first enter, into scrap. Even with the edited files, you have to spawn camp 2 of them. Normally they are set to ignore ALL damage types, and they have obscene high health.
The one that buzzes you on the first mission in the Cordon, and the ones entry area of the Чернобыльская АЭС им. В.И.Ленина (V.I Lenin Nuclear Power Station, better known as Chernobyl) are easy kills, as they are somewhat slow. The two that are called in by the Yantar scientists are fast moving, like the ones at Agroprom, so you need a weapon that is quite literally point and click death.

The similar weapon to the VSS Vintorez is the Автомат Специальный Вал (Avtomat Special'nyj Val or AS Val)
IRL both the Vintorez and Val can use the same 10 or 20 round magazines and ammunition, in game, the Vintorez is code restricted to a 10 round magazine, and the Val is 20.