

XRay-PDA September recap

Fellow stalkers!

It's a bit late than I expected, but here we are with this article piece regarding how things have been, how they will be and what should you expect from the development of the mod!

How's development?

Development has been going on slowly this year, as I was on my last year of high school and I had to take an examination this June and July (in which I brought the XRay-PDA project as part of my thesis, someday I might just release something as it clearly explains the mod and its features to a newly signed user), and the real mastermind behind the code, codeonion, was and still is seriously committed in his work and in his family.

Our immediate goal is still the release of an Android app, hoping that this will ramp up our player base and the liveliness of the chat.

The app is in a primitive stage, but it can dialogue with the server:

As you can see from the emulator, every time the "sign in" button is pressed, the server receives the input and sends a line, with a random number attached at the end: it's online!

As we proceed further, we will expand and optimize the code both client and server side.

Optional features

To further personalize your personal gaming experience, we are going to make some features completely optional and tweakable directly in-game through our console.

A feature already implemented and tested as example: when an emission is about to strike, the electromagnetic field won't allow a proper connection of the PDA to the server.

This is what you'll see (drag-drop on a new tab to watch it bigger):

A sister function of the RNG, the Random String Generator, will create a hash string based on how many characters you used in your original message. It's up to your liking if you will be the only one to see this error message, everybody or even no one.

Graphics

As I am the one who will create all the graphics for the app, I wanted it to be more consistent and repeatable in-game, so one can link the app to the console on a look.

I chose it to be a mix: the minimalist look of the '70s and '80s bonded with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. unique old-new constant atmosphere.





This is just a fragment of the whole UI texture file. One day it might be on your gamedata folder too!

That's it

We're going to make further news as we have more and more material to show and tease you.

Keep supporting us as you've amazingly done through this first year of XRay-PDA: we're not tired yet of pushing this forward!