Copied from Sleepy/v/:
Well forget anything I said earlier about A-Life maybe being in saveable state, shit's completely gone. From the Roadside Panic (AI mod) Nexus page:
>What about offline alife? Well, offline alife does not appear to exist (or at least function), and the game does not seem to have persistence of individual random npcs. The game will not track the movement or schedule of a Glup Shitto from the Lesser Zone to Pripyat. In this sense, the offline a-life of the past games no longer exists. The Director in this game has its own system consisting of "lairs" that appears to manage offline events outside the "bubble range". Except this kind of flat out does not work.
>Confusingly, there are multiple references to an "offline" system 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 UNKNOWN. Whereas occam's razor's says that the simplest explanation is the likeliest, the opposite holds true for STALKER 2. By GSC's Razor, the most convoluted and broken explanation is likely the most true. And GSC's razor might suggest that there was an "A.Life 1.5" system similar to the old titles, which was replaced with the new Director which uses a brand new simulation system. And none of it works.
>Without access to game code, the intended functionality of the "Alife 2.0" system, and the scope of offline alife is unknown. After a week of testing parameters with others in the GAMMA discord, all we can conclude with absolute certainty is that A) the system is internally very convoluted and B) the system is entirely broken and not working according to developer intention.
>Regardless of the scope and nature of "offline" alife or npc persistence, what we know is that the Director is not a random spawner. The Director follows the rules of the "Lair System", which is what we might call the offline part of the "A-Life 2.0" system, at least the part that is proven to actually exist.
>The Lair System is supposed to influence and shape the game world with a mechanically complex system involving faction contests over territory. But this is not the case at present. In fact, the "lair system" actively breaks the Director. The lair system is incredibly convoluted. For example, every faction has overall faction goals that change depending on the lair system. Faction behavior changes from "aggressive", "normal", and "defensive" depending on the number of lairs that each faction has. How do we know the lair system is not deprecated code? Because it is actively utilized in the present director spawn system. One of the more common spawn scenarios is a "lair expansion fight", where two factions will battle over contested territory. In the base game, this manifests as nonsensical contextless shootout between two factions. In my tests, by cranking spawn numbers, i managed to turn the zone into a ... warzone with massive shoot-outs between 2 factions on a random piece of land. When I turned off "lair expansion squads" and removed lair contest scenarios from the Director, the Director began spawning smaller squads and other events such as dead mutants, spread out across the map. What the Director spawns is heavily influenced by this "Lair System". For example, with poltergeist max spawn limits in the ALifeDirectorScenarioPrototypes removed, poltergeists spawn in massive quantities at a specific field in Zaton but not anywhere else in Zaton. (I was unable to force poltergeist spawns in the Lesser Zone even by using console commands to force a poltergeist director scenario, which implies that the Director has specific rules on what spawns are allowed in which part of the map.)
>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, unmoored from the reality of the actual zone.
>Yes, the Director in Roadside Panic 0.7b is a glorified percentage-based random spawner. But the base-game Director is worse than a random spawner, it is a lobotomized spawner that is attempting to populate the map based on broken logic. This is why alife in Stalker 2 is broken. The metaphorical angle here is that the Director is anomalous, it is not spawning things at "random", it is spawning based on a demented anomalous logic that is only known to itself, unmoored from the reality of the actual zone. Even without true NPC persistence, it is quite easy to imagine how this complex "Lair System" is supposed to work with the Director to simulate a game world. For example, the Lesser Zone might be cut up into faction territory, with buildings and POIs owned by Ward and Loners and Bandits and Bloodsuckers, while the wild areas would be mutant lairs that spawn boars and dogs. Factions would spawn at their lairs and random patrol spawns would try to move to their faction lair, while different factions would fight over POIs to "capture" them. What you see in the 0.7b video above is 3-4 different RNG Director scenarios - 2 random stalker squad scenarios, a boar vs dog scenario, a tushkan scenario, and a bloodsucker solo spawn which overlap into each other to create an emergent experience. If these spawns were not RNG but rather informed by a working Lair System (and if the NPC AI was not garbage), you can imagine how it is possible for "A-Life 2.0" to work as well as the AI in the xray games, even without NPC persistence.
<TL;DR: Offline ALife does not exist. There is a pseudo-ALife called "Lair System" that is supposed to simulate faction warfare / turf wars and in the background and spawn groups based on who controls nearby zones but generic NPCs are not persistent.