Stalker
Kendall Paschel
The meaning of the word "stalker" was derived from its use by the Strugatsky brothers in their novel Roadside Picnic, upon which the movie is based. In Roadside Picnic, "Stalker" was a common nickname for men engaged in the illegal enterprise of prospecting for and smuggling alien artifacts out of the "Zone". According to author Boris Strugatsky, "prospectors" and "trappers" were potential word choices before "stalker" was decided on, which was at least partially inspired by Rudyard Kipling's character "Stalky" in his Stalky & Co. stories, of which both authors were fans. Their adaptation of the English word into Russian is pronounced slightly differently as "Stullker", and it came into common usage after being "coined" by the authors.[7]
The film's mysterious Zone has drawn comparisons with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that was established in 1986 (seven years after the release of the film) in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster,[12] and some of the people employed to take care of the Chernobyl power plant referred to themselves as "stalkers".[13] Though the film does not specify the origin of the Zone, near the end, in a shot of the Stalker with his family outside the Zone, what appears to be a power plant is visible in the background. The themes of nuclear radiation and environmental degradation would be revisited by Tarkovsky in his final film, The Sacrifice.
In this film, Tarkovsky wishes to emphasize two essentially human aspects, faith and love. He believes that faith "cannot be dissolved or broken down, [it] forms like a crystal in the soul of each of us and constitutes its great worth," and that when humans feel that there is no more hope in the world, love is what proves them otherwise.[17] The Writer feels as though the world has become mundane and ordinary, and has become cynical of it, he desires to be shaken by the unknown that is the zone. What ends up surprising him is not the zone, but instead, the Stalkers wife and her faithfulness to the stalker even after all he has put her through, "her love and her devotion are that final miracle which can be set against the unbelief, cynicism, moral vacuum poisoning the modern world, of which both the Writer and the Scientist are victims", in Tarkovsky's films, he believes that it is his responsibility to make his viewers aware and reflect on their need to love and to give their love.[17]
True Stalker offers players to experience a completely original, lengthy storyline through the eyes of an ordinary stalker named Axe. Although Axe has been in the Zone multiple times before, he never dared to venture past the Cordon due to fearing of what's beyond it... But realizing that life outside of the Zone has long lost its meaning to him, he decides that time has come to finally start heading deeper into the Zone... And that's when the game starts off.
If a Stalker has already made its way close to an enemy and killing it will still sand the enemy with the reduced radius, using the Knuckleblaster's punch to launch the Stalker far away; An upward-aimed punch with it will send them up to a considerable height. Be wary of doing this when the Stalker isn't at full health, as this can instead cause the Stalker to explode in the face. Once the Stalker is airborne through a Knuckleblaster or ground slam, one can use any weapon, preferably the Alternate Revolver, to safely eliminate the stalker. A similar technique can be enacted with the indirect hit explosion of the Rocket Launcher, allowing Stalkers to be quickly launched away from enemies and killed with no risk of causing the Stalker to detonate on the enemy regardless of health. If knocking back the Stalker is not possible and is about to explode, killing it outright will reduce the amount of enemies being sanded, due to its decreased explosion radius.
When the user calls Stalker.follow(), under the hood, the JavaScript enginecalls through to either gum_stalker_follow_me() to follow the current thread,or gum_stalker_follow(thread_id) to follow another thread in the process.
In the case of gum_stalker_follow_me(), the Link Register is used to determinethe instruction at which to start stalking. In AArch64 architecture, the LinkRegister (LR) is set to the address of the instruction to continue executionfollowing the return from a function call, it is set to the address of the nextinstruction by instructions such as BL and BLR. As there is only one linkregister, if the called function is to call another routine, then the value ofLR must be stored (typically this will be on the stack). This value willsubsequently be loaded back from the stack into a register and the RETinstruction used to return control back to the caller.
We can see the next instruction mov x3, x30, puts the value of the linkregister into X3. The first 8 arguments on AArch64 are passed in the registersX0-X7. So this is being put into the register used for the fourth argument. Wethen call (branch with link) the function _gum_stalker_do_follow_me(). So wecan see that we pass the first three arguments in X0-X2 untouched, so that_gum_stalker_do_follow_me() receives the same values we were called with.Finally, we can see after this function returns, we branch to the address wereceive as its return value. (In AArch64 the return value of a function isreturned in X0).
Now you will see that the functionality of gum_stalker_infect() is actuallyquite similar to that of _gum_stalker_do_follow_me() we mentioned earlier.Both function carry out essentially the same job, although_gum_stalker_do_follow_me() is running on the target thread, butgum_stalker_infect() is not, so it must write some code to be called by thetarget thread using theGumArm64Writerrather than calling functions directly.
Stalker works on one block at a time. It starts with either the block after thereturn to the call to gum_stalker_follow_me() or the block of code to whichthe instruction pointer of the target thread is pointing whengum_stalker_follow() is called.
We covered gum_exec_ctx_obtain_block_for() previously in our section ontransformers. It calls the transformed implementation in use, which by defaultcalls gum_stalker_iterator_next() which calls the relocator usinggum_arm64_relocator_read_one() to read the next relocated instruction. Then itcalls gum_stalker_iterator_keep() to generate the instrumented copy. It doesthis in a loop until gum_stalker_iterator_next() returns FALSE as it hasreached the end of the block.
Most of the time gum_stalker_iterator_keep() will simply callgum_arm64_relocator_write_one() to emit the relocated instruction as is.However, if the instruction is a branch or return instruction it will callgum_exec_block_virtualize_branch_insn() orgum_exec_block_virtualize_ret_insn() respectively. These two virtualizationfunctions which we will cover in more detail later, emit code to transfercontrol back into gum_exec_ctx_replace_current_block_with() via an entry gateready to process the next block (unless there is an optimization where we canbypass Stalker and go direct to the next instrumented block, or we are enteringinto an excluded range).
This function looks through the list of contexts looking for the one for therequested thread. Again, it sets the state of the context toGUM_EXEC_CTX_UNFOLLOW_PENDING. If the thread has already run, we must wait forit to check this flag and return to normal execution. However, if it has not run(perhaps it was in a blocking syscall when we asked to follow it and never gotinfected in the first instance) then we can disinfect it ourselves by callinggum_process_modify_thread() to modify the thread context (this function wasdescribed in detail earlier) and using gum_stalker_disinfect() as our callbackto perform the changes. This simply checks to see if the program counter was setto point to the infect_thunk and resets the program pointer back to itsoriginal value. The infect_thunk is created by gum_stalker_infect() which isthe callback used by gum_stalker_follow() to modify the context. Recall thatwhilst some of the setup can be carried out on behalf of the target thread, somehas to be done in the context of the target thread itself (in particular settingvariables in thread-local storage). Well, it is the infect_thunk whichcontains that code.
Welcome to True Stalker, a fan-made pseudo sequel that bridges the narrative gap between Call of Pripyat and Stalker 2. You play as Axe, an ordinary stalker who decides to set off by himself and enter the Zone solo for the first time. Almost everything from the 2010 classic has been revamped and improved.
In every one of its incarnations: the SVDm-2 is depicted as one of the most powerful and accurate weapons in the game. The weapon's high damage rating, coupled with its cartridge's large profile and armor penetration characteristics; allows it to tear through virtually every type of body armor located in the Zone, ensuring that even the most heavily armored stalkers are not safe from this weapon.
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