As with most noteworthy game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is built around a promising, in-house, engine. The game will be powered by the exclusive in-house X-ray engine.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will be an nVidia recommended game, contrary to common trends, something which we witnessed at this year's ECTS where the gameplay video was demonstrated in nVidia's booth. According to Mr. Yavorsky The X-Ray engine was initially planned as a unique tool that would allow us to actualize even the craziest ideas of a game as close to reality as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The realism is key word for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and it applies to virtually everything the game will feature, graphics is in that row too. Nvidia is our technical partner for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the engine will offer support of quite a few FX features. Geforce FX offers excellent shader possibilities, and we are going to make an extensive use of that. We also design dedicated renderer for DX9 class hardware with fully real-time dynamic lighting, soft, physically correct shadows cast from everything onto everything, true per-pixel lighting, 1-3 millions of polygons per frame, etc. Owners of other brands of high-end graphic hardware will not be deprived of enjoying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with some of the state-of-the-art effects their cards can offer.
The Engine
X-Ray is a versatile engine incorporating most state-of-the-art technologies. It supports both indoor and vast outdoor spaces, X-ray will do up to 3 000 000 polygons per frame; high quality bump-mapping; soft shadows cast by all of the objects onto everything; volumetric fog; Particle system with real physics, screen post-processing, shading, wind, reaction to pressing, turbulent flows, dynamic change of day and night; weather effects etc.
The engine does not support software rendering and requires a DirectX 8 or higher compatible accelerator. X-Ray will offer:
Levels combining closed spaces as well as enormous open areas On demand loading makes it possible to create a single huge level Game time flow, change of time of the day Powerful skeleton-based animation allows usage of motion-capture hardware and produces smooth and realistic motion of characters VR-Simulation engine optimized for massive load
Graphics:
Support for all second generation D3D compatible accelerators (TNT/Voodo2/etc), optimized for Geforce2 and up Visualization optimized for hardware TnL (both FF and shading capable parts) Continuous level of detail technology for all the geometry ~300 000 polygons per frame at 60 fps on average hardware Detailed character models (500-10 000 polys) High-speed blended animation system capable of an infinite number of bone interpolation & modulation operations SSE/3Dnow! Technologies used for skinning and forward kinematics Visibility determination Portal-style, non-linear subdivision based visibility detection system Optimized for T&L hardware by batching primitives in optimally sized groups Dynamic occlusion culling, contribution culling Adaptive hardware state caching technology -Lighting Colored dynamic lights and dynamic soft shadows Breakable light sources Animated lights Character shadowing Intelligent light source selection, clipping, and merging -Detail mapping Water, flares, coronas, etc. Particle system with real physics Screen post-processing -Shading The Shader library is central to every part of the rendering pipeline Completely abstracts the graphics API. Multi-pass Rendering Fallback Shaders Facilitates cross-platform development Separates shader writing from engine development Pixel and Vertex shaders are automatically used (on shader capable hardware.)
Detail objects:
Grass, small stones, etc. Environmental effects, such as wind, turbulence, and tracks
Physics:
Based on ODE engine Simulation speed outperforms commercial engines such as MathEngine, Havok, etc. Real-time IK, vehicle physics, etc. Collision database with low memory usage Collision detection optimized for a large number of queries in a high concentration polygonal environment Realistic simulation of ballistics, movement, and fluids
Audio:
High quality HRTF 3D-sound with clipping and partial wave tracing Location-based environmental audio affected by surrounding obstructions Context-relative multiple-mixed music streams in MP3/MP2/WMA/ADPCM formats
Network:
Distributed computing Client-Server based system
Tools
In-house tools ( Level, Shader, Particle, and Actor Editors ) Plug-ins for popular modeling packages
AI:
Simulation Level-Of-Detail and Culling (2 AI models - high and low detail) Fiber based time distribution allows scalable AI without any slowdown Virtual senses; sight, hearing and touch Terrain-aware tactical assessment system FSM with random factor Data driven design (pattern based evaluation functions are automatically generated and optimized on training examples - supervised learning)
Follow the gameplay link below and to the right to find out about the single and multi player missions, the weapons and vehicles and other features included in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
What is it?