X-Ray

The X-Ray Engine is a powerful, cutting-edge DirectX 9 engine, unique and yet unparalleled in many respects.

Renderer

DX9 renderer with one of the best in the world implementations of Deferred Shading, allowing us to draw a vast amount of dynamic light sources with correct materials and light ‘feedback’, without limiting ourselves to Deferred Lighting, but truly using the Deferred Shading.
Ultra-realistic game graphics with desalination of up to 1 000 000 polygons on screen.
Vast open-space territories up to 4 sq km and detailed indoor environments.
Dynamic lighting and soft shadows, destructible light sources.
Parallax/normal mapping.
True per-pixel dynamic lighting.
Floating point HDR, Shader Model 3.0
Real-time dynamic day-night cycle.
Dynamic outdoor lighting (ambient occlusion, IBL, dynamic Sun and Sun-shadows).
Dynamic weather effects like rain, wind, fog, etc.
Widescreen support.
A lot of postprocess and post render effects.
Powerful FX system.

Innovative life simulation system controlling all the in-game characters.
Over 1000 characters populating the Zone.
For the first time ever the player is immersed in a living, non-scripted world, where A-Life events may develop without getting linked to the player’s actions.
Full life cycle of A-life-driven NPCs – task accomplishment, combats, taking rest, food, sleeping.
Full life cycle of A-life-driven monsters – hunting, attacks on stalkers and other monsters, taking rest, food, sleeping.
Global A-life level - war of groupings, monster migrations.
A-life belongs to the gameplay – unlimited number of random quests – rescuing stalkers, destroying stalker renegades, protection of camps, assaults on camps, eliminating animal lairs, search of hidden stashes and treasures and much more.
NPCs traversing the entire Zone, crossing to other levels, entering and leaving the player’s visibility zone.

Non-scripted AI. Characters traverse game objectives freely – they patrol, guard key spots, oversee the territory and take rest.
Realistic sight and hearing of NPCs, which allows using several ways to accomplish the game.
Variety of tactics to complete game scenes – rush, stealth, sniper fire and their combinations. Adequate NPCs’ reaction to the player’s actions.
NPCs use planning to make decisions (Goal-Oriented Action Planning), which allowed us to create multitude of behaviors and make them considerably more varied (combat, for instance).
Combat – assault actions, defensive actions, enemy search, escaping from fire, movements among covers, reaction to grenade, finishing the injured enemies and much more.

Powerful physics engine supports hundreds of physics objects on level
Ragdoll
Destructible objects, bullet ballistics, skeleton animation, etc.
Physics as base for game play features like monster levitation, real bullets and grenades ballistics, blast wave, realistic ammo piercing characteristics for various materials and surfaces.