In THQ's action game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl you control a Stalker, venturing into the Zone in order to acquire information, technology and artifacts to sell and possibly put a mysterious puzzle together. Various reports have come in from people claiming that STALKER does not work properly with Windows Vista, causing crashes and other hiccups. GSC Gameworld is aware of the issue and is working on a patch.
It is now for the second time that the black Chernobyl erupted to open a Zone – a new horror of ill mankind. It was at that moment that hundreds of people turned into wordless toys of invisible forces, into insane toys with erased personalities. And there were futile attempts of the army to cope with the new disease of the planet, at least to prevent its development and spread, but to no avail. The Zone grew bigger. Only rarely people dared to set off for the Zone to find out, to procure evidence of weird and uncanny changes around Chernobyl Atomic Plant. Only a handful returned, bringing strange objects and stories of deadly traps and eerie animal mutants, they found out of somebody inside controlling the evolution of humanity, forcing it to leap towards unknown final. They became stalkers, those who leave for the changing world of the Zone to explore it and find artefacts, those who cross the Zone of immense territory covered with ulcers of black lakes, scorched earth, poisonous fogs, deadly anomalous zones, populated by sapient pseudo-animal mutants.
Features :
Levels combining closed spaces as well as enormous open areas
Visualization optimized for hardware TnL (both FF and shading capable parts)
Continuous level of detail technology for all the geometry
100 000 polygons per frame at 60 fps on average hardware
Detailed character models (500-10 000 polys)
Powerful skeleton-based animation allows usage of motion-capture hardware and produces smooth and realistic motion of characters
High-speed blended animation system capable of up to infinity number of bone interpolation & modulation
SSE/3Dnow! Technologies used for skinning and forward kinematics
Vertex shaders used on shading capable hardware
Detail objects (grass/small stones/etc)
Portal-style, non-linear subdivision based visibility detection system
Optimized for T&L hardware in the way of grouping primitives to large-size batches
Greatly reduces overdraw - which is the main slowdown on even high-level video boards
Usage of antiportals (aka Occluders) for occlusion culling
Intelligent hardware state caching technology
Both Direct and Radiosity lighting models
Colored dynamic lights and dynamic "soft" shadows
Character shadowing
Intelligent light sources selection, clipping, merging
Makes possible more than 50 dynamic lights per frame at reasonable FPS-es
Ordinary stuff: flares, coronas, etc
Intelligent shader subsystem
Dynamically generated textures
Reflections, chrome effects, etc.
VR-Simulation engine optimized for massive payload
High-performance collision detection allowing simultaneous motion of large number of characters in high polygonal environment
Realistic physics simulation (ballistic, motions, fluid engine, snow, rain, explosions, etc.)
Motion compensation scheme
Hides many visual artifacts produced by FPS-es instability
Particle system with real physics
High quality HRTF 3D-sound with clipping and partial wave tracing
"Low-penalty" & "low-delay" reaction technology (less then 1ms to start HRTF 3D Sound Source to play)
Source: WorthPlaying
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