Metro 2033 Dev: "No Relationship" With STALKER Tech

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Metro 2033 Dev: "No Relationship" With STALKER Tech


S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [http://www.amazon.com/Metro-2033-Xbox-360/dp/B002V16T0Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1279562944&sr=1-1].

It's a natural assumption: After all, GSC Game World [http://www.4a-games.com/] who left the company a year before it was released and GSC Game World founder Sergey Grigorovich has apparently claimed in the Russian gaming media that the Metro 2033 engine is based on pre-release S.T.A.L.K.E.R. code. It's also pretty hard to argue that on the surface, at least, 4A's post-apocalyptic FPS doesn't have a serious S.T.A.L.K.E.R. vibe going on. But 4A CTO Oles Shishkovtsov denies that there's any connection between the two and furthermore, says it wouldn't be practical to make the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. engine meet the demands of Metro 2033 anyway.

"There's no relationship [between the two]," he told Eurogamer's Digital Foundry. "Back when I was working as lead programmer and technology architect on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it became clearly apparent that many architectural decisions put into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. engine were great for the time when it was designed, but they just doesn't scale to the present day."

"The major obstacles to the future of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. engine were its inherent inability to be multi-threaded, the weak and error-prone networking model, and simply awful resource and memory management which prohibited any kind of streaming or simply keeping the working set small enough for back then 'next-gen' consoles," he added.

He also claimed that the nature of the X-Ray Engine code left it completely unsuitable for use on anything but a PC - presumably a high-end PC, as fans of the game can attest. "When the philosophies of the engines are so radically different it is nearly impossible to share the code," he said. "The final answer is 'no.' We do not have shared code with X-Ray, nor would it be possible to do so."

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. connection or not, there's no denying that the DirectX 11 screens for Metro 2033 that were released last week [http://www.flickr.com/photos/metro2033/sets/72157623404399066/detail/] look super-hot. Is it finally time to wave goodbye to DirectX 9 forever? Metro 2033 launches on March 16 for the PC and Xbox 360.

Source: Eurogamer [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/4a-games-dismisses-metro-2033-rumours]


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Sevre

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Apr 6, 2009
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I love the way you say "is it finally time to wave goodbye to DX9 forever?" as if we whitewashed over the failure that was DX10. Love you Malygris <3
 

ElArabDeMagnifico

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Dec 20, 2007
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Really looking forward to this one. I gotta agree with him on this one, I [/i]love[/i] the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, no matter how fucking annoying it is to type, but that engine is crap and if it wasn't for mods I would not have even gotten through the first 2 games.
 

Xvito

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Aug 16, 2008
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I wonder if anyone IN THE ENTIRE WORLD has ever heard of OpenGL...?
 

SniperWolf427

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Jun 27, 2008
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Stalker tech or no, this game should fulfill everything we could want in a post-apocalyptic FPS(RPG?).

Aside from the trailers I've seen, I don't know terribly much about the game mechanics. Regardless, color me excited.
 

G1eet

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Mar 25, 2009
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Good God, that looks fun. Hopefully, this won't let me down like Fallout 3 did.
 

Axolotl

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I'm still hopeing this is anywhere near as good as STALKER. I'm playing through SoC at the moment and it's an amazing game.
 

RvLeshrac

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Oct 2, 2008
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DirectX left OpenGL in the dust long ago.

"But why," you ask? Because it relies heavily on each graphics card vendor to implement the same extensions in the same way. Just look at all the nVidia and ATI-specific extensions in any listing, and you'll see why OpenGL was left behind. There's no interoperability, except where the base extensions are concerned.

It essentially takes videocards back to the days of GLiDE, much like OpenAL has taken us back to the days of PAS vs Gravis vs Creative vs Adlib vs Roland - you can ONLY get hardware audio acceleration if you happen to have a card supported by the audio API the developer chose.

*edit*

Suppose I should actually address the OP in this post!

I like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but, yes, the engine sucks, horribly. That's par for the course when you're talking eastern/northern-europe. They seem to have no quality control whatsoever. That said, the game shines through the crap engine, and you always know what the developers WANTED to do, even where they didn't quite accomplish it.

My only issue with Metro 2033, for now, is that they're just producing another Doom3/Quake4/HL2 at a time when people are largely uninterested in YAFPS - ODST's (relative) lack of success is proof enough of that.
 

Woodsey

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Well, I don't see any reason to not believe him.

Either way, way the game looks a whole lot shit-hotter than the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games do.
 

kibayasu

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Jan 3, 2008
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So, as a tangent, this sounds like this will be like Call of Pripyat and be DirectX 11 or DirectX 9... I'm glad I got that DX10 capable card.
 

Andy Chalk

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Nov 12, 2002
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I am hot hot HOT for this game. Also hot hot HOT for Call of Pripyat. I'm one of the fortunate ones, I guess, because even the original STALKER ran fairly well on my rig (especially after I used that funky STALKER performance booster script thing - stand back, I'm using technical terms here) so I was able to enjoy the experience without having it disrupted by bugs or excessive crashes. And it was frikkin' awesome.

I hope this doesn't cast me in any sort of negative light, but I really don't care if Metro 2033 uses STALKER tech or not. I just want it to be HOT!
 

Asehujiko

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Sevre90210 said:
I love the way you say "is it finally time to wave goodbye to DX9 forever?" as if we whitewashed over the failure that was DX10. Love you Malygris <3
As a general rule of the thumb, never buy 2 microsoft products in a row. DX9 was good, DX10 sucks, DX11 is good. XP was good, vista sucks, 7 is good etc.
 

Darktau

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Mar 10, 2009
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Asehujiko said:
Sevre90210 said:
I love the way you say "is it finally time to wave goodbye to DX9 forever?" as if we whitewashed over the failure that was DX10. Love you Malygris <3
As a general rule of the thumb, never buy 2 microsoft products in a row. DX9 was good, DX10 sucks, DX11 is good. XP was good, vista sucks, 7 is good etc.
As far as I can see DX11 is just DX10 with more parralax texture ability?
 

Asehujiko

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Feb 25, 2008
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Darktau said:
Asehujiko said:
Sevre90210 said:
I love the way you say "is it finally time to wave goodbye to DX9 forever?" as if we whitewashed over the failure that was DX10. Love you Malygris <3
As a general rule of the thumb, never buy 2 microsoft products in a row. DX9 was good, DX10 sucks, DX11 is good. XP was good, vista sucks, 7 is good etc.
As far as I can see DX11 is just DX10 with more parralax texture ability?
And better support by everybody not too preoccupied with making their games unplayable via drm.
 

Beardon65

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Jul 16, 2009
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Korten12 said:
Thinking about getting this from Steam abit after it comes out.
Seconded. I like games that are based off a book or have books (not going to read the Halo or the GoW book. Nor play Dante's Inferno.) It seems like a good game and might read the book afterwards.

OT: Well let's just hope they don't use it. I found a lot of bugs that were annoying, and amusing.
 

Darktau

Totally Ergo Proxy
Mar 10, 2009
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Asehujiko said:
Darktau said:
Asehujiko said:
Sevre90210 said:
I love the way you say "is it finally time to wave goodbye to DX9 forever?" as if we whitewashed over the failure that was DX10. Love you Malygris <3
As a general rule of the thumb, never buy 2 microsoft products in a row. DX9 was good, DX10 sucks, DX11 is good. XP was good, vista sucks, 7 is good etc.
As far as I can see DX11 is just DX10 with more parralax texture ability?
And better support by everybody not too preoccupied with making their games unplayable via drm.
Hmm, Not going to get a GT300 series just for one game, so meh. (Unless it is more than just a pretty picture)