What do you think about this engine? Has anyone other than myself seen the video preview for the game? The engine, from what I hear, was an in house project of GSC. For those of you who haven''t heard anything about the game/engine: http://www.stalker-game.com/index.php You can find the movies on that site, or 3dgamers.com (sorry don''t know the specific address at time of posting).

It looks really nice, in the same league as the current Unreal engine. The lighting effect that I saw looked about on Splinter Cell''s level, so this is definitely a powerful graphics engine. However, I''m curious what else it can do. One area that definitely needs improvement is in animation. The character animation is pathetic and I thought Unreal Tournament 2003 was bad. It''s amazing how something as seemingly trivial as character animation can be, but after watching Lithtech''s new Triton engine in effect on Tron 2.0, and saw the absolutely fluid and realistic character animations....it is in my opinion in the same league of importance as lighting and geometry processing power. Hopefully the game will polis this area up.

Just as an aside, the engine for X2: The Threat also looks pretty amazing, as will the engine for Midway and Imperium Galactica 3. It is funny that of the 4 game engines noted, 3 of them are made in Slavic/Russian countries. X2 might be, but I''m unsure of what country is making it.

Those Eastern Europeans sure know how to code an engine.

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The Idea Foundry

Did a little digging and found out what developer did what game.

Imperium Galactica 3 is designed by Philos Labs which is a Hungarian team. Midway: Naval Battles is done by Mithis (the same people that did Sacrifice if I remember right) is also Hungarian. The Stalker engine is done by a Russian team called GSC Game World. The X2: The Threat game is being developed by a German company called Egosoft.

It makes me wonder now....how come there''s a lot of European talent making computer games, but not that many asian companies making any? Do all the asians play Playstation2 games and not care about computers (except the S. Koreans with Starcraft?).

Getting back to the X-ray engine though, the terrain engine is amazing. It''s definitely better than the Ghost Recon engine, and so far, I haven''t really seen any Unreal terrain shots that look any better. Since Stalker is supposed to be a sort of creepy game, I think the lighting effects are important, and I kinda think having a scary game set outdoors can be more unsettling than in confined corridors.

With such a rabidly huge hardcore game playing public, Koreans get by just fine without exporting. That''s the basic reason you don''t see more titles from them, but they are around... they''re normally just quirky and mistranslated.