Question GSC and STALKER: why did they give up further development of the X-ray engine ?

[80251]

Did GSC even try to update their X-ray engine (i.e. to a 64-bit address space and multi-core CPU usage)? Or did they just decide from the get-go to go w/Unreal 5?

There is an OpenXRay project on github: https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16 and while it is 64-bit it doesn't seem they could do much to make it multi-threaded/multi-process or add DX-12 support.

I've read the A-life in STALKER 2 is borked badly relative to how well it ran in the original STALKER series.

 

[Blunderfluff]

I'm not aware of any significant rewrites from GSC. Seems the engine framework is far too antiquated to even bother with. Even Anomaly's own revision wasn't able to extract much juice from it.

The engine appears to have severe processing throughput limitations. Even with multithreading it would still have to contend with existing code which is likely to be half the problem.

Maybe I've got that wrong and the coding isn't that bad, And instead its the intricacy of A-life code that robs so many CPU cycles. While still capable of dumb things, the AI in certain iterations of this game/mods is remarkably intelligent. I'd go as far to say most of their package supersedes the majority of modern AI, granted it was refined further by mods like Anomaly.

Surprised to hear they borked that in S2 given the solid foundation they already had.