Metro 2033 Doesn’t Use X-ray Engine, Does Support SteamWorks

It was revealed recently in a big announcement that Metro 2033 would support DirectX 11 technology as well as 3D Vision, And several nice screenshots were there to prove it.

If you thought however that the game was too good looking to use the same engine and tech as STALKER… you’d be right. Metro 2033 developers, 4A Games, have put the rumours to rest that they used STALKER’s X-ray engine during the development of the title.

For a while, there have been rumours going around that Metro 2033 indeed used the X-ray engine, and this was even backed up by Sergey Grigorovic or GSC Game World, the STALKER developers. He claims it’s based on an early build of the X-ray engine. But some people who worked at the company and later left to join 4A Games, like Oles Shishkovtsov , say that isn’t the case, as he claims that the X-ray engine couldn’t handle the features in Metro 2033.

"There's no relationship. 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.

When the philosophies of the engines are so radically different it is nearly impossible to share the code, the final answer is ‘no’. We do not have shared code with X-Ray, nor would it be possible to do so.”

Comparing the two titles, Metro 2033 may well look a lot prettier in my opinion. I do sense a bit of professional rivalry there though, to say the least.

The bad news for some people: Metro 2033 is going to support SteamWorks for the PC version of the game, just like Aliens vs. Predator and Modern Warfare 2.

That’ll likely mean that the only place you’ll be able to pick it up online via digital distribution will be Steam, seeing as other companies like D2D boycott SteamWorks titles. They might have to adapt though, seeing as they’ll start losing sales as more and more games start using this feature.

Metro 2033 should be out in the middle of next month for the PC and Xbox 360.

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Sources: Eurogamer - Shacknews

Metro 2033 Doesn’t Use X-ray Engine, Does Support SteamWorks