Radium features discussion news

So this news update is going to be a little different. Rather than telling you what various team members are up to, I'm going to try and explain a bit further about what Radium is about.

I decided to write this for two reasons. One is because people who join the team even get confused at first thinking we are a mod for Call of Chernobyl (it isn't), or people thinking this is a weapons mod (also not the case).

As burguois pointed out in an earlier article about Radium, this originally was a weapons mod, dubbed "Ultimate Weapon Renewal", which is still part of our URL. However, Radium is much more than that.

I recommend people read burguois' earlier new article on this subject here: Moddb.com
However, I will attempt to explain further.

The concept of Radium is to take the game Stalker: Call of Pripyat, and make it into the game it should have been. At the same time it is being modernized in many ways.

We are using the game's source code, and applying bug fixes, gameplay changes, improving rendering, improving sound, and just generally making COP a better game overall.

In terms of the gameplay, expect new features like dynamic news, randomized anomalies, more intense combat situations, new mutant varieties and characteristics, a dynamic ranking system based on how skilled of a stalker you are considered, new achievements, new types of anomalies and artifacts, many new weapons, dynamic enemy load-outs, a revised story to make more sense, several different starting locations and background stories, and many other features. We have several fun secrets that we likely will not reveal until the release of the mod, but may hint at.

In terms of graphics, they have undergone quite an overhaul. First of all, there is no longer a static lighting renderer, and there is no longer DX10. The available renderers are DX9 in several flavors, and DX11 (which has undergone a major overhaul). If you are playing on a dated system or a laptop, it is recommended to play the game in the lowest option of DX9. Static lighting/DX8 was removed for a variety of reasons, one of which is that if someone has to resort to playing on static lighting in order to play the game, chances are your system is not up-to-par to play Radium to begin with.

There are many new graphical features, though some bloat that was in a previous graphics article has been removed or refined. The main changes is a new outdoor and interior lighting system, Vincent Vega's excellent SWTC weather mod for COP, vastly improved looking water, increased grass rendering distance and a grass LOD system so it doesn't affect performance as bad as other mods, many fixed rendering issues, improved shadows, improved Ambient Occlusion varieties and properties, improved light map rendering, FXAA, improved Level of Detail, a version of grass shadows that have little in the way of a performance hit, Shoker's fix for increased detail of models, improved fog, improved tone mapping, cloud shadows, and most recently atmospheric light scattering in the water, sky, and clouds. This is just the beginning, there will be many more changes coming along.

I want to point out that although we have added a lot of eye candy, almost all of it is optional and can be tweaked via console or the game menu.

As for sound design, I'm sure many of you have noticed our approach to sound. For weapons, we take cues from Michael Mann movies such as Heat: guns are loud. I know this only too well myself, as I have some hearing loss due to someone firing a gun close to me when I had no hearing protection. Guns should sound powerful, and they do.
Ripflux and Koma both have worked on music for Radium, but we're still trying to determine how it should be used. One idea is to have a more dynamic music system, where music changes based on where you are, what is happening, what time of day it is, etc.
We also have added support for sound quality greater than 44.1khz. In fact, we have adopted 48khz as our new standard.
We have also enabled proper detection of any sound devices there are, such as your dedicated sound card (highly recommended, people who say there is no difference between on-board sound and a dedicated sound card don't know what they're talking about), and also it will be bundled with optional OpenAL Soft, and hopefully support for an alternative to OpenAL implements: FMOD.

As for other features, we at our core are using many of the Call of Chernobyl scripts and features. Likewise, Call of Chernobyl has some of our code as well.

I suppose I should mention system requirements. Well, you can definitely play Radium on a laptop on low settings if you play on DX9, but Radium is definitely intended to be played on DX11. I would also recommend running Radium on a fast hard drive or solid state drive, if you have a dedicated sound card you'll get a richer audio experience, and you'll need a minimum of 7GB of hard drive space as when Radium comes out it is going to be released completely standalone. I also recommend a minimum of 4GB of RAM, though I must stress that is a minimum.

I would also like to say that I fully support having things open source. That is why before long I am going to be releasing part of our code as an Open Xray fork. Some of it will not be released if it is felt that it could give away gameplay spoilers, or it simply will not work correctly when compiled due to certain changes. We also may keep some graphical features to ourselves for the time being.

More articles coming soon.