The envisionment of SIN is to bring you what was promised by GSC for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, instead of the gutted retail release we were left with. SIN aims to cover every aspect imaginable from gameplay intended to genuinely scare the player, to graphics for the absolute best visual experience, cut mutants, absolute realism, optimisations, stability, and a complete game mechanics overhaul, all without breaking the story. The idea is to present the player with a complete retail experience for the purist that liked SoC but wished it was far more fleshed out. In no way what so ever does SIN try to be like old beta or alpha builds of SoC, SIN aims to enhance everything SoC already has and give it continuity with CS and CoP - nothing more, nothing less.
...When X-Ray can still look like this.
Wow, now that is nice!
There is so much to like here, from the textures to the flares and sky. It becomes increasingly hard to highlight one area for either praise or criticism and that I suppose is the ultimate goal, a high quality balanced screenshot. No doubt though you will find one more detail that you consider in need of tweaking, but being a perfectionist that you are does show :)
The only sad part is the the 32bit nature of x-ray, which gets a major headache from things like this.
Thats why there is a included patch with TK that makes the XR3DA 64bit aware, letting it address more than 2GB ;)
That the madboris fix?
Looking at this image again I've seen one or two maps that I think I will replace using a new mapping technique I invented, it should result in the parallaxing on the concrete texture on the upper right hand side of the image being much more accurate. Possibly to the point of looking like the details were actually part of the level not just the texture.
*gives ketxxx CryEngine editing resources to see the results*