hivemind. The player can either accept this offer or attempt to stop the C-Consciousness. If Strelok rejects the offer, the hivemind teleports him away. To reach the hivemind Strelok must fight through Monolith soldiers and mutants, and navigate anomalies. Upon reaching the C-Consciousness, Strelok shoots the capsules holding the scientists, killing the hivemind. He then destroys the unit prepared for him, leaves the facility and lays down on the grass, unsure if he made the right choice but relieved that his ordeal is finally over. Technical features The X-Ray Engine is a DirectX 8.1/9 Shader Model 3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time. The engine features HDR rendering, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, widescreen support, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that use deferred shading, the X-Ray Engine does not support multisample anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a different form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with dynamic lighting which utilizes an edge detection algorithm to smooth edges between objects. The game takes place in a thirty square kilometer area, and both the outside and inside of this area are rendered to the same amount of detail. Some textures in the game were photographs of the walls in the developers' studio. As of patch 1.0003 the X-Ray Engine supports "surround screen" monitor setups, including a 16:9 native resolution ratio. The X-Ray Engine is among the first of its kind to feature real time Global illumination through a method called Photon mapping, the GI system runs entirely through the CPU on one core and was first seen implemented in a beta build as early as 2004 however remained experimental through ShoC development most likely due to its massive performance hit. The X-ray engine uses GSC Game World's proprietary ALife artificial intelligence engine. ALife supports more than one thousand characters inhabiting the Zone. These characters are non-scripted, meaning that AI life can be developed even when not in contact with the player. The NPCs have a full life cycle (task accomplishment, combat, rest, feeding and sleep) and the same applies to the many monsters living in the Zone (hunting, attacking stalkers and other monsters, resting, eating, sleeping). These monsters migrate in large groups. The non-scripted nature of the characters means that there are an unlimited number of random quests. For instance, rescuing stalkers from danger, destroying stalker renegades,