S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl News

Winter is a tough season, especially in the Zone. And even though some winter days felt like late March, stalkers are jubilant to welcome the advent of spring. The season when everything is new, the world refreshes, and the Zone is no exception. Curious mutants lurking through the grass searching for adventures, artefacts and anomalies are easier to spot. Seasoned veterans are ready to find what was left under the snow, some romantic stalkers are happy to see first flowers and traders are ready to welcome newcomers.

Spring is a big deal to them, tons of rookies are looking to venture for a better life, and they need equipment, and food, and drinks, and, you can see where it goes. Most rookies go by the established route. Steam offers discounts up to 75% for classic S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games.

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But some future stalkers can venture into the unknown, that is console Zone, and try S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Legends of the Zone trilogy. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. world joins consoles, and you can try to survive and find your way with a gamepad. This route is branched into two separate entries, Xbox Store and PlayStation Store. It is up to you to choose one you prefer.

Deadly anomalies, dangerous mutants, anarchists, bandits, free stalkers, players and partners are heartily invited to join us and play the demo of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl at gamescom 2023 on 23-27 August.

Fixed Ukrainian localization to include more character voices.

Traditional Chinese (texts only) added as localization option.

Minor update in the renderers initialization sequence to address issue with freezing the game on computers powered by 12th Gen Intel® Core™ processors running on Windows 11.

Patch affects only R2 render (Full Dynamic Lighting @ DirectX® 9).
The reason behind this issue is the fact Intel dropped hardware support for DX9 in their integrated graphics cards found in 12th Gen (and upper) CPUs and discrete Arc GPUs.
To support older games, emulation layer called D3D9On12 is used to translate DX9 API calls to DX12 at runtime.
The game has somewhat complicated initialization which locked the emulator.
To address the issue, initialization was simplified a bit to be more emulator friendly.

Update, June 15

Thanks to the valuable patch feedback collected in this thread, we’re releasing a really tiny fix:


• R2 render (Dynamic Lighting) should now work properly on the systems with outdated DirectX End-User Runtime
  
• Multiplayer servers with previous version should not reject clients with the new version
  
• On numerous requests, we created public “beta” branch called “pre-win11-patch” which points to the game version without this patch
  
• Information for modders: the only file changed in the patch is “xrRender_R2.dll”