Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

[AndalayBay]

Really? I never noticed that

[prettyfly]

Out of interest; does anyone think that Beth might be 'stretching the truth' a bit when they say that merging greaves and curiass's allows you to have extra NPC's on screen.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Out of interest; does anyone think that Beth might be 'stretching the truth' a bit when they say that merging greaves and curiass's allows you to have extra NPC's on screen.

Not really, they might be stretching the truth by not owning up to the fact that if it were not for consoles they wouldn't need to.

[Arthmoor]

It seems plausible enough that the merge would benefit this since that means one less animation controller to deal with. Havok is a pig, and they're using some form of Havok for their anims now.Of course, Sigurd is right. They're only doing this because of the 360. PS3 and PC couldn't care less.

[Dwip]

I will at least believe the bit about it making the modeling easier, but.

[Kayle]

Of course' date=' Sigurd is right. They're only doing this because of the 360. PS3 and PC couldn't care less.[/quote']The PS3 has a harder time with things like that then the 360 does.

[prettyfly]

Not if the game is coded properly for the processor, in which case PS3 would handle something like that with ease. Of course, its not terribly likely that Skyrim's going to be coded properly for the processor, so I imagine it could also allow them to get off easier when porting the game over to the PS3 as well.

[Arthmoor]

Bottom line is that Todd said it was the 360 that prompted all this talk of streamlining and optimization. I'm sure if he meant to say the PS3 would have an even harder time of it, he'd have simply said it was being done for the PS3's benefit.I guess on the bright side, PC performance should be astronomically smooth considering anyone with a half decent rig built in the last 3 years is going to be more or less able to run the game without even breaking a sweat.

[Dwip]

When blue flames start shooting out my fan ports, I'll remember you said that.

[prettyfly]

Next gripe; the people who are saying that Bethesda should have made Skyrim the size of Dagerfell and simply made use of randomly generated content rather than the apparently inferior hand placement. Hmm...by that logic vanilla Oblivion landscape would therefore be better than UL. That's not to say that I wouldn't mind it if the worldspace was a bit bigger, but, really?

[Dwip]

I think you mean better than UL.My main issue with procedural generation is, yeah, you can get pretty good terrain results fairly easily (read the whole thing, it's neat), but I have a fair degree of difficulty believing that you could get cities better than what Daggerfall had (impossibly huge and boring), dungeons better than what Daggerfall had (impossibly huge, complex, and boring), and random quests better than what Daggerfall had (ever kill an epic dungeon just so you could off a rat at the end? Yeah), all of which somehow have to be better than what something like Fallout 3 offered us in terms of atmosphere and choices. Never mind NPCs.I like big worlds as much as the next guy, but there's a reason they did Morrowind in the way that they did. That fight's been over for a long time now.

[prettyfly]

I think you mean better than UL.

Yeah, I did, didn't I? Please excuse my terrible grammatical mistakes.

[Arthmoor]

Are these people who want Skyrim as big as Daggerfall also the same people who want to see fast travel burned at the stake? Good luck with that. :PI can't really fathom how anyone thinks hand placed content is inferior to procedurally generated content. Especially when these people are the same ones who whined about how generic and boring Oblivion felt.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Are these people who want Skyrim as big as Daggerfall also the same people who want to see fast travel burned at the stake? Good luck with that.

I can't really fathom how anyone thinks hand placed content is inferior to procedurally generated content. Especially when these people are the same ones who whined about how generic and boring Oblivion felt.

Maybe they just want the authentic medieval experience, possibly including leprosy?

[Thomas Kaira]

RARGH! Fast Travel must die! Grr! :whistle:But yes, I do prefer the smaller world with richer content to the gigantic world that is mostly empty and procedurally generated.The only problem I have with the size of Oblivion's game world is that it feels a bit cramped. But Bethesda seem to have learned from this, though, and have cut back the number of major cities (the main contributors, IMHO) from nine to five.

[prettyfly]

I suppose we've got those huge mountains now to which should make travel a bit slower and make it easier for them to make it seem like the dungeons are spread out to.

[Arthmoor]

I think part of that cramped feeling was not having space enough on the disc to hold everything. Of course, had they trimmed their ESM, pruned the unused dialogue files, and swept up any loose graphic files not being used, who knows, maybe they could have increased the province to 1.5x normal or something.Skyrim will likely feel cramped for other reasons, but we get to relieve some of that with having the added 3rd dimension: UP. If done right, even if they have more content it won't feel squeezed in.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I think part of that cramped feeling was not having space enough on the disc to hold everything. Of course' date=' had they trimmed their ESM, pruned the unused dialogue files, and swept up any loose graphic files not being used, who knows, maybe they could have increased the province to 1.5x normal or something.

Skyrim will likely feel cramped for other reasons, but we get to relieve some of that with having the added 3rd dimension: UP. If done right, even if they have more content it won't feel squeezed in.[/quote']It's the fact that the province is basically an open bowl surrounded by mountains, huge mountains, and then lots of the land isn't even used.

[AndalayBay]

If you referring to Cyrodiil, mods have taken care of that! It's really difficult to find an unused spot now when you're plopping down a dungeon or new ruin somewhere :grinning:

[prettyfly]

Geckoman haven't we been through this before there is a reason why it gives such a boost and that is because the main engine driver can't effectively place out a correct pattern of curirases and grieves at one time bethesda has already went through countless other options and finally decided this was one of there most logical and simple solutions. The codecs don't seem to want to accept 2 separate pieces so the engine hesitates that hesitation is minor at first but when more people start appearing it becomes impossible for the engine to run properly so doing this and implementing it into the new more advanced engine allows it to place armor on random bandits in larger number thus creating more of them in an efficient manner so i hope Ive helped explain the main line of the reason.

This is a reason that a poster on Bethsoft is giving for the merging of curiass and greaves. It sounds like a load of nonsense to me, anyone here got any thoughts?EDIT; the guy claims to be doing a course in game designing and to have applied for a job with Bethesda and had a firsthand look at what the new engine does. There's no way of knowing whether or not he is telling the truth (and to be honest I really don't think he is), but anyway.EDIT:

Ok all of the character is handled in a 3D world space when the game renders a zone it looks at the npcs when it does it just pulls the general look out of a database called the codec when that happens it places the character and picks out armor pieces for the character so to streamline this they made random sets of equipment for boots helmet and gloves and have them dished out at random based on player level (usually unless an area is specific) but the main thing that it used to have to decide is what breastplate and grieves should the character wear. Now in oblivion they didn't put all that in the codec they just put spawn locations and all that generic stuff so the engine really had nothing to run off of so it had a Much harder time processing all of it in an effective manner see what I'm getting at? Which also caused some of the notorious bugs in oblivion so ive heard.

More of this guys explanations. I've decided to stop engaging him because I think he's full of shit, but yeah...

[Arthmoor]

Chances are he doesn't know what he's talking about. I don't think it's the mere presence of the Cuirass with separate Greaves we're talking about here. I think it has more to do with animations than anything else, and Bethesda has been notoriously bad at optimizing those. This may have been a simple way for them to dodge the problem enough to allow more NPCs on screen. One less animation node may not sound like much, but it's a far more plausible explanation than there being one less mesh.Codecs? Come on man, that guy is pulling everyone's leg and enjoying it. I'm not even a professional programmer and I know that everyone in the biz refers to such things as APIs. No way he's working professionally in the field, and no way Bethesda would have shown him sensitive engine data if he didn't even work there.

[prettyfly]

Actually, for that matter I might emphasise that this bloke thinks that the combining of these two armor slots subsequently allows for doubling of the number of NPC's on screen. For some strange reason I think that is complete rubbish. :whistle:Um...and now he's claiming that the requirements are far higher than Oblivion and most PC's won't be able to run it....yeah....

[Arthmoor]

Clueless then. I doubt it'll allow for doubling, but Todd himself said it allows "more" which is somewhat vague.And anyone who knows even the slightest thing about PC and XBox can tell you that since Skyrim runs on the 360, it's hardware requirements for PC will be no different than Oblivion.

[Dwip]

Can't imagine as how you'd be saving any animation nodes - you're going to need to build the skeleton the same anyway, and you're not animating the greaves so much as you're animating the skeleton, if that makes any sense. I'd imagine the real savings comes in the modeling stage, where it's doubtless easier to model an entire suit than it is to dick around trying to work out what pieces go where. Probably save an awful lot of texture memory by only needing to load one texture per suit, too.I think that guy's at least half full of shit.

[Arthmoor]

I'm just going by what seems most logical to me. Animation is the only valid thing I can come up with, because it's absolute horseshit to think they can render a combination armor faster than a two piece armor. That makes no sense at all considering the poly count necessarily has to rise.If the fact that it takes up slightly less texture memory actually means something on the 360... well.... I've said it before. PATHETIC hardware that's doing substantial harm to gaming as a whole.