Starfield and Creation Engine 2

[dagobaking]

14 hours ago, Mr. Otaku said:

As i understand it, Rockstar originally released a table tennis game in 2006 which was the first game that used their new inhouse RAGE engine and every game they've put out since then has used massively upgraded versions of that same engine. The leap from that table tennis game to a game like RDR2 shows just how much work Rockstar really put into their engine so Bethesda really has little excuse in that department.

 

I'm not sure if I follow that comparison though. Just based on this info, Rockstar built both the little tennis engine and the much larger iteration of it. But, Bethesda also made a comparable lift by building the original Creation Engine.

 

At the time of creation that was a huge feat also. Between Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim they were elevating the "open world" space in ways that hadn't been seen before. It captured players imaginations with ideas like "every object can be picked up" and "the grass looks realistic as you run all the way up to the top of a mountain." Things that already seem quaint now. But, were impressive at the time.

 

Something happened after Skyrim that caused that progress to stop.

 

14 hours ago, Mr. Otaku said:

From what we know, the game could come out anywhere between 2025 to 2027 if we account for possible delays what not, i'll be in my mid 20's by then which is kinda odd to think about right now. But yeah i sincerely hope that TES6 will be a radical step forward in all the right ways, Elder Scrolls is one of my favorite series and i want it to receive the proper technical treatment by Bethesda, especially since it's their flagship IP.

 

I think that timeline is probably right given a "we're starting on it for reals" date of this year.

[Guest]

49 minutes ago, dagobaking said:

Something happened after Skyrim that caused that progress to stop.

 

 

Creation Club happened. 

[dagobaking]

Hah. Indeed it did.

[Guest]

The idea that a mod author should cater to the majority (in order to become a star and make money out of it), came from the Creation Club. This was in 2016-2017, same time the permission system in the Nexus was implemented. Patreon came only later, so it is more a consequence of it. From there on, it has been only downhill. 

Mod authors were always the opposite of AAA developers. I remember back in the 2000s people used to self-host their mods in Civfanatics, and just send the links to the public. Everything was niche and if users did not like it, they just moved on. Today the mod author needs to have a discord and a following, else he is not even marked as a mod author in some circles, no matter what he did.

And the censorship is heavy. A user above pointed out you can't remove woke content from games anymore. That's because all modding platforms have been compromised. They follow the same rules from the industry, hence the same imposition of woke content. This somewhat affects developers as well, as many of them gets inspiration from mods, and when you have censorship, creativity goes away. Modding was the underground side of the industry, a place where people were free to do what they want. Today it is just a appendix to the industry. Even indie games now have woke content and disgusting visual filters. 

[davisev5225]

1 hour ago, Wolfstorm321 said:

 

 

Creation Club happened. 

 

There's probably quite a bit more truth in that statement than many people realize.  Bethesda actively disincentivized themselves from changing the engine because they wanted to monetize their modding community.  Said modding community would take a while to get up to speed with a new/heavily-revised engine and related tools, so Bethesda backed themselves into a corner here.  They can't make major changes to the engine without admitting that the Creation Club was a bad idea, and AAA studios never admit things were stupid when it comes to money.

[South8028]

1 hour ago, davisev5225 said:

 

There's probably quite a bit more truth in that statement than many people realize.  Bethesda actively disincentivized themselves from changing the engine because they wanted to monetize their modding community.  Said modding community would take a while to get up to speed with a new/heavily-revised engine and related tools, so Bethesda backed themselves into a corner here.  They can't make major changes to the engine without admitting that the Creation Club was a bad idea, and AAA studios never admit things were stupid when it comes to money.

All talk about a new engine seems naive. It's like talking about converting a tank factory into a locomotive factory. This is certainly possible, but only the premises will remain from the tank factory. Everything else will have to be changed. Machine tools, personnel, accounting, suppliers and markets. ) Figuratively speaking.

[Mr. Otaku]

6 hours ago, dagobaking said:

 

I'm not sure if I follow that comparison though. Just based on this info, Rockstar built both the little tennis engine and the much larger iteration of it. But, Bethesda also made a comparable lift by building the original Creation Engine.

 

At the time of creation that was a huge feat also. Between Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim they were elevating the "open world" space in ways that hadn't been seen before. It captured players imaginations with ideas like "every object can be picked up" and "the grass looks realistic as you run all the way up to the top of a mountain." Things that already seem quaint now. But, were impressive at the time.

 

Something happened after Skyrim that caused that progress to stop.

 

 

I think that timeline is probably right given a "we're starting on it for reals" date of this year.

 

My comparison was about how big the gap is between current RAGE and the first iteration of RAGE that we saw in 2006. I'll never deny that Bethesda also made huge leaps with their engine but the gap between Morrowind and Fallout 4 doesn't seem to be as big as that table tennis game and RDR2. Rockstar seemed to have kept upgrading their engine like their lives depended on it whereas Bethesda's engine upgrades seemed to have slowed down quite a lot after Skyrim, so i think you're right about something happening after Skyrim.

 

Not to say Bethesda isn't doing anything at all, but there's clearly a lot of gaps in priorities and it'll become more and more prominent in the coming years as gaming tech keeps evolving at breakneck speeds. Here's hoping TES6 will be as iconic as Skyrim, fingers crossed. They said they're going back to their old school RPG styles with Starfield so that's a good sign at least from a games structure point of view.

[27X]

11 minutes ago, Mr. Otaku said:

 

My comparison was about how big the gap is between current RAGE and the first iteration of RAGE that we saw in 2006. I'll never deny that Bethesda also made huge leaps with their engine but the gap between Morrowind and Fallout 4 doesn't seem to be as big as that table tennis game and RDR2. Rockstar seemed to have kept upgrading their engine like their lives depended on it whereas Bethesda's engine upgrades seemed to have slowed down quite a lot after Skyrim, so i think you're right about something happening after Skyrim.

 

Not to say Bethesda isn't doing anything at all, but there's clearly a lot of gaps in priorities and it'll become more and more prominent in the coming years as gaming tech keeps evolving at breakneck speeds. Here's hoping TES6 will be as iconic as Skyrim, fingers crossed. They said they're going back to their old school RPG styles with Starfield so that's a good sign at least from a games structure point of view.

 

Half of Carmack's prediction of in-memory versus streaming tech were wrong, simple as. Had he gotten his way there'd be no stuttering now from asset and shader decompilation but people would be whining about loading speed because giant compressed asset packages and complaining about 64 gigs being the norm.

[Mr. Otaku]

9 minutes ago, 27X said:

Half of Carmack's prediction of in-memory versus streaming tech were wrong, simple as. Had he gotten his way there'd be no stuttering now from asset and shader decompilation but people would be whining about loading speed because giant compressed asset packages and complaining about 64 gigs being the norm.

 

I don't know how this Carmack person or any of that other stuff is related to what i was talking about but, okay.

[Guest]

Skyrim had barely any stutter in my old monitor, even with Vsync enabled. 

But nine months ago, the monitor started to fail, after more than ten years of use, so I bought another monitor. 

This one I use now is a Gsync monitor, and I started to get stutter in Skyrim, when Vscyn was enabled. 

After Vscyn was turned off, the stutter decreased by 90%. 

You can't have both Gsync and Vsync enabled, at least for Bethesda games. 

[xbrrrty]

On 8/17/2022 at 10:12 PM, Wolfstorm321 said:

The idea that a mod author should cater to the majority (in order to become a star and make money out of it), came from the Creation Club. This was in 2016-2017, same time the permission system in the Nexus was implemented. Patreon came only later, so it is more a consequence of it. From there on, it has been only downhill. 

Mod authors were always the opposite of AAA developers. I remember back in the 2000s people used to self-host their mods in Civfanatics, and just send the links to the public. Everything was niche and if users did not like it, they just moved on. Today the mod author needs to have a discord and a following, else he is not even marked as a mod author in some circles, no matter what he did.

And the censorship is heavy. A user above pointed out you can't remove woke content from games anymore. That's because all modding platforms have been compromised. They follow the same rules from the industry, hence the same imposition of woke content. This somewhat affects developers as well, as many of them gets inspiration from mods, and when you have censorship, creativity goes away. Modding was the underground side of the industry, a place where people were free to do what they want. Today it is just a appendix to the industry. Even indie games now have woke content and disgusting visual filters. 

"Woke"...dude seriously. Whining about something fake like the right-wing panic of "woke" isn't going to help. All I hear from this is whining about LGBT or non white characters or any one of a hundred presentations of women in games etc. Don't be one of those creepy anti-woke people that the rest of us make fun of.

 

[xbrrrty]

On 8/17/2022 at 10:33 PM, davisev5225 said:

 

There's probably quite a bit more truth in that statement than many people realize.  Bethesda actively disincentivized themselves from changing the engine because they wanted to monetize their modding community.  Said modding community would take a while to get up to speed with a new/heavily-revised engine and related tools, so Bethesda backed themselves into a corner here.  They can't make major changes to the engine without admitting that the Creation Club was a bad idea, and AAA studios never admit things were stupid when it comes to money.

 

I think this is the key point. Bethesda changing the engine too much (to something like UE5) would result in delays to mods being made as it would take some time to get used to the new engine and create tools that were user friendly. Of course Bethesda has the money to do all of it but not the will. Creation Club was fine in terms of the mods (generally speaking) but NOBODY liked the paid mods angle at all.

[Mr. Otaku]

1 hour ago, xbrrrty said:

 

I think this is the key point. Bethesda changing the engine too much (to something like UE5) would result in delays to mods being made as it would take some time to get used to the new engine and create tools that were user friendly. Of course Bethesda has the money to do all of it but not the will. Creation Club was fine in terms of the mods (generally speaking) but NOBODY liked the paid mods angle at all.

 

Honestly, i'm okay with Bethesda using a not so flashy/janky engine if it means the games will be very moddable. If i wanna play a super polished and highly detailed game i would just play a Rockstar game or something. Getting rid of the Creation Engine this late also means throwing away all the time and money they've put into developing it all this time so from a business perspective i can't be too hard on them for sticking with it, as long as they keep introducing meaningful upgrades to it and encourage/facilitate complex modding i'm cool with it.

 

The paid mods thing is kinda wack, yeah. I wont' give flack to a modder if they're asking for donations but pay walling mods is kinda yikes. Downloading mods from the Creation Club feels kinda like microtransactions, i know they're not the same but it feels like that. You're paying for additional content that the game doesn't offer by default in both cases.

 

1 hour ago, xbrrrty said:

"Woke"...dude seriously. Whining about something fake like the right-wing panic of "woke" isn't going to help. All I hear from this is whining about LGBT or non white characters or any one of a hundred presentations of women in games etc. Don't be one of those creepy anti-woke people that the rest of us make fun of.

 

 

True!

Edited August 24, 2022 by Mr. Otaku
"Do you know the definition of a typo?" -Crazy Man With A Mohawk

[Guest]

1 hour ago, xbrrrty said:

"Woke"...dude seriously. Whining about something fake like the right-wing panic of "woke" isn't going to help. All I hear from this is whining about LGBT or non white characters or any one of a hundred presentations of women in games etc. Don't be one of those creepy anti-woke people that the rest of us make fun of.

 

 

 

I just pointed out a example of censorship. Mod authors are no longer free, like it used to be in the past. 

I could have used the parlor modding example, but that is a exhausted topic. 

[Antiope_Apollonia]

On 8/16/2022 at 6:24 AM, 27X said:

Because I work in the industry. Any AI/PC non-dialog interaction is handled by behaviors in Bethbryo, and she can't be assed to care about ladders and quite literally, no one has the balls to ask her.

To be fair, I can't be arsed to care about ladders, either, and I suspect most players are the same. 

 

In all my many hundreds of hours playing Skyrim, the idea that there's anything deficient about the ladders had literally never crossed my mind before this thread.  It seems like a perfectly reasonable development decision to look at ladders and say, "Yeah, we could implement fantastic ladders and solve all the second-order problems that arise from them, but there are two dozen other, better ways to use those development resources instead."  If someone really passionate about ladders wants to make the ultimate ladder mod, well, more power to them—that's part of the beauty of Bathesda games—but when you're making a game on a budget to a deadline, some things just aren't priorities.  

 

And I think someone mentioned this already, but it bears reiterating that it isn't just a matter of animating the ladder climbing behaviour itself.  Once you introduce actual ladder climbing, then you have to deal with what to do when you get attacked on a ladder, when you get Fus Ro Da'ed off of a ladder, etc.  And NPC AI packages need to be able to deal with the situation where they're trying to go one way on the ladder while you're trying to go the other.  And probably a whole slew of other second-order effects that I haven't thought of, because nothing exists in a vacuum.  Are these problems soluble?  Sure.  Is it worth dedicating the necessary resources to solving them when just bypassing the issue entirely is a perfectly adequate solution?  Doubtful.

[travelmedic]

8 hours ago, xbrrrty said:

"Woke"...dude seriously. Whining about something fake like the right-wing panic of "woke" isn't going to help. All I hear from this is whining about LGBT or non white characters or any one of a hundred presentations of women in games etc. Don't be one of those creepy anti-woke people that the rest of us make fun of.

 

 

Regardless of which "wing" any of us are in, censorship should be a bad thing.

 

The whole purpose of mods is to be able to tailor a game to the way we want to play it, and that we can individually enjoy.  Maybe for some people that means removing the "woke" stuff, and for others it means adding pictures of Che Guevara everywhere.  Who cares?  As long as we download the mods we like for use in our games on our computers, it isn't hurting anyone else.  If we see a mod we don't like, we can just move on.

 

And I'm willing to bet that there are many in the "right wing" who like to make fun of the "creepy woke people" too.  In the long run, demonizing the "other side" and finding differences instead of commonalities does no one any favors.

[RohZima]

2 hours ago, travelmedic said:

 

Regardless of which "wing" any of us are in, censorship should be a bad thing.

 

The whole purpose of mods is to be able to tailor a game to the way we want to play it, and that we can individually enjoy.  Maybe for some people that means removing the "woke" stuff, and for others it means adding pictures of Che Guevara everywhere.  Who cares?  As long as we download the mods we like for use in our games on our computers, it isn't hurting anyone else.  If we see a mod we don't like, we can just move on.

 

And I'm willing to bet that there are many in the "right wing" who like to make fun of the "creepy woke people" too.  In the long run, demonizing the "other side" and finding differences instead of commonalities does no one any favors.

 

Nah. Traditional prejudices are traditional for a reason. And that means they will be back before you know it.

 

Also, I hear someone was perma-banned for a mod which removed woke content from a game. That's pretty shocking, if you ask me. Though I'm sure there was more to the story.

 

Then again, it is the popularity of those "anti-woke" mods that they take exception with.

[travelmedic]

1 hour ago, RohZima said:

 

Also, I hear someone was perma-banned for a mod which removed woke content from a game. That's pretty shocking, if you ask me. Though I'm sure there was more to the story.

 

 

Terribly shocking, and hence my comment on the evils of censorship.  Actions like that will only make the two "wings" hate each other more.

 

Besides, the person who was banned only restored content that was already in the game files for use in the Middle East version of the game.  If people want to get upset about the lack of LGBT flags in Spiderman, they should be upset about how LGBT stuff is so suppressed in that part of the world.

[Kendo 2]

13 hours ago, xbrrrty said:

"Woke"...dude seriously. Whining about something fake like the right-wing panic of "woke" isn't going to help. All I hear from this is whining about LGBT or non white characters or any one of a hundred presentations of women in games etc. Don't be one of those creepy anti-woke people that the rest of us make fun of.

 

I have no idea what the fuck you're used to but you're not going gaslight anyone here.  Woke is fake...yeah sure it is.  And in case you missed a key point, everyone makes fun of or outright hates Modernity woke bullshit in their entertainment.  You obviously have an agenda and you're on the wrong site.  Woke is what's creepy; the rest of us are sane.

[RohZima]

36 minutes ago, travelmedic said:

 

Terribly shocking, and hence my comment on the evils of censorship.  Actions like that will only make the two "wings" hate each other more.

 

Besides, the person who was banned only restored content that was already in the game files for use in the Middle East version of the game.  If people want to get upset about the lack of LGBT flags in Spiderman, they should be upset about how LGBT stuff is so suppressed in that part of the world.

 

Good points. But I think it's beyond salvagable at this point and at least a good portion probably secretly want things to go that way. 

 

15 minutes ago, Kendo 2 said:

 

I have no idea what the fuck you're used to but you're not going gaslight anyone here.  Woke is fake...yeah sure it is.  And in case you missed a key point, everyone makes fun of or outright hates Modernity woke bullshit in their entertainment.  You obviously have an agenda and you're on the wrong site.  Woke is what's creepy; the rest of us are sane.

 

I just ignored that dude (or whatever) because he was blatantly too out of touch with reality. It's obvious from looking at the mod scene where the modders and users are at. By looking at the numbers and examining the themes and messages in the greatest quest mods made by the most talented modders. There is a very clear pattern.

Edited August 25, 2022 by RohZima

[Guest]

11 hours ago, travelmedic said:

 

Terribly shocking, and hence my comment on the evils of censorship.  Actions like that will only make the two "wings" hate each other more.

 

Besides, the person who was banned only restored content that was already in the game files for use in the Middle East version of the game.  If people want to get upset about the lack of LGBT flags in Spiderman, they should be upset about how LGBT stuff is so suppressed in that part of the world.

 

 

I'm not shocked because this was predicted, and was to happen sooner or later. 

 

Back in 2003 I was looking for mods for Civilization 3, in the Civfanatics site, and saw some military units for WW2 scenarios in the lists. 
There it was a german soldier sprite (Civ3 was 2d) with a nazi flag behind him, for use in a WW2 scenario.

The flag is illegal in some countries, but there was a modding forum, so nobody said a word about it. 

Compare this with the recent case of the Spiderman mod, and you will notice how things have changed. 

 

Today we have modding forums who try to treat mod authors as developers, with all that excessive legalese, leading to the parlor modding debacle. 

Content started to die and today there are a hundred overhauls for each expansion that is released. And I'm not talking about the big ones. 

I saw mod authors being banned for releasing their mods, accused of being thieves. Some for the pettiest reasons imaginable. 

Just from taking a look at that environment, you can predict that political censorship would happen sooner or later. 

 

If the game industry is overriden with wokism, the same will happen with modding scenes, because now modding scenes are just appendixes of the industry, instead of alternatives to it. But mod authors were never meant to developers. Developers can be mod authors, but it is still a hobby, not a paid work. But now we have Creation Club and Patreon, where people go beg for money for a simple 3d port from another game, and the Nexus which turned into a company, and is now bound to the laws of a country where you have to ask permission to have a kitchen knife. It was inevitable that political discourse would contaminate it. In such environment, the industry will dictate what mod authors can and cannot do, even while most mod authors are not paid for what they do. 

 

There is a alternative, though, but it is unconfortable for most mod authors. The solution would be to have a small forum in a DMCA-ignored country, where mod authors would be forced to self-host their files, like it was 20 years ago. So no strike would be possible against it. But then, you have mod authors who are accomodated with the Nexus and its easy of use, so just a few of them would migrate to it. And you also have the issue with search engines, which actively censor small sites, so people would not be able to find it. 

Edited August 25, 2022 by Wolfstorm321

[RohZima]

11 hours ago, Wolfstorm321 said:

There is a alternative, though, but it is unconfortable for most mod authors. The solution would be to have a small forum in a DMCA-ignored country, where mod authors would be forced to self-host their files, like it was 20 years ago. So no strike would be possible against it. But then, you have mod authors who are accomodated with the Nexus and its easy of use, so just a few of them would migrate to it. And you also have the issue with search engines, which actively censor small sites, so people would not be able to find it. 

 

I know of at least one technology emerging that is decentralized hosting. It's based on blockchain and users would volunteer, effectively, some of their hard disk space to host (the encrypted) block chain which contains the website data. That means it is totally decentralized so there is simply no way the authorities could do anything. The obvious problems would be with scale and performance on a site with downloads. But I guess the solution would be the mods themselves be hosted on 3rd party - but then they could just go after those...

 

So there is a postential solution to our censorship woes.

[davisev5225]

55 minutes ago, RohZima said:

 

I know of at least one technology emerging that is decentralized hosting. It's based on blockchain and users would volunteer, effectively, some of their hard disk space to host (the encrypted) block chain which contains the website data. That means it is totally decentralized so there is simply no way the authorities could do anything. The obvious problems would be with scale and performance on a site with downloads. But I guess the solution would be the mods themselves be hosted on 3rd party - but then they could just go after those...

 

So there is a postential solution to our censorship woes.

 

Even blockchains must have indexes.  Blockchains are, to potentially over-simplify the concept, essentially an evolved version of the torrent magnet links and peer exchange - you still have to scrape some level of indexing data from somewhere in order to navigate the blockchain.  While far more difficult to trace, it is not impossible.  Authorities could simply target the index hosts and effectively dissolve the blockchain.

[RohZima]

1 hour ago, davisev5225 said:

 

Even blockchains must have indexes.  Blockchains are, to potentially over-simplify the concept, essentially an evolved version of the torrent magnet links and peer exchange - you still have to scrape some level of indexing data from somewhere in order to navigate the blockchain.  While far more difficult to trace, it is not impossible.  Authorities could simply target the index hosts and effectively dissolve the blockchain.

 

I'm pretty sure there are no index hosts. There are obviously a group of "power users" but I don't think it can be penetrated in the way you said. There is no "point of failure" they could target. This means p2p crypto trading, plus totally decentralized web hosting; not dependent on any 3rd parties. Well except the ISP, I guess. But I don't really understand networks or blockchain so I can't defend it. But I do know that the entire purpose of this was to solve these problems which we are discussing.

 

The creators have themselves said that there is no way to stop people from doing anything illegal on the network because it is so decentralized. In theory someone could be selling human body parts in full view of everyone and there would be nothing anyone can do about it. Well except the police tracking down the person physically. 

[sila]

I would love to remain hopeful on the future of Bethesda games modding scene but... Honestly I kinda think Kendo is probably right, much as I hate to say it.