Behold the mighty Unigine Engine

[Darkwisdom]

I just think that people should respect the biggest contributors to the community, like a wise old man. 

[Captain Cobra]

Post counts are in no way a good indicator of this.

[bjornk]

I wouldn't know about the lazy programmers, but there are all sorts of evidence of lazy design choices in all Bethesda games. I'm pretty sure putting together a brand new, up to date game engine is beyond their abilities as a game studio. They may tweak what they've got, but that's about it. As for the CK, first of all, they should make it more stable before attempting to make it multi-threaded, otherwise it's a recipe for disaster.

[prideslayer]

I just think that people should respect the biggest contributors to the community, like a wise old man.

People should try to respect other people in general. If he doesn't use any of "my stuff", I'm not much of a contributor.

 

Post counts are in no way a good indicator of this.

I agree. Wish they were hidden most of the time. OTOH it's a good indicator that I need to delete a PM without reading if it's a help request from someone with 0 or 1 posts. Ain't nobody got time fo' dat.

 

I wouldn't know about the lazy programmers, but there are all sorts of evidence of lazy design choices in all Bethesda games. I'm pretty sure putting together a brand new, up to date game engine is beyond their abilities as a game studio. They may tweak what they've got, but that's about it. As for the CK, first of all, they should make it more stable before attempting to make it multi-threaded, otherwise it's a recipe for disaster.

 

I would not have jumped to their defense if they were called nearly incompetent liars, as all evidence points to that being the case. I agree entirely that creating a (good) engine is well beyond their skill level -- but it's beyond most. You need real a-grade chops to create a competitive engine, doing what they did (buying one and extending it) is a smarter plan.

 

The CK is a definite love/hate thing. Hate it for how terrible it is, but love the fact that they make it available at all.

[Guest carywinton]

From a purely cost and price point perspective, buying your own engine and developing your own in house code for it is usually far less expensive than the development process of an entire rendering 3D engine. Prideslayer is probably correct on the assumption that they would not develop their own engine, not that they couldn't per say, they would just outsource a team for that anyway, it just would not be cost effective and you folks have to realize the majority of the decisions are not up to the development house or group but the board of investors, who could care less how great the gamer runs or it's stability, they care only for ROI.

[joemonco]

I would not have jumped to their defense if they were called nearly incompetent liars, as all evidence points to that being the case. I agree entirely that creating a (good) engine is well beyond their skill level -- but it's beyond most. You need real a-grade chops to create a competitive engine, doing what they did (buying one and extending it) is a smarter plan.

The CK is a definite love/hate thing. Hate it for how terrible it is, but love the fact that they make it available at all.

 

 

I don't think they are incompetent liars, I think they are just dealing with an incredibly old and almost unmanageable code base.  This suggests a code base that resembles spaghetti.  Skyrim's PC release, their high res DLCs shipping with missing textures, suggest problems with QA.

 

Then again, Fallout 3 did ship with Little Lamplight, so maybe I'm just being overly optimistic.

[Symon]

Remember that the 'engine' used by Beth games is actual an assortment of third-party SDKs, (Havok, Speedtree, Gamebryo, etc). The Beth contribution is the ESM/ESP handling and the scripting ).

 

If you want to see a Bethesda engine, there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XnGine

[prideslayer]

 

I would not have jumped to their defense if they were called nearly incompetent liars, as all evidence points to that being the case. I agree entirely that creating a (good) engine is well beyond their skill level -- but it's beyond most. You need real a-grade chops to create a competitive engine, doing what they did (buying one and extending it) is a smarter plan.

 

The CK is a definite love/hate thing. Hate it for how terrible it is, but love the fact that they make it available at all.

 

I don't think they are incompetent liars, I think they are just dealing with an incredibly old and almost unmanageable code base.  This suggests a code base that resembles spaghetti.  Skyrim's PC release, their high res DLCs shipping with missing textures, suggest problems with QA.

 

Then again, Fallout 3 did ship with Little Lamplight, so maybe I'm just being overly optimistic.

 

I do think they are incompetent, or borderline. The major show-stopping bugs, and weird idiosyncrasies, always seem to be in code they wrote -- not 3rd party code like havok, bink, speedtree, or the gamebryo engine itself. They obviously didn't think their cunning plan through with the skyrim script-instance saving stuff either. I agree they have QA problems.

 

I say they are liars because they have claimed (or strongly implied) that the various incarnations of the CK are what they use in house to create the games. It's obviously not true. There are things you can't do in the CK, records that exist in the EXE itself, and so on -- and I'm not just talking about havok/FNIS type stuff which has a "good" (relatively) reason behind it. If that were a heavily used in house tool, there's no way it'd be as buggy and badly behaved as it is. I'm sure they use it, but they don't use it to build the whole game. I'm sure that e.g. FalloutNV.esm exists and has many records and such before it's ever touched by the GECK, as it was built primarily in some other tool.

[Captain Cobra]

 

They obviously didn't think their cunning plan through with the skyrim script-instance saving stuff either.

 

Here is a question I've been wanting to ask for a while:

 

Why did Skyrim have a problem with scripts becoming "baked" into saves, compared to older titles that did not have this problem?

[prideslayer]

 

They obviously didn't think their cunning plan through with the skyrim script-instance saving stuff either.

 

Here is a question I've been wanting to ask for a while:

 

Why did Skyrim have a problem with scripts becoming "baked" into saves, compared to older titles that did not have this problem?

 

It was a decision on their part, presumably to save the current state of a running script since skyrim scripts can run for longer than a single frame. Previous game scripts are either forcibly terminated, or delay the next frame. In the older engine saving a game just has to wait for a gap between frames, and then it knows no scripts are in the middle of running.

 

The idea itself isn't bad, but they didn't think through the consequences. That's why savegame scalpel and skse have to do their job for them, cleaning up bad references when a game is loaded.

 

Modders can work around this but it's tedious, so most don't do it. If papyrus had exception handling that would have helped a lot.

[Majuko]

Not sure this thread is even about this anymore but wow....That video was actually too epic I stopped at 2mins in.... I wish and hope and if I did believe in a god I would pray to it for that to be what the new TESVI looks like cause that was just....Down right amazing.

[Symon]

OK, let's get back to the topic of a 'new engine'.

I'll be completely stunned if you ever see one for a Beth game for a decade at least.

 

Can you all remember the Beth sales droids hyping up Skyrims 'new engine'? Did you get one?

 

Now when this 'new engine' was announced. some of us who program for a living called fiddlesticks, for several reasons.

1. They didn't have remotely enough time.

2. Sales Droids wouldn't know an engine if it jumped up and bit them. It became apparent they just meant changes to the Beth bits, most notably the scripting, the user interface, oh and changing the name of the Construction set (again).

3. They've just made incremental changes through Morrowind->Oblivion->FO3->Skyrim, mostly by using the latest SDK for their chosen and familiar middleware; then excising some features to concentrate on the needs of the console market.

4. Most importantly, the chosen technologies will be limited by the capabilities of the current Microsoft Console!!!!! So no cutting edge graphics.

 

Point 4 is the most germane to this discussion. Until Consoles go out of fashion, your next Beth game will be limited to the capabilities of the console on sale at the time of development!

[prideslayer]

4. Most importantly, the chosen technologies will be limited by the capabilities of the current Microsoft Console!!!!! So no cutting edge graphics.

 

Point 4 is the most germane to this discussion. Until Consoles go out of fashion, your next Beth game will be limited to the capabilities of the console on sale at the time of development!

I think you can only safely say that when it comes to the DX version used, and only if the game isn't multi-platform from a console perspective. Skyrim was released on the 360 and it would be fair to say it was limited to DX9, but only if it hadn't also been released for another console.

 

Since they also ported it to the PS3, even the DX version limitation isn't something you can pin on MS console compatibility. A "PC Port" using DX11 was possible, and would have been easier than the PS3 port.

 

Why they stuck with DX9 is an exercise in speculation, but my money is on it being PC related -- Windows XP was still really popular at the time of Skyrim's release, and isn't available on XP. In 2011, when Skyrim was released, XP and Win7 were split about 50/50 worldwide in popularity.

 

The next game might use DX11 if we're lucky, and they've hired the talent to update the engine. DX12 is doubtful but still possible.

[Symon]

While sensible suppositions, I doubt they'll do this. After all, Beth does it's initial development these days for the XBox platform and when porting to PC, they can't be bothered to implement 10 hotkeys, let alone change the Version of Direct-X.

 

I'm convinced they stuck with DirectX9 because that's what the XBox used. Using another version on the PC would have been time wasted that was actually spent porting to PS3 and, crucially, wouldn't have generated any extra revenue.

 

I'll be astonished if the next Beth game on PC doesn't use the same version of DirectX as the MS console of the day. There is no money to be made out of a better version on the PC. How much has Skyrim's sales been hurt by DirectX9? Not very much it would seem.

[prideslayer]

While sensible suppositions, I doubt they'll do this. After all, Beth does it's initial development these days for the XBox platform and when porting to PC, they can't be bothered to implement 10 hotkeys, let alone change the Version of Direct-X.

 

I'm convinced they stuck with DirectX9 because that's what the XBox used. Using another version on the PC would have been time wasted that was actually spent porting to PS3 and, crucially, wouldn't have generated any extra revenue.

Probably a bit of both. They didn't port to DX10 or DX11 due to time/money constraints, and even without those constraints, they wouldn't have done it anyway with the prevalence of XP at the time.

 

I'll be astonished if the next Beth game on PC doesn't use the same version of DirectX as the MS console of the day. There is no money to be made out of a better version on the PC. How much has Skyrim's sales been hurt by DirectX9? Not very much it would seem.

That won't be so bad. The xbox one is DX11, moving to DX12 next year.

 

I will not be surprised if they switch engines entirely. I kind of don't expect them to, because of the obvious investment into their custom version of gamebryo. On the other hand though, even the newest gamebryo (lightspeed) can only target Win32, X360, PS3, and Wii.

 

If they want to release on the One and PS4, they have a lot of work to do that they probably aren't equipped for, or they need to switch engines.