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Elder Scrolls 6 engine discussion.


Lethargickitten

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I just wanted to start up a discussion about the engine for the next elderscrolls game.

 

I feel like it's about time bethesda retires the old gamebryo/creation engine. I'm really enjoying Fallout 4, but the more I play the more the engine shows its age. I have no idea what kind of technical stuff goes into making a new engine, but I feel like I'd rather wait for bethesda to make a new engine from scratch than get another revamped gamebryo engine game.

 

I also feel like getting a new engine would mean new possibilities for modding. I think that would also mean we would have to get used new modding tools which might set us back a bit. However the end result would be better in my opinion.

 

Thoughts?

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"I feel like it's about time bethesda retires the old gamebryo/creation engine"

 

Beth will keep bringing Gamesbryo back to life more then a comic book villain :P

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It's the engine they own, that they have spent time developing and training among their staff. It is an engine which has become more and more tuned for making the kinds of games they want to make. They aren't going to just drop it and start over. The engine isn't even the problem, rather the problem is that their development cycle doesn't seem to give them enough time to really tune, work, or utilize the engine very well. Beyond that, they probably have too many design decisions made by committee instead of actually looking at a mechanic and weighing its value as it relates to the greater game.

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Completely agree with your post, OP. No matter what they do with their old mutant engine, it's still old and will become more and more outdated by year. New games they develop, it doesn't kinda look old, because many candyeye effects poured in, but man, feels like I'm back in 2002 every time my character moves or some interactions happen.

 

They either need serious technical upgrade, or completely reassamble it anew, not just rebranding it in attempt to fool customers as they did last time... The best option would be still transition to another technically able and modern engine IMO.

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Completely agree with your post, OP. No matter what they do with their old mutant engine, it's still old and will become more and more outdated by year. New games they develop, it doesn't kinda look old, because many candyeye effects poured in, but man, feels like I'm back in 2002 every time my character moves or some interactions happen.

 

They either need serious technical upgrade, or completely reassamble it anew, not just rebranding it in attempt to fool customers as they did last time... The best option would be still transition to another technically able and modern engine IMO.

Rendering or graphical style is not the engine, it is just a component. Aftereffects are things that are added 'after'.

 

Animations are not the engine, they are just resources with a bit of coding to string them together.

 

Interactions are based on how the game itself is scripted, and has little to do with the actual engine.

 

They have been continually updating their engine as they go. Just like how Unreal, Crytek, and similar companies update their engine. The biggest change that came with FO4 was a switch to 64 bit and multi-threading. From a programming standpoint, that is, in itself, a very large undertaking and probably where a large portion of their development budget was spent.

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I also feel like getting a new engine would mean new possibilities for modding.

The opposite may also be true, as new engine might be highly mod-unfriendly. We've already seen such things.

 

Quite likely that this would be the case actually. While they might not go as far as having areas that are closed off, it would mean re-figuring out how things like mesh and texture resources are used, and may end up using some proprietary formats for models that have new-fangled effects, like hairworks. It might also change the world formatting so that things placed in the world are part of unchangable large statics instead of individual forms. Single piece large statics are much easier for a game developer to work with than ones made of multiple parts. Not only can you pretty much just hand off everything to an art developer to arrange and drop it into place, as opposed to setting up each individual static, but often means you can optimize those large meshes better. This is because a tileset of generic meshes usually needs to have other faces or components which allow parts to fit into eachother in a variety of situations. In building that tileset, often you end up building components which aren't actually used but were made beforehand for the sake of having enough options for level builders. Meaning that instead of interiors comprised of tiles, we could also be stuck with interiors that are a singular mesh, similar to Doom3 (4). For a developer, this is easier, but for a modder this greatly limits the amount of things you can reasonably do with the game without specialized knowledge in breaking apart those meshes into a sort of tileset. The bad part of all this is that it might lead to even more corners being cut... Bad like Dragon Age 2... Where interiors that are a singular piece get re-used.

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@Vagrant0

I can't disagree with what you are saying, but thing is: every game made on same engine posses certain similarities from previous ones. For example, you never can confuse any game made on Frostbite with something else, each Battlefield (and even offspins along with newest NFS games) feels exactly the same. It may seem ridiculous, but first time I launched XCom EU it was too obvious that game made on UE despote the fact it's far from arena-shooter and so on, same with TES and FO. That's why I suggested to "reassamble" the engine, maybe not correct word for it, but meaning is exactly that. Switch to x64 is very big deal, no doubt, but most features in-game still looks and feels quite ancient. That's very big job to completely re-write engine to fit modern needs, and it's MUCH easier to use previous groundworks for new projects, but as we see it doesn't always end well...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Good evening. Now that Bethesda done the creation of x64 engine for Fallout 4 and the stability problems that shown in Skyrim were removed, there will be much trouble for them to improve Skyrim's engine to x64 as a big update?

 

Ps I already know the statement of Bethesda team about Skyrim and the further improvement-updates.

 

Thank you and wish you a happy new year!!!

Edited by dmaravelis
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unlikely they gonna drop their Engine.

pitty because standing still is deathly in this industry and it also shows it's old just compare Melee strikes and movements with more resent games, Dragon age or witcher.

you see how smooth both are compare to TESV

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