The Elder Scrolls Megathread XVII: Paid Mods? Not in My Community. - Games

[QUOTE=coyote93;48298336]That shit is actually pretty cool.[/QUOTE] And it paid off handsomely. They finished Oblivion in 3 years, and Skyrim in 5 despite having a much larger dev team.

I'd rather have them take five years than three to make video games considering the sheer leap in content and quality between fallout 3 and fallout 4.

And so when Todd (can i call you todd, howard-kun?) talks about having fucking 50 different models/textures/whatever for a bunch of blinking buttons that I nor anyone will ever notice, I start to become a little confused as to what the fuck Bethesda is doing. They're like Nick Cage. They got all this time and money but they keep spending it on pointless egyptian tombs and (multiple) castles and like nigga why

[QUOTE=cdr248;48298339]Source for skyrim being handcrafted because tbh I wasn't entirely sure myself on how handcrafted it was:[/QUOTE] In the end it all boiled down to one guy. I feel bad for not remembering his name but he was the lead envirnoment artist. He was the man behind the artstyle and worlds of Fallout 3 and Skyrim. He died a while back, that's why Fallout 4 doesn't have a similar artstyle. His death is sad but it means bethesda are opening up to different ways of doing the environment, so who knows, we may actually get larger worlds in the next ES title.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;48298353]I'd rather have them take five years than three to make video games considering the sheer leap in content and quality between fallout 3 and fallout 4.[/QUOTE] I'm saying they allocated far too much time into handplacing everything in the world when the could have been doing other stuff with that time. [editline]26th July 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Wickerman123;48298364]In the end it all boiled down to one guy. I feel bad for not remembering his name but he was the lead envirnoment artist. He was the man behind the artstyle and worlds of Fallout 3 and Skyrim. He died a while back, that's why Fallout 4 doesn't have a similar artstyle. His death is sad but it means bethesda are opening up to different ways of doing the environment, so who knows, we may actually get larger worlds in the next ES title.[/QUOTE] Adam Adamowicz isn't the environment designer he was the character/misc stuff concept artist. Noah Berry has always been the designer of environments. I get that he wants to handcraft stuff now but its just far too impractical, especially because games are so much more demanding of development time for things that aren't just the playing space (which is ironic because he was against handcrafting the environment while he was working on Oblivion for the very same reasons, see above.) I feel if they keep going the route of handcrafting and making their maps bigger then we'll find that content (the quests in this case) will dwindle to either poor quality, and/or low quantity. [editline]26th July 2015[/editline] and christ man, all those merges lost like... tears, in the rain

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;48298353]I'd rather have them take five years than three to make video games considering the sheer leap in content and quality between fallout 3 and fallout 4.[/QUOTE] it's probably a good idea to wait until the game is actually out before you start talking about how much content it has and how good it is.

Looks like Boris is tired of the boobs and shit posted on the Skyrim gallery on his forums. [quote=Boris Vorontsov]Recently i have checked all screenshots on 2000+ pages of this topic (took 3 days). Only few authors have done unique and cool/great looking presets, which exists from very old versions of the mod (0.103 f.e.). Much less presets growed up, everything is the variation of same look. About 4 old presets have nice movie like styles, a bit more are closer to realistic view. Another thing i want to mention is what some of you posting here. It's boobs, asses, all same ugly faces with sexy bodies of 2-3 types. I do like girls, but i'm sick of looking on them here, 99.99% of the shots are not beautiful in terms of nu-art and just for boobs fans and low level fappers. Feels disgusting when i see all same stupid supermodel bodies the only men care about. Use specialized places for such things, loverslab for example or japanese blogs (for sure they have boobs of mammoth size each).[/quote] Good.

[QUOTE=Daemon White;48298460]Looks like Boris is tired of the boobs and shit posted on the Skyrim gallery on his forums. Good.[/QUOTE] Wow, I hoped for this for so long. The enb forums might now actually be worth a look from time to time

You guys realize that Gamebryo literally can't handle more than the 6 or so houses in Solitude without suffering massively, right? Not without serious external modification. Until they change to a new engine that retains all of the modding capabilities without being strictly worse, you guys are just gonna have to grin and bear it or just not play at all. I'm not saying you're not allowed to criticize Bethesda, but you gotta recognize the limits they've imposed on themselves with Gamebryo/Creation Engine. [QUOTE=Daemon White;48298460]Looks like Boris is tired of the boobs and shit posted on the Skyrim gallery on his forums..[/QUOTE] The guy has a point. Everyone likes hot waifu chicks with strange faces, but there's so much rad looking content in the Nexus and even the non-adult part of LoverSlab that would make for great screenshot material, specially if you heap in the allcaps object/character retextures that the one guy makes. Skyrim's good as hell for screenshots, specially with ENB letting you do some real time tuning.

Maybe if they stopped using prefabs that clip through each other with entire chunks of models rendering below the floor where you'll never see them, they'd be able to put more stuff in.

[QUOTE=Daemon White;48298460]Looks like Boris is tired of the boobs and shit posted on the Skyrim gallery on his forums. Good.[/QUOTE] I have terrible fantasies of waking up as the owner of the Nexus and carpet bombing all the skimpy armor mods.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;48298549]Maybe if they stopped using prefabs that clip through each other with entire chunks of models rendering below the floor where you'll never see them, they'd be able to put more stuff in.[/QUOTE] The assets aren't the problems it's just how gamebryo handles them. That engine is just filled with mishandled resources and bottlenecks. Especially because radiant AI (be it skyrim's or oblivions) is such a goddamn resource hog (not to mention all the other things that are cpu dependent) so you can't fit more than 15 npcs on screen without feeling some kind of hit.

Maybe they should use a different engine. Maybe it's easier for me to just say something like that but I don't give a shit. Maybe they should use a different engine.

Looks like they're making a lot of efforts to keep the engine afloat. They don't necessarily need to change the engine if they keep overhauling and improving it.

Yeah, but is that going to allow them to amend everything we complain about in this thread? I don't think so. If Fallout 4 comes out and we still only have like 15 NPC's with six houses in any given city, I'm going to pee on Bethesda's office.

At this point it'd be better to make a new engine that works instead of slapping more duct tape onto a nearly broken one.

It's less duck tape and more organ transplants though.

I think you guys aren't looking at another reason (and probably the main reason) why Solitude(or any of the other cities for that matter) isn't huge is that there's a budget and a mandate on Skyrim (11/11/11?) that they had to meet. Why make any of the cities bigger when that would detract from the game world itself and probably have diminishing returns? Remember that hindsight is 20/20 for us and for them.

[QUOTE=ClarkWasHere;48299947]I think you guys aren't looking at another reason (and probably the main reason) why Solitude(or any of the other cities for that matter) isn't huge is that there's a budget and a mandate on Skyrim (11/11/11?) that they had to meet. Why make any of the cities bigger when that would detract from the game world itself and probably have diminishing returns? Remember that hindsight is 20/20 for us and for them. So it's not really the engine that limits them, it's time and $$$[/QUOTE] They also had to fit all of this on the Xbox 360 and PS3 that are severely hurting for RAM. Skyrim itself has a 3.5 GB memory limitation hardcoded on all platforms as well, and every building and NPC you add runs it closer to that limit. A combination of those factors with the RAM limitations they had to work with severely limits their scope. None of the problems lie exclusively with gamebryo, but rather with Bethesda's implementation of it, and their time and hardware limitations they are working with.

Fallout 4 they implied will be 64-bit though

[QUOTE=ClarkWasHere;48299947]I think you guys aren't looking at another reason (and probably the main reason) why Solitude(or any of the other cities for that matter) isn't huge is that there's a budget and a mandate on Skyrim (11/11/11?) that they had to meet. Why make any of the cities bigger when that would detract from the game world itself and probably have diminishing returns? Remember that hindsight is 20/20 for us and for them.[/QUOTE] Usually it has more to do with gameworld scale and performance reasons. They keep the cities small so it fits within the small map scale of the game and so that they don't have to populate it. If you make a city big, you can't have it be empty, so it requires NPCs. And NPCs chew resources. Also if anything, handplacing fucking rocks has diminishing returns.

idk about you guys but personally i spend the vast majority of the time in cities when playing TES games.

[QUOTE=elowin;48300110]idk about you guys but personally i spend the vast majority of the time in cities when playing TES games.[/QUOTE] It does suck that the cities aren't as big, but as CDR says it has to fit in the game world size wise, and more time would be spent developing cities rather than other areas they could use to develop. TBH I think they need to go back to the random flora and mineral generation that they used in Oblivion to focus their quality on the quests and cities.

[QUOTE=elowin;48300110]idk about you guys but personally i spend the vast majority of the time in cities when playing TES games.[/QUOTE] And? No one is saying they shouldn't make cities bigger it's just that it's probably not going to happen any time soon.

[QUOTE=ClarkWasHere;48300164]It does suck that the cities aren't as big, but as CDR says it has to fit in the game world size wise, and more time would be spent developing cities rather than other areas they could use to develop. TBH I think they need to go back to the random flora and mineral generation that they used in Oblivion to focus their quality on the quests and cities.[/QUOTE] Well, grasses are already randomly generated in Skyrim-- the LANDSCAPE ref. for a cell is assigned a material/texture for its base ground, after which the grasses associated with said material are pulled from a list and placed by the engine according to their density/slope/size values. It would be nice if they'd use the same system for (large) trees and rocks though, a procedural system can honestly produce more realistic results than hand-placing a lot of the time. (Small bushes and pebbles are usually "grasses" with rock/bush models and textures.)

I think they should really work on big cities. It doesn't need to be at the expense of much else. Something like You put a house exterior The house randomly generates it's furniture. The furniture randomly generates it's contents The house also generates a townsman character based on the amount of beds there is. His job is decided by a city AI based on what's needed. If ya get this formula down, You could build thousand house Cities with ease. Why am I so big on bigger cities? (other than, obviously, a better looking city and a more real feeling universe) More opertunities for hiding and running away from guards. More quest opportunities. More to steal. It'd enforce a more realistic crime system. You're not the only thief so they can't pin it all on you. Exciting city chases. Not just a single minute run to get out of the city all the time. Absolute joy with spells. Frenzy with a big radius? Oh yes. Oh yes indeed.

[QUOTE=The Jack;48301200]I think they should really work on big cities. It doesn't need to be at the expense of much else. Something like You put a house exterior The house randomly generates it's furniture. The furniture randomly generates it's contents The house also generates a townsman character based on the amount of beds there is. His job is decided by a city AI based on what's needed. If ya get this formula down, You could build thousand house Cities with ease. Why am I so big on bigger cities? (other than, obviously, a better looking city and a more real feeling universe) More opertunities for hiding and running away from guards. More quest opportunities. More to steal. It'd enforce a more realistic crime system. You're not the only thief so they can't pin it all on you. Exciting city chases. Not just a single minute run to get out of the city all the time. Absolute joy with spells. Frenzy with a big radius? Oh yes. Oh yes indeed.[/QUOTE] Random generation isn't very good for things like that, it's a lot of work to get it right, if it can be made to perform well at all. A better way to do buildings would be as a template, something that could then be expanded by modders making more building templates. A good example would be lots in The Sims 3. City layouts could then stay the same between games, but unimportant buildings could be randomized based on the available pool of buildings installed.

[QUOTE=dragon1972;48299985]They also had to fit all of this on the Xbox 360 and PS3 that are severely hurting for RAM. Skyrim itself has a 3.5 GB memory limitation hardcoded on all platforms as well, and every building and NPC you add runs it closer to that limit. A combination of those factors with the RAM limitations they had to work with severely limits their scope. None of the problems lie exclusively with gamebryo, but rather with Bethesda's implementation of it, and their time and hardware limitations they are working with.[/QUOTE] The problem I see with this argument is that no other developer has "taken advantage" of the new hardware that the new console generation offers, nor the "cross comparability" that [I]literally everything[/I] now has a 64bit processor. Bethesda isn't the kind of studio that pushes the envelope in those departments either, so if they actually do have expanded areas and more NPC's and it's all because of the new console generation and engine upgrades and better implementation, I'll be [I]fucking[/I] shocked.

Got ESO for PS4 from a friend the other day. Having a lot of fun so far, it's pretty much Skyrim with co-op and clunkier combat. (Only played about 10 hours so far, just finished the tutorial island)

Bethesda has already managed to create procedural cities and worlds before all the way back in Arena. I don't understand why it would be so much harder to do it now just because there's a higher poly count and less 2D assets. The kit used to create Elder Scrolls games assembles buildings and interiors like Lego blocks, so it should be entirely possible for said Lego blocks to be procedurally generated with some modification (like anchor points to indicate where things connect).