Hi all,

I will make this short, when I read about the amazing environments of Skyrim and the AWESOME snow that will actually FALL on stuff, my jaw dropped.

But after the happy crazy feeling subdued , I started thinking will it grind my laptop to a halt! will my uber super 22inch 4gp ddr2 RAM 1.5 gb vga duo core processor laptop die?
or will it run the game well on medium settings ??!

anyhow I guess its no point worrying too much now until the system specs are released.

but how much power this new snow will require, what do the computer wizards think?

How can we know?

Most technology in games these days are not only amazing but also very well optimized.
Clean and neat code.

Still I think no one here on these forums have any idea of the system requirements...
Just wait and see?

Seen the engine is built in-house.. I don't know how much it has been optimized! I'm sure the Unreal Engine and those other household names are optimized to the max.... but something custom-made by a videogame company who never EVER built engine.... not so sure!

I'm hoping for the best though because I also would be gaming from a laptop!

What GPU exactly?

It's pretty much an optimization issue actually.If they do it good,than it could or could not,depending on the specs.If they skip optimization (LOL) than we'll all have to buy the graphics card that's going to be released along with Skyrim. (GF 7800 anyone?)

Well unless they want to severely cut down the graphics on the consoles they'd better optimize it.

I know mine will...guess i'll have to get a console version this time.... :brokencomputer:

YES YOUR LAPTOP WILL XPLOSION! bliviongate:

I am kidding, it depends on how dynamic is the snow, I am guessing it's using a texture-like effect that morphs based on shape instead of using particle physics for snow. So probably, it won't fry your PC, as long as you have a mid-end graphic card and a CPU with good clock, you are all set.

Judging by your specs, I believe you will be able to run on medium settings.

It could very well fry it. But only Bethesda knows :hubbahubba:

Skyrim = Cold place
You see, the awesome snow that falls on stuff also falls on your laptop and cools it
So in fact your laptop would run skyrim rather cool :biggrin:

hmmm indeed I should not worry yet.

I will be getting a laptop cooler though BUT I can't find the size for my stupid laptop, I guess I will just have to look harder or just get one that fits all sizes or something.

http://img4.realsimple.com/images/daily-finds/home/0809/df-ecco-fan_300.jpg

actually I did use a fan at summer hehe

VOXEL SNO-*explodes*

That's nigh impossible with a game the scale of the elder scrolls.

False...any project, any scale, can be clean and neat. Software design is where it's at...but that's not really important.

Peter

There are no system requirements for the game yet but you can make an educated guess if you know what's the standard. As I can tell from what you said of your computer, you have 4gb of ram and 1.5 GHz? Dual core processor and if that's what you meant then it should be able to pull 2.6 GHz which I'm sure you can play the game just fine with that computer on low-medium setting but it won't be very good for running it on highest settings.



That's not true, it's not a factor of how big the game is, it's all on the game engine for that, which Gamebryo was not very well programmed (gamebryo is not Bethesda's engine, it was licensed.) However, Skyrim's engine was bethesda's in-house engine and we won't know how well it is coded until we get to play the game but I'm confident it will be well coded as was evident in their past programming.

Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Bethesda has built ALL of their engines. Gamebryo is just a renderer and and doesn't ship with specifically tailored architecture.

When talking about optimization one only need compare FO3 to OB and then you can just imagine how much farther they have taken it since then.

Look at it this way: if the graphics cause your laptop to explode, they'll probably be worth it.

You can pick up an Xbox 360 or a PS3 relatively cheaply now, so you could always invest in one if your laptop can't handle it.

With no disrespect intended, this is Bethesda we're talking about here.

I lurk (far too much for my own good) but after seeing this topic for about the fifth time, I felt compelled to log in and make a post.

Preface

This stuff about physically accurate snow is getting out of hand. Skyrim is not going to be employing particle physics for snow, nor is it going to be even doing a crude approximation of particle physics for snow. The former is, well, impossible with today's technology and the latter would look bad/unbelievable and probably STILL be too computationally expensive.

The "Old" Way and Skyrim Predictions

What you had for "snow" in Oblivion was essentially a 2D animated texture, affixed to the camera. It was in view space, not world space. It was awful. If you looked up and started running the snow would follow you. I predict that in Skyrim they have moved snow into world space and use a particle system, sans the physics. It will probably have inputs for wind speed and direction, and attempt to mimic SOME physically observable patterns of snow fall.

What I expect the description in GI was describing is the new world space snow, in combination with a snow pixel shader. Now, I don't know if for Skyrim they chose a forward or deferred rendering approach, but either way they have access to the object normals (deferred shading would provide the normals for "free" from the G-buffer, so *crosses fingers*). In this case the pertinent information could be summed up as "What surfaces in this scene point toward the sky?" This approach is used for all kinds of things and is usually called "splatting", e.g. where to procedurally generate a cliff texture based on terrain slope. This usually involves textures though, and not pixel shaders, so it's not quite "splatting", I guess.

Examples

You can see this kind of snow shader in Crysis Warhead. There are plenty of Youtube videos of it in action. It's "realistic" but certainly not physically accurate. And, just as described in the GI article, the snow in this game is NOT a premade texture and uses what I described above to "place" the snow in the scene.

Collisions

When it comes to colliding with objects like people, the ground, etc., well, I doubt there are any collisions at all. The resources involved with tracking every particle, and keeping it around, accumulating it, calculating the physics for snow-snow collisions, and collisions with other objects is just not likely given the expense of calculating collisions for hundreds of thousands (millions, billions, etc) of particles on screen 30-60 times a second.

I expect at most the snow particles will terminate upon hitting the ground and *maybe* large objects like buildings. This is LIKE collisions, but the particles won't stick around and react physically -- they terminate. But I know nothing of their collision detection setup.. if they use bounding spheres or boxes it would be completely unusable for snow particle termination, you'd literally see the bounding sphere/box because the particles would vanish a far way away from the actual object. If they use bounding meshes (closely formed to the shape of the object) then *maybe*. Without collision termination the particles would appear to move through solid objects in certain circumstances, like a high speed wind blowing snow nearly horizontally would appear to go right through houses, etc, at the right viewing angles.

I expect they will at LEAST terminate particles when you are under overhangs. That is *very* simple not even requiring a bounding box or sphere, but a simple collision plane that covers the overhang approximately. I'm fairly certain they will have done this after the Oblivion nonsense with rain and snow.

Volumetric?

So will the snow be volumetric? I am guessing not but I will not say "No" for certain. It's quite expensive to implement though... I don't think it's been done in any realtime game. Even in Crysis Warhead, I don't think it is in any way volumetric because that would mean it would have to be creating extra geometry or using shells/fins (fur and grass shaders, not suited for snow) or something like voxels all which are computationally prohibitive for realtime, at least at a decent resolution for something as fine as snow... Nor does it look remotely volumetric either.

It's not impossible, however. If they happened to be extra generous and support DirectX 11 on PC, AND code extra shaders for this, they could combine the surface normal "splatting" as seen in Crysis with decal tessellation. Decal tessellation implementations I've seen usually go the "other way" meaning dents, specifically dynamic car dents, but I don't see why it couldn't be used for bumps, like snow buildup. It could then maybe be built up over time, as snow continues to fall, and dissipate (sublimate, since most of Skyrim is probably too cold to let snow melt =p) over time.

Volumetric Feasibility

But, I doubt the method I just outlined or any like it will make it into the game. I know they develop for the "bottom line" first, which is $$$ from Xbox 360 sales, but that obviously doesn't rule out *all* progressive enhancements for PC users. DirectX 11 is actually easier to support backwards-compatibility-wise than DirectX 10 because it introduced "Feature Levels", and, barring Windows XP support (Gah!) they could still support down to DirectX 9 from the same codebase as long as the DirectX runtimes on Windows Vista/7 were up to date.

"Accumulation" without Volumetric Snow

The last important question, then, if the snow is not volumetric will it accumulate? Well, yes and no. It will appear to, if the snow shader has an intensity component, ranging from "Light Dusting" to "Fully covered" for the game to dynamically slide between based on how bad the weather is and how long the snow lasts. I'm not sure of how "dynamic" the snow shader is in Crysis Warhead but I assume it has something like this.

Conclusion and TL;DR Version

So, I hate to be realistic, but I don't think the way the GI information has been conveyed and perceived is really anything like reality, and has in fact gotten quite out of hand. I don't expect to be able to trudge through knee-deep snow, but I would sure like to. I imagine instead we will get at most decals on the ground which make it appear we've left our footprints in the snow, but this is simply a normal-mapped 2D texture.

I'll end with an anolysis of the sentence from GI, for the TL;DRs



This really doesn't even mean what it's been made out to by people who blow things out of proportion. "Snow falls naturally ... exactly as it would ... given [the object's] shape and size" means that the shape the snow (collectively, not snow particles) makes after it has fallen looks realistic given the object's shape (read: surface normals as mentioned above). It does not in any way imply that for every snow particle on screen each one falls in a physically correct manner, and accumulates, and sticks around via a vast physics particle simulation.

Combine that with the hyperbole in the few sentences above: "Every object in the world casts a perfectly formed shadow" ... Something which is not possible given today's hardware in realtime situations, and BTW, even crude shadows are still quite expensive to do despite what everyone on this forum thinks, it becomes clear that we've fallen victim to some hyperbolic writing, that while still accurate enough, gets blown out of proportion by people who either don't read well or don't have the amount of knowledge I do about rendering 3D games.

I already talked about this to some extent in a similar thread. I came to conclusions similar to jonwd7's, although I don't know nearly as much about computer graphics I do consider myself to be somewhat could at thinking my way through what it would take to implement certain features.

One way I've considered snow accumulation working would be through some kind of "morphing" effect, however since the time I suggested that idea I've also considered the implications of how that might work. Would it apply only to the terrain? Would there need to be a custom morphing mesh placed on every rooftop? How would the game keep the streets in towns clear from too much accumulation? Would we have horse-drawn snow plows-how would that work in real time? What sort of calculations would have to be involved in making the accumulation morphs work? It's still possible the game could use something sort of like this, but I'd imagine its use would be fairly limited and the mechanics behind it to be fairly simplistic.

Most likely it'd be one of the things jonwd7 suggested if anything at all.

at this moment I'm alive because I want to see snow fall IN THE GAME ... ON OTHER STUFF man that's huge if you ask me, and no duo processor 2.2 GHz I think its the VGA that is 1.5 gb memory, I really svck at technical stuff

jonwd7 you made my head hurt, but I got some of it, that's why I'm worried cause what if snow becomes 1 meter high in the game will the wind accumulate it in a corner like in real life will the wind knock it off the tree branches will the water FREEZE :shocking: EEEEKKKKKKK

Isn't the vertex shader a better way to create an altered landscape due to snowfall?