As much as the entire Elder Scrolls fanbase would LOVE to see Bethesda try and liscense a full engine, or just code up their own engine from skilled technically/engine/graphics programmers, it simply won't happen.

1. Their coding department lacks the knowledge and experience required to make their own solid engine from the ground up, plus it takes a lot of resources (which they probably do have, but still).

2. Liscencing a full engine is very expensive, especially if it is modern. And you also have issues with how much you can actually do in that engine. Gamebryo/Creation engine svcks, but it does several things very very well that makes it perfect for Elder Scrolls.

3. They'd basically have to relearn everything to learn how to build a game in a different engine. Which is good mind you, but unlikely, and bound to cause a lot of problems for their first released game on the new engine

4. Modding would be severly stunted. Gamebryo/Creation engine is great because we can get things like the Creation Kit rather easily - even if these dev tools are abysmal or archiach, they are much more powerful than your average editor you can get with an RPG game. Unreal Engine and such allows for a great degree of control for those who own the source code, but those that don't (aka us modders) would have to rely on just doing level/world edits and simple gameplay mods, unless Bethesda spent a lot of time modifying Unreal/Cryengine to work seamlessly with their quest design/loot design/spawners/NPC/etc workflow, versus just doing it the easy way and hard-coding all of that.

IMO what Bethesda really needs is to simply hire a bunch of very skilled engine-level technitions to really make Creation Engine stand up on its own, and not be so outdated/sloppy. Really work on making everything logically and naturally work together, maybe even get some WYSIWYG editing tools in there too. Clean it up, etc.

Make the ENTIRE engine on their own? Nobody does that. Like 99% of the industry uses common licensing things like Scaleform or Havok (Or other phsyics engines) that they snip into their engines. It's cheap and fast. Want Bethesda to make everything on their own from scratch? Fine. We just wont see another retail release from them for 10 years.

Why not use the Unreal Engine? Well, to put this kindly, because the Unreal engine is to a BGS game like a spoon is to a mechanic. Useless.

Bethesda has spent 10 years custom tooling an engine to meet it's very specific game needs. The Unreal engine (Just like Cryengine, Frostbite Engine, Dunia Engine, etc) is not made for an open world persistant game like the ones BGS makes. Their games are truely unique, so they need a unique engine.

Plainly put, there are very good reasons for all of this, you just need to research engines and licensing a bit first to understand better.

Perhaps when Dawnguard is released for the PC people can decode the Werewolf and Vampire Lord perk trees and learn to make new ones from that. They're not even hooked into the other perk trees, and stand on their own, which seems like it would be simple to decode and replicate.

@vincentD - like i said before those are all created using Scaleform, which Bethesda uses to create UI stuff like perk trees etc. of course they can use the software to create however many trees they want.

we however, cannot do that without the software and uncompiled source files (which they do not own the rights to distribute to us)

Actually Unreal Development Kit (UDK) is the same thing as Unreal Engine Unreal Engine is made first then they make Unreal Development Kit (UDK) for it so modders can make mods or games with it.

I believe Bethesda has the man power to make an entire video game engine from the ground up when they started working on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 they had 60 people then once they started working on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim they got 100 people working on it.

That should be enough they have Engine Support Engineer, Gameplay Programmer, Audio Tools Programmer, Technical Artist, Character Artist, and Concept Artist.

CryEngine is the same thing as CryEngine (SDK) as I said in the Unreal Engine part CryEngine (SDK) is made after CryEngine is made for it so modders can make mods or games with it.

The scripting tools in Unreal Engine 3 called kismet is made by Epic Games it is not a 3rd party tool and now Unreal Engine 4 has C++ code compiling in real time on the fly while you are in the Unreal Divelopment Kit (UDK) editor and their new scripting tool called Kismet 2 which is also in real time in the editor now so you can change anything instantly while you are in the editor without needing to call a engineer or some other person an artist can do it now by themselves.

Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 does not use Havok I don't know about Scaleform if it does.

The only video games I know that use Havok in Unreal Engine 3 is Mass Effect, and BioShock because those game developer companies decided to license it in there I guess.

Unreal Tournament 3 does not use Havok it uses APEX Clothing and PhysX which is all from Nvidia and running off of the GPU not off of the CPU which some stuff does run off of in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Epic Games makes their video game engines from scratch all the way from the ground up.

Epic Games said Unreal Engine 4 would be good for The Elder Scrolls 6 or for any RPG video game.

Epic Games president Mike Capps said Todd Howard this engine is for you this is for The Elder Scrolls 6 and he said Todd Howard really liked Unreal Engine 4 from a video interview I saw.

Everything is done in real time in the Unreal Development Kit (SDK) editor for Unreal Engine 4 now the C++ code compiling, lighting, particles, shadows, liquids they are not pre baked Clothing simulations, destruction, physics, animations effects are also all done in real time now not pre rendered ore pre baked or what ever you want to call it which makes making a video game 100X easier now.

Epic Games Vice President and Co-Founder Mark Rein said in a video interview that an artist made a tiny video game with the new Unreal Engine 4 (UDK) in 2 hours when on older engines it took him 2 days because he had to send in animations, lighting, and particles to programming engineers like engine or gameplay programmers.

Woops post bug my internet lagging made me post 2nd one because 1st comment I posted did not appear /frown.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' />

Is there no way we can get hold of a copy of scaleform ourselves? Do Autodesk only sell it to games studios or can anybody buy a license off them?

If the above is possible, how hard would it be to have the ck talk to scaleform again? I remember if you set up Version Control on your own copy of the CK, an error message appears saying that Scaleform is not present, so does this mean that the public released ck will still work with it as is?

Just throwing out some questions that I don't think anybody's brought to the discussion yet

- Hypno

I can absolutely guarantee you that Skyrim does not, in any shape or form, use Direct X 11.

They licence the Havok engine for Physics, and new to Skyrim are Havok based animations. They use Scaleform for the Perk Trees, and Adobe Flash for the UI and menus. They licence FaceGen for the NPC and creature faces. They use Bink video for the video clips shown ingame. They use a third party "Sentry" Winter Tree spell checker for the CK. The whole of the CK and the engine is built up around a mixture of old bits of the GameBryo engine, new bits they've added, and third party software they've licensed.

I just seem to be repeating the same things over and over and getting a bit mad. Would I like to be able to create skills and perk trees? Of course I would. But it's hardcoded due to licensing rights, that's it. It's not going to happen.

I don't think Scaleform is licensed to Bethesda I think it is there for free after all Crysis and Crysis 2 have it in their Source Development Kit (SDK) Crytek released it for free.

Havok however seems to be a licensed product.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim does use DirectX 11 are you using after burner or what program are you using that it shows there is no DirectX 11 because I know after burner doesn't show it.

Bethesda should just make their entire video game engines from scratch from the ground up licensed products ruin the PC modding community by not giving us loyal customers who buy their video games everything we want for those of us who mod.

Bethesda needs to get rid of Havok and bring in Nvidia's APEX Clothing and PhysX it is 100X better and it's free because Nvidia after all makes their money selling graphic cards not software.

Looks like I forgot a few more APEX Particles, APEX Vegetation, and APEX Turbulence.

I don't know what APEX Turbulence is probably has to do with smoke or fire and smoke emitting from fire and stuff like snow storms or w/e.

If you don't know or don't think that Nvidia's APEX Clothing, APEX Destruction, and PhysX is free.

Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX

Read the page carefully first paragraph it says its free.
The PhysX engine and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_kit are available for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3,^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-ps3-physx-license-2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-PhysX_website-4} and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii.^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-Gamasutra_News-5} The PhysX SDK is provided to developers of all platforms for free, both for commercial and non-commercial use.

I know what PhysX is and I'm not doubting that it's free, but Bethesda didn't use PhysX. They used Havok, as they have for the past 6 years.

It would be nice if Bethesda scrapped Havok from Skyrim just release a patch/update that replaces it with PhysX it would save them alot of money on licensings to put toward the game to make it better or for future games PhysX is 100X better than Havok.

Nvidia won the battle with PhysX Havok should either advance their physics engine or go out of business instead. Nvidia is the best graphic card AMD is ok but it lacks all that stuff AMD just has Tessellation I don't know what else it has.

I hope Fallout 4 and TES 6 comes out using PhysX.

What I'm curious about is... how did Bethesda add two brand-spanking-new perk trees in the Dawnguard DLC?

After seeing all the posts about how hard it is to do so, I'm even *more* curious about it now then I was before I read this thread.

Bethesda added two new perk trees in Dawnguard DLC because they have all the Source Codes and they can give them to us for free because there is nothing in the Creation Engine that is licensed but the Havok physics engine and other people who posted comments here saying it is hard coded or they have many many licensed products I don't believe is true it is just some Bethesda fans like taking the companies side and not our side for some reason I don't know why.

Scaleform is a free software Crysis and Crysis 2 use it and yet Crytek manage to give us their Source Development Kit (SDK) and Source Codes for free from their CryEngine 2 and CryEngine 3.

I mean when you use the Creation Kit to make new npc's or creatures from scratch you are using the Havok physics engine in a way because your creations also have physics or ragdoll effects.

To me the only reason some game developer companies give us no mod tools or if they do give us mod tools they give it to us in a limited quantity is because they think you won't buy their DLC or future video games they think you will play that same video game for ever they only care about money that's my opinion.

Bethesda has been listening more and more to their loyal customers who buy their video games lately though.

Well, whatever the case is, it appears that adding new perk trees should be possible, it's just that we can't add to the existing collection of skill-based trees. With the way that Beth jimmied in the new ones (very slick, btw), there may be some hope for getting a new tree in... depending on what it is exactly that people are trying to build and whether or not they will be satisfied with having the tree completely separate from everything else (which I happen to like) and also functioning slightly different.

there is a very good reason why UE3 costs over 300k and UDk is free. yes, they are both unreal engine, but there is a rather huge difference between the 2. i also think you may not fully understand the difference between low-level source code and scripting language

and btw, kismet is not a scripting language. it is merely a visual interface. UE uses Uscript language.

Skyrim does not use DX11, it uses DX9. Here is a [http://hardocp.com/article/2011/11/21/elder_scrolls_v_skyrim_performance_iq_review/ when they benchmarked the game across various configurations.

"Skyrim is a DX9-only game. There is no DX10 renderer or DX11 renderer in this game. DirectX 9.0c is what is used, and there aren't any exciting DX11 features we've come to experience in recent games. Beyond that, there aren't even some DX9 features we've come to enjoy in other DX9 games, such as soft shadows. We'll talk about this more in the IQ page, but this game seems to be a mix of image quality, and in some ways doesn't even challenge the capabilities of DX9. While we don't equate eye-candy with quality, we have powerful DX11 capable video cards, and for a late 2011 game, we'd expect PC games to be pushing the bounds of graphics utilizing the power of today's video cards."



Very interesting if true, do you happen to have a source to that? TES 6 on Unreal sounds like an interesting prospect /smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':smile:' />

Where did you see that? I've been looking at Autodesk's gameware website but I could not see this info. I've been a bit cheeky and tried registering myself as a small studio...just waiting for it to be approved /tongue.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':P' />

- Hypno

It's my guess that it is free because Crytek uses it on Crysis and Crysis 2 and Epic Games also uses it and they only use free software to make their video games the only software they paid for is probably Visual Basics and you can read it here.

There is this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform read the page carefully first paragraph.

Scaleform Corporation is a developer providing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine#Middleware for use in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry. Their most recent software, Scaleform GFx, is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics rendering engine used to display http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash-based user interfaces, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUD_%28video_gaming%29, and animated textures for games^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-masthead-0} for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux, as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-PS3-1}, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSVITA^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-Platforms-2}, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DS^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-Platforms-2}, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-Platforms-2}, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-Platforms-2}, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform#cite_note-Platforms-2} platforms.

Then you can see some resemblance here as well yes I know it is different companies but read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX read the page carefully first paragraph.

PhysX is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computer_graphics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_kit developed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageia (which itself was acquired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia in February 2008^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-0}) with the purchase of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich spin-off NovodeX in 2004. The term PhysX can also refer to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_processing_unit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_card designed by Ageia to accelerate PhysX-enabled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game.
Video games supporting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_acceleration by PhysX can be accelerated by either a PhysX PPU or a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA-enabled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit (if it has at least 32 CUDA cores), thus offloading physics calculations from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit, allowing it to perform other tasks instead. This typically results in a smoother gaming experience and additional visual effects.
Middleware physics engines allow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development to avoid writing their own code to handle the complex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics interactions possible in modern games. PhysX has provided physical simulation for more than 300 games.^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-sdk3-1}
The PhysX engine and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_kit are available for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3,^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-ps3-physx-license-2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-3} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-PhysX_website-4} and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii.^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX#cite_note-Gamasutra_News-5} The PhysX SDK is provided to developers of all platforms for free, both for commercial and non-commercial use.

Adobe Flash Player is free so that is how I can tell Scaleform is also free there are a few things that add up to it being free so you shouldn't worry you will should get accepted.

Oh right...well I'm not holding my breath then...

Just because flash player is free doesn't necessarily mean scaleform will be.

I only registered with them due to being bored at work, we'll see how it goes

- Hypno

The Unreal engine uses both Havok and Scaleform. At least the version used for Splinter Cell: Conviction, and the Assassins Creed series all use Havok. (And like I said, most games use Scaleform. Conviction, AC, Borderlands, etc)

Actually you can make completely new trees just fine as long as you replace an existing one. The only part that would require Scaleform would be the Constillation image (I think) and the actual code that controls how the design/interface works. I.E. it's unlikely we'll ever be able to completely re-do the perk tree system to use menus instead of constillations for example. But adding in new perk trees is not outside of the scope of the game engine, as long as there is an area in the interface for the new tree to go (i.e. you'd have to be able to get to it in some manner outside of the normal skill tree area, since I'm pretty sure the positions of the trees on the whole interface is something that can only be changed with Scaleform as well).

Seeing as Dawnguard adds two new trees outside of the normal skill tree area, it is entirely within reason to suspect that we'll finally be able to make new trees for various things, and script a way to get to these trees. Keep in mind though we'd probably not be able to change the backgrounds, or add new skills at all still (as that would completely break so many things).

Scaleform is not included in Crysis/Crysis2 (Crysis 1 doesn't use scaleform, only C2 and the Cryengine3 SDK use it).

Which makes things rather annoying/hard if you are making a game on the CE3 SDK, because you'll never be able to modify the HUD elements. Unless this changed somewhat recently in the past few months. It's one of the major reasons why the SDK has such a low adoption rate compared to UDK - because its only useful for artists who want to make a portfolio and not useful for actual game designers. The only way to get scaleform support is to actually liscense full CE3.