I'm a little disappointed with page 52. There, on the first pic in the village... textures look way too flat.
The hay on the roof and the "stone" ground looks flat and unrealistic.

I'm unsure about the water on page 48. It looks a bit flat... but it's hard to say from the angle. And it should be kinda flat if it's in a "still" environment (not much wind, just a small lake, etc).

Still, these two examples are definite proof of that we won't have tessellation.
It's kinda sad, but I guess it would be "too much" in a big world like TES games always are.
Tessellation though... would make Skyrim possibly the best looking RPG ever made. :yes:

I think the textures on these pages could use quite a bit more "depth". More parallax occlusion mapping would be nice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcAsJdo7dME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdvZPIQpsQo


On a note, I think Bethesda should tweak the HDR and the Dynamic Shadows a bit. They can look a bit better; and not hurt performance or anything.
Tweaking them just a bit more... and lighting is perfect

I've got another gaming magazine beside me, and I checked some of the screenshots (of other games). While you do get an idea of how a game looks like, it really doesn't compare to when playing the game. And screenshots printed on paper seem different then when seeing them on a screen, for some reason.

Definitely looks like global dynamic lighting with soft shadows to me and I sense higher polycounts from the charcter and weapon models. Texture sizes seem to vary a bit though and one thing that caught my eye was the stonework behind the zombies appears to be lower res than other examples. One thing that helps offset performance is textures can be lower res (smaller mem footprint) when using dynamic lighting cause it masks tiling better. Waterfalls may involve animated (morphed) meshes in addition to animated textures. Not sure what they meant by 'flow'. Does the 'current' push you? The whole 'snow' thing has me baffled as to how thats done. A 3D buildup of snow would seem to be a reaaallly involved process to me. Gonna have to see it to understand it.

I also think that it's unlikely that the snow will build up in 3D as it would be pretty complex to do, so I think it probably means that there will be a snowy texture applied. However, I hope that in some snowy regions of the game that there will be pre-set 3D snow, which the player has to wade through.

I think that by flowing rivers, it implies that there will be a different animated texture for flowing rivers than is used for lakes. It would be nice if the player was dragged by the current.

Speaking of visual presentation.... Will (should) Skyrim use the "European colorpalette" with more cold and "natural" use of lighting and colors (http://sandbox.darrenbrant.com/wp-content/themes/yashfa/images/default-image.jpg) much like The Witcher, Arma 2, Stalker series, Gothic 3 etc - or the "US color palette" with more warm and "truculent" use of colors and lighting (http://risen.deepsilver.com/blog/media/images/screenshots/top3/Risen_20090302_02.jpg) like Oblivion, Risen etc? Or maybe even have it toggleable?

This popped up when I was deleting the Arcania: Gothic 4 demo from my computer recently. As, as much of a turd the game was otherwise, it offered quite impressive options menu, and one toggle was between EU and US color palettes.

A bit off topic, I know, but this isn't a "pressing issue" so I didn't consider it worhty of its own thread.

Yer i completely agree with this but as of the moment it is a while yet till the game is actually finished so, some textures may be improved upon or other graphical areas may be enhanced it usually happens

I agree. The textures look about the same resolution as those in FO3, although from what I can tell this is pretty standard of all AAA console titles. It would be nice if parallax mapping was used slightly more outdoors.

Crysis has the best water ever. Even Half Life 2 has better water than Oblivion! COME ON BETHESDA!

I did spend a lot of time in Crysis admiring the water. It's pretty good, especially the ocean, but I think that the water in RDR is possibly better - certainly in the rivers. In RDR the rivers have a 3D surface and amazingly good animated textures that flow around the river bank excellently.

For a lot of the graphical features I think that RDR is the game to beat, and some of the screenshots suggest that Skyrim stands a very good chance of doing so. I still can't get over how good the mountain screenshot on P48 is!

I haven't played Uncharted 2 - how does it handle snow?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4MvrI7u9ZI

Footprints, snow can be "deep" so your character doesn't "stand on it" but rather "walk through it".
Snow gives some... uhh... just watch

That's pretty cool - exactly what I'm hoping Skyrim is like in areas of deep snow.

It could lead to some interesting game play situations, like enemies moving more slowly through deep snow allowing you more time to riddle them with arrows.

I doubt this kind of snow would fall dynamically, although I think Bethesda have met or exceeded all my expectations so far.

Personally I thought the trees look like they are done the same way as Oblivions, just nicer looking.

Also, there is a shot of the player up against some Ice Wraiths in what looks like a snowy area and there are bushes or something near the player that have no snow on them. Of course it's not snowing at that time so it's hard to tell if the snow build up will occur. I can't imagine that it will.

Haha thank you for the guy linking the snow topic, yes that is what I hope we could see as well, I personally don't expect it but it would be a very nice addition to their graphical arsenal.

I think you can see that the foliage on the trees is not always facing the player like it did in Oblivion. On P54 you can see that some of the branches of foliage are being viewed from acute angles which suggests that the trees are fully 3D.

I went over the snow possibilities in-depth in one of the many threads all about the new snow:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1158033-amazing-snow-and-enviroments/page__view__findpost__p__16971345

Be warned, it's a very long post.

The TL;DR version is "Look at the snow level in Crysis Warhead. They use a pixel shader to place "snow" on the parts of objects that point upward. It's flat (has no volume)."

I haven't updated that post or anything, but looking at the confirmed in-game shots of snow, there is clearly no volume to the snow.

Nice post! I've added a link to my initial post.

I agree that the snow is likely to be shader based like in Crysis. I think there is a reasonable chance that it will occur dynamically in-game when it starts to snow. As for volumetric snow, I think there is also a decent chance that there will be deep snow that the player will wade through, but only in areas where it has been manually added. I also agree that it's very unlikely that snow will fall and create deep snow dynamically. (Although, if they have an algorithm to determine how snow falls on a texture, I don't suppose it would be too much harder to specify a polygon based layer of deep snow on some objects, as opposed to using voxels. It would probably be a big hit to the frame-rate though.)

Does anyone else agree that the Tavern on P52 seems to show off some form of ambient occlusion. The shelves, and wooden beams on the walls seem to exhibit this in the corners.

The latest GI video about the sound engineering has given us another glimpse at the awesome vistas the new Skyrim graphics engine can produce.
http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/8528/ss20110115211505s.png

Dude that was totally...unimpressive.

Seriously?

I bet you any money that's better than anything we're going to get out of the snow in Skyrim... I actually quite like the effect, even though it trails off rather quickly. I'm guessing at most we will get 2D decals for footprints, and completely hard snow. Other than what has already been advertised, which amounts to the snow shader in Crysis Warhead.

I think you're probably right about this. although it is a shame because it has got to be pretty easy to implement, and I think it would add quite a lot to the game.

It could also lead to some funny conversations when you are sneaking around near enemies.

As far as graphics are concerned, I approve. I am liking the face detail. She actually, y'know, looks like a PERSON.

It's probably going to be a shader like someone said before, but hopefully we have some deep areas that will be displaced when you walk through them.