Engine Optimisation.

Post » Mon Jun 20, 2011 5:58 am

I still have seen nothing to support the existence of render occlusion culling in Skyrim, which is a shame because the outdated "fog draw distance" method hasn't been used by most developers since like 2005. Fallout 3 had portals, yes, but they had to be manually placed. By contrast, our dear beloved http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_engine has been automatically calculating visibility areas since 1996. Okay, so Quake uses BSP map architecture and not meshes.

BSP trees doesn't really work with the way the game world is built. If you build a game map in Quake or most level editors, the editor then have to "render" the level, save the BSP info, save the pre-calculated lightning and so on. That's not the case with MW or OB, nothing is pre-calculated at all, the whole game world is dynamic in that sense.

I think it was a perfectly valid trade-off, going with better and easier to develop content over render speed, when dealing with such large game worlds. Which also proven to be a very good thing for the modding community.

But we have middleware like Umbra now which is wholly capable of serving the same purpose.

It would be nice if Skyrim used Umbra, yeah. Only question is if the whole plug-in infrastructure of the engine allow something like it, or if they had to rebuild it from scratch (which I'm not sure they would bother to do).
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u gone see
 
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Post » Mon Jun 20, 2011 6:48 am

... The fact this concept took ANYONE by surprise is outright pathetic. Everyone should have known from day one.



It not that it took us completely by surprise, its just that we were hoping that Bethesda would put in some extra effort into the platform that is five years more advanced than any other.
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But I guess that's getting a bit off-topic, Culling would be good, and so would tessellation and decent SSAO
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Mistress trades Melissa
 
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Post » Mon Jun 20, 2011 12:59 am

They know we're loyal, and so long as there's an SDK, we'll be here crawling back to their feet. Which I'm okay with. It's not like we're on the end of their list, that's the PS3. They haven't done anything bad to us per say, just have not taken that extra step, probably due to the fact that it has to be optimized for the 360. So I see no reason to complain. Crytek's community however, has been in a weird sort of outcry. So much so that that Crysis isn't on Steam anymore...Who wants to be part of that? Anyway, since that beautiful gameplay was running on the 360, I can only guess at how nice it'll look on the PC with ultra high settings. I'm not sure there will be any texture packs anyway, it all looks pretty amazing. As for lighting, that's a lot of processing power. But seeing those huge fog clouds roll through the mountains and the nice weather effects is a nice trade off I think.
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