Now you see, the main problem with Oblivion (and morrowind) was that the game engine rendered too much. Say for example you were on once side of Anvil lookign down the street, the game would render and calculate eveything in that field of view even if it was behind an object. So the game would also render and calculate many things that wernt in your view. Which is why Better Cities ran awful frame rate. Even on the best hardware it would bring the frame rate to a crawl. This is because there was no poly culling. Now this may also be true for Skyrim, but Im hoping they have built poly culling into the engine. So mods that come out later like Better Citys foir Skyrim may bring your game to its knees, because Better Cities added ALOT more detail and objects to the citys and it makes the citys in Oblivion look amazing but the Gamebryo is engine is told to draw all of it.

That was Gamebyro though which is terribly optimized so i expect Creation engine to be much more optimized. If it isn't then shame on Bethesda.

The lighting and effects still looked like Gamebryo.

Rendering isn't the problem, the Gamebryo engine, like any open-world game which keeps track of nearly 100 NPCs that aren't even inside the player's cell, is that it's very CPU-intensive. For Oblivion it did really well, 4 years later people added very high definition stuff that the engine wasn't designed for, but could work with, hence it doesn't perform as well as it would if say it was released today.

But yeah, I think Skyrim will be optimized, Bethesda has hopefully had plenty experience in engine building and should be up-to-date with all the tips and tricks of optimization in coding, so I have high hopes for it.

I hope you're right.

Lighting and shading effects are rendered via Creation Engine, hence why practically everything drops a shadow now.

There is much, much, much more to lighting and shading than just shadows. Lighting and shading is what practically make Crysis 1/2 and Battlefield 3 look so darn stunning, and that's also what their game developers have been working so hard on.

Other than shadows, lighting and shading effects looks barely improved at all from FO3, at least to me.

Still looks quite impressive, specially in some of the screen shots we've seen. The close up of the Draugr comes to mind and how eerily lit the dungeon is. Sets the mood you know? To each his own I guess.

Wasn't FO3 far better optimized and thus a far better comparison?

Fo3 ran like [censored]. but it had slightly better lighting than oblivion.

Write your own game engine, problem solved.

Seriously though, you've got good points, especially given Skyrim's topographical assets to the cause.

Yep. FO3 ran much better.



(and I'm not sure why the OP starts a thread on engine poly-rendering optimization, and then makes his replies about lighting.... :shrug:)

I'm confused myself - What would be the purpose of this thread? Perhaps the OP can clarify. As it's clearly been said a n number of times in the past, the game runs on a rewritten engine. It's only logical to assume that the devs took into account the flaws of the previous engine implementation when developing it.

If Skyrim incorporated real-time culling then it'd be better optimised sure... But the lighting is fantastic, nothing wrong with the lighting at all, in-fact I'd say the lighting effects is better then most games I've seen this year. e.

I also want to note that it's not fair comparing BF3 or Crysis engine to Oblivion/Skyrim since they have different requirements and goals, and hence have different priorities when it comes to resource allocation.

Not to mention Skyrim is primarily a DX9 game developed with consoles in mind first.

I was replying tto the previous post.

What I meant was "It sure looks like Gamebryo"

And yes, the thread is about poly culling. I was watchign a bad LP of Oblivion and he had raely bad frame rate because he was running Better Cities.

Also separate interior cells and city cells just svcks. The engine blows, imo.

Vanilla FO3 and vanilla FNV are much more demanding than Oblivion, at least on my laptop.

We've seen him in that small town to the south and tha twasnt walled off, but we never actually got to see him go into a city. And when he went inside the cave, I dont remember seeing a loading screen, but I guess he would have edited that out of the video.

The reason we only got to see 10 mins of the 30 min demo was the other 20 mins were spent in loading screens lol.

Gah, don't remind me.
I think I died a little inside when he made that comment.

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

It's not even the consoles I'm mad at. Just the 360 with its 512MB RAM that I had on my computer in 2002. Microsoft, the last useful thing you did for the gaming industry was inventing DirectX and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN0K58EfJSg. Give it a rest already. :whistling:

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

We're just not as smart as you. :whistling: