I dont like SSD, HDDs are so steam punk you know? I can put two in a raid and that'll be plenty fast enough.

If TES:V looks similar to oblivion i have to say that'll be a major turn off, may even sway my purshase.

You really, really don't understand the point. That's the advantage PCs have over consoles. If the PCs can't handle it when the game's released, the option can be left so later, all you have to do is adjust the settings and the game looks better. There's no negative impact on having the option off... it doesn't matter at all, honestly. I honestly think you just can't grasp the idea or have jealousy issues with PCs.

Then please tell me why there isn't a slider to allow Morrowind to look like Oblivion for PCs? Developers don't develop games for future platforms and people act as if the dynamic shadows were finished and ready to go. If Bethesda wants to give PC players graphic bonuses, it doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the "they were all finished and consoles stopped them from being in the game, just as they ruin all gaming" vibe I'm feeling.

Thats not the subject, we are talking about dumbing down the game for consoles, not making the game for future generation hardware. You're totally mixing the two and they are not even remotely similar.

Yes they are. I challenge the theory that consoles are the great dumbing downers of Oblivion because in the case of Oblivion, I do not believe those shadows were ever working, therefore I do not believe the PC version got dumbed down. I also don't believe developers should develop for future platforms, and Bethesda certainly didn't with their past games. I would rather have Bethesda work on the gameplay than some shiny new graphical side of the game that would only run on some future PCs, anyway. It's an aging game, but I suppose the complaints never end, now do they? I'm sure someone with a super PC claims that all the weaker PCs(in this case, almost every other PC on the planet) are dumbing down his/her games, though, as well.

There is limits but for example they have said a few times with respect to Morrowind and Oblivion they made houses zoned so they can have finer textures inside the house where the view distance is short. Otherwise those finer textures outside would slow down the computers at the time, they had the abilities to use finer textures but opted not to. Other examples is rendering of grass trees and etc in Oblivion. Why at the highest settings the grass still magically appears at 100yards? Allow the sliders to go to infinite, yes you can change these in the dll files, but they don't always work properly after a certain range because the developers made it to work on top end computers of that time.

The demo with the shadows was running the game engine and was not a movie; as he moved the rib cage around in the light its shadow played out across the floor/wall. Beth said they took it out because it was slowing the game down too much at certain points. This is what we would like left in. If I can't run it with all the bells and whistles that's ok cause TES games I pick up a couple years later and still play them. Mostly why they don't is probably economics. Why put somethings in that only 1/3 or less of your players might be able to take advantage of. What I hope/ask for is that if it isn't too much more tweak the game for infinite grass leave the shadows you already developed, maybe not perfectly, as an option.

It definitely would have been interesting to see Oblivion with all those great shadows. Did Bethesda ever confirm completion or near-completion of those shadows? What I don't understand is why Bethesda would take out a completed or nearly completed part of the game, even if it was only available to the PC gamers of the future. What did they gain by taking them out? They gained criticism, but I doubt that's beneficial. If they had left them in(at least on PCs), would they still have received as much criticism as they did, or perhaps more for making them PC-exclusive?

That is a good question. Your comment reminded me of the timing of all this. The next generation console, the XBOX 360, was just released and it was a hot, power hungry and all powerful. Along comes Beth with one of the most anticipated new console release games and they say, "Sorry if you want all the eye candy you'll have to get a $4k gaming PC, Microsoft's new uber machine is just not up for the task." Probably wouldn't have made a hit with big M and the console gamers that got this new cutting edge machine for to experience next gen graphics would probably not be too happy. Not sure how far the shadows were developed. Gothic 3, released 6 months later, had this type of dynamic shadowing, buggy of course, but that is what you get when one of your lead coders dies in a car accident a few months before the game's release.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/demo-demonstration-elder-scrolls/7907, at 1:35: "This is all rendering in real-time, true HD, real-world physics, true dynamic soft-shadows..."


That's what we don't understand either. Perhaps that's the reason why it wasn't in the PC version: to ensure that purchasers of the brand new Xbox360 didn't realize that their brand new High Definition console wasn't actually the greatest gaming system in the world, as Bugnguts suggested, and that PCs already had access to more advanced options, whether those options were playable or not. Hopefully that is the reason, as everyone is aware that PCs are typically more powerful than current-gen consoles, and even expect games to look better on the PC. Bethesda won't have that issue again.

It is a fact though, that those shadows were working in real-time, at least in the interiors, as that video I linked to above shows.

But then wouldn't the xbox 360 owners be pissed off.

No, they shouldn't be pissed off because some other people with different hardware simply have the OPTION to play a better looking game two years down the road. It is the PC owners who have every reason to be pissed off who are denied this OPTION for reasons that they have absolutely nothing to do with their own hardware.

I think you might be wrong about that.

Shadow mapping for the flash light was added to the update that came with EP2 - Much before L4D.

If Oblivion had better graphical options on the PC? Possibly, because most of them believed they were paying for the best gaming hardware in the world at the time. It may have come as a blow to see PC gamers getting better graphics right at the start of the 360's lifecycle.

If TES:V gets better graphical options on the PC? They'd be crazy if they got upset about that. The 360 is in it's 5th year now, and although it's aging well, it IS aging. The average gaming PC is more powerful than a current gen console. A top-end gaming PC is vastly more powerful. Everyone should expect a better visual performance on the PC version of the game. I will be pretty upset if I can still play TES:V on max graphics with my current PC. It's been 2 years since I bought this PC, and TES:V is at least another year away from release.

I should clarify that i'm not overly upset about Oblivion looking the same on PC as the 360, since there wasn't too much separating them at the time. It would have been great to have shadows as an option for later on down the line, but I still had a great experience at the time and felt the graphics were a beautiful leap forward. It's if Bethesda follows the same tactics and pulls TES:V down to console standards of graphics for the PC that I'll be upset, because we have 4+ years of improved tech and hardware to utilize over the consoles.

Yes but what else is new...? These are the same people that swear that the PS3 cost $700, has no games and get's dropped online every 2 minutes. They also are 100% positive that any gaming PC must cost $7000+ has to use only keyboard and mouse because PC controllers do not exist, and it is still far inferior to their "lying in dormant" all powerful xbox GPU waiting to be unleashed.Anything non-positive about anything xbox related is bound to piss them off, that's the way they work.

With how long the current gen consoles have been out, I would think that Bethesda would know that their PC version of the games they produce may have longer lifespans to them. Hopefully they won't hinder the PC versions by limiting it to the 4 year old technology of the consoles.

Certainly possible, I'd love to see some directx 10 and 11 features in the game.

The real question is of course cost, as in how much it would cost them to put it in versus how much it would be worth to them.

At the very least I'd like to see standard settings that go beyond the console limits, I'm tired of manually tweaking an ini to get what should be a menu option.

Beyond that, if there was just an easy way for modders to access and modify all the shaders and the engine didn't have some sort of lock off to advanced features then we'd be good. Just as with Morrowind and Oblivion I'm sure some crazy dudes will happily make the game much shinier. If it's easier to do so then all the better.

That's a really good point. I'm not a modder myself so I have no idea how difficult it is for the OGE/OBGE guys to add and edit shaders, or whether providing those suggested additions in a future iteration of the CS would help solve the holy grails like collision-detection rain, overhauled water, dynamic shadows etc.

If Bethesda could provide that modding access though, then perhaps that would be a cost-effective solution to satisfy both our desires for the game to utilize modern computer technology, and Bethesda's financial ability to create a superior version of their next game for the smallest user-base (at least, PC gamers are likely to be the smallest user-base at launch. I imagine Oblivion is played more on the PC than on both consoles combined today).

Isn't Half-Life baking the shadows? I don't call that shadows(real-time). L4D had pretty shadows where EP2 wasn't that good for me. I think I can say Source was incomplete by that time. But I also know about the troubles they got into. EP2 is when it came near completion and L4D was the polished and finished engine I want to see.

I wonder if I can get some updates to Dark Messiah too.

Edit: Maybe I'm too harsh on source. But CS ran pretty bad on my Pentium D. Although new updates might have changed it. As it can run on MAC now. That should count as something.

Some screens, I really searched hard to find a pretty flashlight image for HL2:EP2. I will take my owns.

http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/4598/22419128.png
http://www.cheats.ru/uploaded/h/halflife2episode2/halflife2episode2-02475.jpg
http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m261/coolcorky/c2m3_coaster0000.jpg
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/1687/softshadowsjw4.jpg

This is personal opinion though as all of my posts.

hmmmmmmmm.......im not a programming expert, i wonder if the shadows in the game were just disabled or actually removed from the disk altogether. if they were simply disabled could they then be enabled kind of like some games have missing content added to them like KOTOR 2?

Removed. What carry all that weight ? When you're running time-critical processes, you'd like to remove all impediments. Beth decided that shadow mapping for all light sources was impractical on console hardware. Had they simply disabled it and let the code remain in the game, it wouldn't have played as smoothly as it does now (as the code does get called). While the performance gain might not have been substantial (or even noticeable) on the PC, consoles were probably able to benefit from it. As it stands, the TES4 renderer stencils out all objects except actors when drawing shadows. Perhaps, when much if it's been decoded, it might be possible to get it work with all objects.

PS : I guess I was kinda wrong about shadows in HL. Apparently, they were too buggy and disabled past the beta. But there are mods that add them back.

Thought you guys might find this cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eia-v1JUfEg

Shows off what a decent pc can really do when not tied down by consoles.

Oh, and Source does indeed use mostly "baked" or pre-calculated lighting. They added a dynamic shadow map for your flashlight in the engine update for Episode 2. On a side not they're really going to have to re-do a lot of their engine if they want to get modern looking and working games such as large open environments.

thats what i was wondering. how come if they simply disabled them in HL why didnt they disable them in oblivion. would love it if they had kept them on the disk so that modders could use them. oh well.

I should have been more clear, my apologies. The code that rendered shadows were removed from HL's executable - Mods had to do what MGE does to implement new effects.

oh ok.....got you now.

But not all of us are like that.

But really I have no idea why shadows were removed. I actually didn't notice oblivion didn't have shadows until this topic. Seems rather odd that they'd show off the shadows and then just do away with em completely. I guess I'll have to agree that they were cut due to console development.

Of course if I had to make a wishlist it would be:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CBwQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.download.nvidia.com%2FSDK%2F10.5%2Fdirect3d%2FSource%2FScreenSpaceAO%2Fdoc%2FScreenSpaceAO.pdf&ei=DIgiTJOwC46lnQfPpsAm&usg=AFQjCNFUZvyxBZuAVPOtNcWlN0yVyaxJiQ&sig2=AUxeDOJi92Kcux9PZuMTKA
http://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/samples-tutorials-tools/motion-blur-sample/
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.amd.com%2Fgpu_assets%2F01GDC09AD3DDStalkerClearSky210309.ppt&ei=xIgiTKuEEoXknQfokpXBDw&usg=AFQjCNGjCbNMl28vJ30YQDVLUIVJHDckug&sig2=tRydQNKRdn4Urk5TKwsWFA
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee416567%28VS.85%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee416430%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
And of course dynamic lens flare would be great.

All shiny shiny and well documented! Plus if say the PS4 came out in 2013 you could put a GOTY version out for that with all the improvements (and in 3d?)