If Bethesda's community manager didn't say that its brand new (several times I might add... see the links in my other post) I'd humor such speculation since his semi-cryptic statement is in fact hard to interpret. However we know for a fact, a 100% fact, that the engine is brand new so hes clearly not talking about GameBryo. Besides, when someone says something like "The technology is ours and it is inspired by the technology we have"... hes talking about two different things right there. The technology that is theirs.... and the technology that they already had.

Of course the new engine is almost certainly based heavily on GameBryo because they don't want TESV to feel toooo different. However its abundantly clear its a new engine built from the ground up... so clear in fact its been confirmed, more then once.

So be it then.

This suggests it http://kotaku.com/5712806/oh-good-elder-scrolls-v-wont-use-that-broken-old-engine be on Gamebryo.

No one knows for sure because we haven't seen it yet.

Those saying it will be this or that with 100% certainty are insane.

Until it's released we will not know for sure.

It could be based on Gamebryo and take heavy influence from it, which would still be considered 'new'.

It could be 100% new and take no influence from Gamebryo.

It could be 100% new and be a complete turkey of an engine and make us wish we had Gamebryo back :biggrin:

You said that Todd said they were still using Gamebryo. Which I haven't heard him say at all.

"The technology is ours and it is inspired by the technology we have."
This to me implies that it is not Gamebryo, but was inspired by Gamebryo.

"We have a lot of it. But that's our starting point - the Fallout 3 tech."
Sounds to me like he was saying they're building there own parts and using them with Gamebryo.

"It started with Morrowind, we went to Oblivion, we did a lot between Oblivion and Fallout 3 because now we had final hardware - with Oblivion we had six months on final hardware, so Fallout 3 technically does a lot more than Oblivion."
I don't know exactly what he means by that, saying they had six months on final hardware with Oblivion. Maybe that's when they started building their own engine that was going to be used instead of Gamebryo in the future.

The new stuff is an even bigger jump from that.
It's going to pwn.

How was the Gamebryo engine broken? I though it was pretty good for its time.

Most people saw the quote "...that's our starting point - the Fallout 3 tech."

But really Todd Howard said " The technology is ours and inspired by the technology we have. We have a lot of it. But that's our starting point - the Fallout 3 tech." http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-08-16-bethesdas-todd-howard-interview

This could mean that they started with the gamebryo engine as a starting point and improved upon it
Or that it is their starting point as in inspiration like the beginning of the quote states.

This statement can be misinterpreted to support the theory of both old engine and new engine so we really can't base our judgements off that.

A more direct quote from Nick Breckon's twitter "We can now confirm that the TES:V Skyrim engine is all-new, and it looks fantastic." http://twitter.com/nickbreckon/status/14015054991069184#

And yet another quote, this one from Todd Howard again in an IGN interview "We decided to really reboot our technology after Fallout 3" http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html
That sounds like building a new engine from scratch to me.

Oh yeah and also the Gamebryo assets were put up for sale on November 10th.

So I think it's safe to say that Skyrim will use a new engine.

I don't really think it's broken either, but at the same time we've had it since Morrowind and I do think that we've gotten the most out of it already, and that it's time to move on to a new, fresh experience.

Also notice, he said our technology, as in the stuff that is actually theirs. He didn't say the tech we use.

One also needs to seriously consider the legal side of things. If Bethesda says so openly that it's "all new" that carries a certain weight in legal circles. That means it has to be all theirs, basing it on even a smidge of something else would mean they'd have to call it "mostly new" or something to that effect. It's all copyright stuff basically. They can't claim it's all theirs if that's not actually true. They'd be sued, even if Gamebryo bit the dust last month.

It's far more likely, btw, that Gamebryo bit the dust a lot longer ago than just last month. That's just when the assets got put up for sale. It's extremely likely that Bethesda found out they were going under back in late 2008/early 2009 about the time they'd be seriously investing resources into Skyrim development. You don't go in to that on shaky ground. That would be madness, and last I checked, Sheogorath isn't the lead developer

Well, I suppose they've already had that considered. They said they used it for inspiration. I'm assuming that doesn't mean they just used some code from it. Rather it's just the same type of engine, you know for building open and interactive worlds.

I think you (well actually all of us) are picking apart the choice of words from various sources. I think most of the time they are just talking. By saying "ours" he could be referring to the tech they use, especially when considering that they have added, and probably changed a lot over the years of using Gamebryo.

While I'm not 100% certain (of course) I feel confident saying that they built an entirely new engine as Nick Breckon was saying, and that it was inspired by their years of working with Gamebryo, an engine they grew to know inside and out. They're comfortable with that engine and so wouldn't want to have to relearn their habits too much.

tl;dr (my fist tl;dr and it's not necessary): It is a new engine they built themselves; inspired by Gamebryo.

One interesting thing to think about is that Pete Hines have refered the old engine as "our tech" too, even though it used a lot of middlewares like Gamebryo, Havok, Speedtree, Facegen and so on. For example, http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=175852.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/feature/interview-with-bethesdas-emil-pagliarulo/ with Emil Pagliarulo.

So there often been cases when they haven't mentioned their tech as Gamebryo or whatever, but instead as "our".

That middleware is also a point of concern for a brand-new engine. Whatever the problems of Gamebryo, it offered seamless integration with lots of those. Umbra in particular sticks out in my mind. So I can only hope that either Bethesda managed to scraqe that compatibility together themselves, or that they had the serious resources to manage their own physics engines, tree generators, and hopefully occlusion culling.

I considered that briefly. But then I realized what forum I was on and began to pick apart specific words. :tongue:


I realize that. I just figured he might have been choosing his words more carefully (as in "ours" implying ownership), especially after reading what Arthmoor was saying about copyrights, and them not wanting to get sued.


Indeed, I agree.

True, but you would be surprised how much old code is reused. I mean, there are bits of Quake code in the Half-Life 2 source engine, and it was released 8 years before HL2. And the HL2 Source engine is still used for upcoming games, 14 years after Quake was released.

So the Source engine is older than the Netimmerse/Gamebryo engine. Does that make the Source engine outdated? Of course not, it continuously gets updated, but so does Gamebryo. Gamebryo Lightspeed was released last year, and as far as I know, we haven't seen any game using it yet so we can't say how good/bad it is.

Haha this forum is good for that. i think a lot of us are guilty of over-anolysis, and probably will continue to do so "4ever" (see what I did? )

Who will sue them? Emergent ain't around no more. But seriously I think they wouldn't have to worry about copyright issues about word choice in an interview, short of saying "this is our engine that we entirely thought up ourselves," and then we find out it is Gamebryo.

Well, I'm just an over anolyzing paranoia machine... What can I say? :teehee:

Either way I'm just really excited to see whatever engine they have, and how good it is.

Yep, I think everyone can agree with that and we may as well just close this thread now January can't come soon enough. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1149859-bethesdas-latest-potential-masterpiece/.

Exactly. You would probably be fairly safe to assume they didn't use any code from it, as under copyright law that would make it a derivative work and subject to the Gamebryo license. Somehow I don't see this happening at all. Even being inspired by it could be somewhat unsound. Unless they have a documented clean-room implementation where they duplicated whatever functionality they still wanted without reusing the old code.



Whoever ends up buying Emergent's assets would be around to sue should they feel the need. Worrying about legal stuff with public statements from your public figures is what lawyers do, and I'd wager they have at least some say in what GStaff and Nick are allowed to tell us, or have some input into how it gets worded so they can avoid being legally ambiguous. So don't expect to have their "all new" engine end up being a poorly disguised update of Gamebryo. That right there would be recipe for disaster.

Honestly I can't believe you guys. "Tech" can mean a lot of things, it's a simple way of saying all of the tools they have made/brought, Todd didn't even mention the "engine" word. So chill. "Hardware" that they didn't get till near completion on Oblivion is probably referring to the Xbox and PS3 SDK (development kits) and consoles. You guys seriously need to read between the lines. The engine has been stated that is is NEW. That is all.