WE NEED THIS. K.
We need a mod that activly monitors gpu usage and agusts IQ settings indipendantly.
Like one that in a firefight will lower quality for motion and for those of us with tri sli gtx 470's it makes the LOD kick in WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY farther than it does and draws high detail halfway across the mojave.


Not just an ini tune.
And as a sniper char, we need this.
Somehting that fixes the load rocks pause fps okay its mapped you can have your fps back.
This is unplayable srsly.

Or just an ini tweak. anything I need to play as a sniper

ddxx, what settings could you recommend upping for a sniper? I do a ton of sniping myself and the distance graphics, of course, look like crap.

@OP - It can very much be done but it will be democratic to the end if we are to embark on this graphical orgism adventure.

Have you thought of checking into the FNVSE and finding out what functions are already available to emulate your IDEA

As far as the OP goes, no it probably can't be done in any competent way, things like the animation system are hard coded, and while NVSE will allow you to modify some of it, you really don't want to [censored] around with a few places. Rendering process is one of those areas. Even OBGE and MWGE didn't really [censored] around with the direct rendering process, preferring to work around it, and tweak it just slightly until they'd figured out more about it. That understanding's about 2 years off for Fallout and 4 for NV, if my predictometer is calibrated correctly. Also recall that the gamebryo engine with the tweaks bethesda puts on it, tends to svcker punch certain things into dust. It does things like only rendering a certain amount of NPCs in a frame once combat is called.

Also, given the probability of some kind of infinite view distance mod, as well as the quality of it, it would likely lag even the most spuriously powerful rigs into the dust. AI processing is tough, imagine it rendering AI for everything in the game world, or even the smallest of large segments, say an eighth of the game world, would still likely lag a computer to the bone.

As far as GRAPHICS/TEXTURE detail goes, it is a possibility. A thousand fold greater possibility than what the OP seems to want, they will likely come out in a scant few months.

There is definitely something wrong with FONV, or rather Gamebryo / Havok. After my latest rig was built I replayed Crysis without a single hiccup at 1600 with ALL graphics maxxed. I know it's not fair to compare to a lot of otrher games but Crysis has massive vistas, top notch physics and a very high level of detail in the environment.

I've got a 3.4 Ghz Quad core with an ATI 5850 and 4 Gb of ram. Not "bleeding" edge but better than most machines. Walking up to a burning barrel in one of the NCR camps with about 8 npc's in view and I get a lot of lag. I stormed the Fort last night and I had to do almost all of it in VATs (I've never done so many drugs in all my games since FO1. How I didn'
t get adicted had to be pure luck.) Trying to shoot it out, outside of VATs was almost impossible due to really sluggish responsiveness.

When I'm just walking around I see relatively close elements fade into view, buildings magically appearing, etc. I've tried that mod for making use of all 4 Gb of ram but it had little (if any) effect.


EDIT: And one more thing about Crysis, after reading the post above, It's got some pretty good AI with NPCs that actually initiate combat rather than just charging head long into battle.

From what I can recall of this issue it is because the Gamebryo engine version that they are using(April 2k7 IIRC) does not have the capability to take advantage of multiple cores effectively. The games are thus incredibly processor locked and areas like the AI and the meshe stream are straining to get through the buffers and such.

I don't understand beth .. they make millions with their games .. but still they refuse to buy the upgraded version of gamebryo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMihpCxEaI0&feature=related....

It's not a matter of upgrading - they'd have to rewrite massive portions of their engine to support the new features in the latest Gamebryo - and they've likely customised, or added their own features to the version they have, making it quite impractical.
Chances are, however, they're going to have to do something like that with TESV - rewrite a bunch of stuff and all that. Unless, of course, they're lying to us when they talk about the "new and improved" engine it'll supposedly have.

Because their engine is hardly recognizable if put side by side with any other gamebryo engine. Most they really have in common is the file format. They have written and rewritten nearly every part of the engine to fit their needs, it is highly unlikely they will change. BethesdaGS said they wont even be using the Tech5 because its not as good with large open worlds, which is true.

Uhh yeah, I'd like to call BS on Bethesda's commentary regarding Tech5 not working well with open world games, since a fairly large part of their upcoming title RAGE are it's huge draw distances and sprawling vistas. It all comes down to their familiarity with the engine, pre-set deadlines and sheer, in-born, human laziness. None of which we can really blame them for.

Gamebryo does what it does well, but it's beyond outdated, just look at the lack of any sort of dynamic or even smooth animations. Any animation outside of the basics have to be jury-rigged in and then forced into action through some fancy scripting and/or activators. The basics themselves are about as stiff as animations come.

It's a versatile engine, but in the end it really just isn't up to snuff in regards to modern gaming.

I'd honestly love to see what Bethesda could do with Unreal Engine 3 though, since it's really obviously the most versatile engine in the industry.

You know, "huge draw distances and sprawling vistas" does not equal "open-world". It merely presents the illusion of it. Would you call Borderlands an open-world game?

To the OP, it sounds like what you are requesting is a port of Streamline to NV from Oblivion.

If NVSE and NV have the right commands, it's possible, but the Streamline creator hasn't been around for a while last I looked.

Unreal also isn't optimized for open worlds. Tech5 pre-loads a region, while large, there are still loading screens between areas. As roxahris said, ""huge draw distances and sprawling vistas" does not equal "open-world""

This.

idTech 5's game creating specialty is just about the same as Unreal's, and that is creating FPS games that either require you to trudge from level to level (Doom/Gears of War), or a pseudo open world game that has you transition between "checkpoints" to get to the next area (RAGE/Borderlands).

I'm pretty sure if idTech 5 was able to handle the types of open worlds that Bethesda creates, they would've already jumped on it and announced it to the world several times that they would be using it. Hell, at least I'd boast about using idTech 5.

Not for TES5, I think they were already working on it when ID joined them. I think changing the engine would have set them back quite a bit : time spent to learn how to use it, time spent to port over their assets, rebuilding the gameworld, the scripts etc.

That being said Carmack is a genius, I'm pretty sure he could help them edit idTech5 into a more gamebryo-ish engine (huge worlds with lots of detail and all that) for future projects.

They said the engine is an upgraded version of the NV engine, for all we know they could have integrated more advanced stuff... or not, we don't know yet.

If I caught his drift properly, what he is asking for is for the game to load half the Mohave at once, NPC's and all, provided that portion wasn't hyperbole.

Also for those of you arguing on game engines, loading and render distance, you're all forgetting something, bethesda's engine, as modified as it may be, also preloads cells, IE, 512x512 game unit-world sections, IIRC, as you move. It may not show a loading screen, but it still loads each cell you pass through into memory and caches it there. This is the reason cell buffer purgers were so necessary for Oblivion and FO3. This is also the reason you went into an interior cell within the cities or an interior cell linked to an interior cell when you wanted to respawn enemies by resting and refreshing the cells.

This can be done within unreal, via clever use of culling boxes, or even "seamless" portals with a minimal loading screen, I'd imagine IdTech5 will also take advantage of culling tech like this. You'd also be able to use a much more advanced an optimized rendering platform, as well as having better coded systems overall.

What I would rather see is BethGS to bring over some of the ID coders to help improve their engine. I mean, why change from what you know? It can be made better, and it is still everything you are familiar with, and in my books, that is a win-win.

Though call me bias from a community member standpoint. Not only would they have to learn a new system if they switched engines, but so would we. We would be set back to square one, needing new community tools to make new content of our own outside of what assets were with the game.

Good point! Personally, I'd rather have a modable engine than a better-looking but more restrictive one. Not saying idTech5 wouldn't be modable though. But yeah, we're used to GameBryo....

You guys haven't done much game development, have you? Let me fill you in.

First off, "Gamebryo" is not a "game engine", it's just a piece of middle-ware which makes up a game engine. For example, Civilization IV uses Gamebryo and looks NOTHING like Oblivion, which uses a similar version of Gamebryo. Nor can an Oblivion mod be ported to Civilization IV, even the modding utilities are incompatible.

Gamebryo gives you a scripting engine, XML parser (Bethesda uses the XML very lightly, mostly only for the UI) and an extensible 3D renderer. The rest, Bethesda has to source elsewhere or make itself. Civilization IV has no spells, but Oblivion has no turn based combat, Bethesda (and Firaxis) had to make that itself. Same with Civ's netplay (though Gamebryo supports that natively) and so on.

To actually make Gamebryo into a real game needs a ton of work because it's not a game engine, it's part of one. It's much more accurate to say "The Oblivion Engine" than it is to say "Oblivion's Gamebryo Engine". Oblivion adds Havok, Facegen, Speedtree and other "engines" even before it gets anywhere near the high-level stuff that actually makes up a game design.

Most engines these days have a scripting interface, it makes development much easier. On with a few salient points:


Between Morrowind and Oblivion, Bethesda did just that.


This is exactly how Oblivion and Fallout3/NV works. That distant land? Yeah, it's low-detail, low-poly fakery to present the illusion that the cells are loaded when they're not. The only part of the game that's loaded is the five cells immediately around the player. Even the AI doesn't run until the player arrives, then as the cell loads, the AI quickly catches up - Unless the player is in the same cell or the cells are "local", then NPCs do not exist short of a very basic script which lets quest targets move around (and that doesn't always fire properly). This is why NPCs would never die when following you if you fast travelled, even if a whole den of bandits was between you and the target.

The whole "stumbling upon a battle"? Yeah, you did that so much because the battle couldn't start until you loaded it.


Of course it can. Probably better than Gamebryo can. Handling cell and area loads is for the developer, not the game engine. The game engine just has to draw it. Way back when Morrowind was the new and hot stuff, NetImmerse (renamed to Gamebryo later) was the only decent middleware which could handle the kind of draw distances needed and it did that extremely badly, needing the distance clamped and hidden behind fog. Now every engine and its dog can draw more or less to infinity.

Wishing this forum had some form of thumb up right now, excellent expansion upon the salient points, hattix.

To give you, those of you who haven't researched this [censored], an example of what gamebryo can have by default, preintegrated currently, these are extra cost addons with licensing fees not associated with the "main" engine, I'll explain the kind of obscure ones. Havok, Speedtree, Umbra, Scaleform, Kynapse(Essentially autodesk's AI solution), Natural Motion, Allegorithmic Software(Procedural and Dynamic Textures), PhysX, BEAST!(Autodesk's lighting system), Lightsprint(Another Lighting system) Pixel Active(Actually unsure what this is, it's been bought out by another company, anyone know?), Simplygon(one of the best LOD reducing middleware out there,) Sundog Software's stuff(Cloud and Sky Simulation), Audio Kenetic(Best sound system for games out there). Yeah that's about all the good stuff.

This is the kinda stuff they'd get if the upgraded to a more current version of gamebryo. As Hattix said Gamebryo is a VERY slim engine in comparison to Unreal or some other engines I could name. You get middleware to enhance it's capabilities, which by default are scripting things, source access I'd assume, XML for UI implementation, which if they update, scaleform will do easier, and a par decent renderer.

You don't do much blog reading do you?

Bethesda has stated, as well as ID that the Tech5 would not be good for the kind of world generations that Bethesda does. The Tech5 loaded (large) levels, which is why they can get such good detail on the terrain. Each landscape is a hand-crafted 3D models in RAGE, given a super texture.

The AI depends on how it is set up. For the most part, yes, it does not run when the cells are not loaded, however, when you fast travel with an NPC following you, they DO actually run across the landscape. The reason they don't die (usually, but they can) is because the aforementioned AI not running on the bandits. The reason is because the processing power to handle all the NPCs AI running at once would be more demanding then Crysis was graphically when it first came out. No computer could run it Fallout if that were the case.

Same goes for draw distance. And it does not load 5 cells, it loads a 5x5 grid, IE 25 cells. You can bump that up to 49 cells but you would effectively double the requirements for the game to run smoothly. This is not an issue with RAGE because each region is pre loaded and closed off with loading screens in between.

By your definition og what they Gamebryo engine is, then the Unreal engine is not a true game engine either. Mirrors Edge and UT3 don't looks the same, and mods can not be swapped from one game to the other. However, the files ARE compatible, mostly. Lego Universe uses Gamebryo, and if I wanted, I could take the nif files from there, do some tweaking, and they are ready for Fallout use.

I'm sure you know this, but no engine is game ready right out of the box. Developers need to take it and mold it to their needs, adding what they want, but at its core, it is still the same thing. So while the Gamebryo engine might not be a whole game engine in a box, it is at the core of every game that uses it.

Erm, same for OB and FO, well minus the super texture tech. OB and FO use a grid based tiling designation for textures
Very true, thus why I was mocking the OP and being so scornful.
So wait, you're saying it preloads f 25 cells, then you say, rage couldn't do the same because it preloads a level? Here's the thing, the entire lynchpin in this point, Gamebryo didn't do streaming cells until bethesda added it in. It comes down to effort for a far greater engine, or reusing old code that works but not as well.
Here allow me to clarify UE like Gamebryo is an engine and a middleware. UE actually does allot more than gamebryo engine does by default though, it's got speedtree, it's got scaleform, it's got bink, it's got a lighting processor and renderfarm software, it's got a shadow renderer, it's got a level stream, it's got bounding boxes, it's got a base gameplay layer for prototyping levels, and more that I'm probably forgetting after 3 years of not having access to the actual engine itself. In comparison to gamebryo, gamebryo is the model kit where you fabricate the raw iron components and glue them together, occasionally buying preforged parts, unreal is the model kit that comes with plastic snap together parts and allows you to add in other components as well.

Actually, look up above the quote to see how wrong you are.

What do I do to do this.
I have 2GB of video memory alone and 12GB of system memory.

What do you mean "after 3 years of not having access to the actual engine itself."? You had access to a $500,000 engine?

And even then, there still needs to be engine changed for custom game features, Like Mirror's Edge and its running/climbing. Last I checked, UT3 didnt have those types of features.

SpeedTree is not included with the Unreal engine, because Unreal does not own it. Same with Bink

All in all, UE may have more stock components, but that does not make Gamebryo any less of a game engine simply because it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that UE has. Thats like saying you are not a man because you don't have hair on your chest.