Yo,

Check out this DMM running in the gamebryo engine. That's right, oblivion was built with gamebryo and skyrim has a augmented in-house engine based off gamebryo sooo... they could have this in skyrim !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MryrCquonzI&feature=related

Imagine melting stuff with spells! or freezing an orc and shattering it with a hammer !!

Not as "awesome" as you think, actually. They did it with Black & White, and with some items in Oblivion. And both Red Faction games. All it requires is a collision system and coding that will tell an object how to "break" or react to certain objects.

So you're saying when we cut down trees it will be a preset animation?

This isn't very impressive really; Oblivion did physics just as well, if with less "ooooh" factor.

We don't really know that "cutting trees" is actually in.

Aww mannn... I was planning on cutting down the entire province...

Meh, Red Faction: Guerrilla style. I didn't like the physics they gave the humans in that and the burning was lame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqnM3CMQdyc&feature=related

Hopefully it's going to look something like this?

If you want a peek at what engine they might be using check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMihpCxEaI0

You will see footage from Black Prophecy( a closed beta i'm currently participating in.

More importantly at :32 and again at 1:05 could be shots of Skyrim.

Oh the memories. Crashing a walker though the roof of a building and laying waste to everything will never get old for me.
Can you imagine the "any structure can be leveled" principle in, say, Oblivion? It would be madness. Though stealthy types would be at a disadvantage. And the damage would almost certainly have to be fixed some time.

And to the Topic Master, how far should the destruction physics go? Do you want buildings crushed by dragons, or just a few new ways to torment level 4 bandits?

I am pretty sure the physics engine used for TES IV was Havok, and Gamebryo just was the render engine.
Also, there were lots of problems I had with that video. First is the fractures, and "denting" of the barrels are way behind the times. Ageia PhysX has done a way better job of this. I think they were bought by Nvidia and may no longer be called Ageia. Next, they didn't have shaders for there demo to give the appearance of the slide being chilled, or heated. That would have helped sell the gamebryo engine. The "human" models that they were throwing had no visible rigging. They should have shown of their ragdoll physics. Finally, they melted them? That shouldn't happen. If anything they should have burned. Sure some parts of them should have melted in a perfect world, but a cremated person turns to ash not goo. It looked like it took the human models and deformed them until they were flattened. No sign of skeletons being used.

I must have missed something. I thought they weren't using a Gamebryo based engine this time.

That is not confirmed. the video in the OP is the old version. Lookat the video for the new version I posted up, it has the same level of graphics as Skyrim so it's quite possible that is what they are using.

But they have said that they were using a new engine build in-house, as opposed to a supped-up/modified Gamebryo engine like they used to Oblivion.

Mitheledh, I think you are right. In-house does mean internal, as in not from an external company like Emergent.

all they said was they were using a new engine, They consider all of the engines they have used to be theirs as they built them using the Gamebryo renderer. Gamebryo is NOT an engine it is only a component.

I could be mistaken, since it was a few years ago, but I don't recall them ever claiming that Oblivion was built on a new engine. They said it was on a modified/upgraded version of Gamebryo. So for them to claim it's new now, and still use Gamebryo doesn't sound right to me. Component or not, Gamebryo is hardly new to TES.

http://www.emergent.net/Products/Gamebryo/

If there is one thing I want developed more in the gaming world... its real time, physics driven dynamic destruction.

Now, with that said... tech demos like this spring up all the time. First of all, Gamebryo has nothing to do with this since its clearly using a physics engine not standard to Gamebryo. Now, its really not all that hard to make a physics engine capable of real time destruction... however, optimizing it to work in a game is a whole other animal. Bohemia Interactive for example showed off a really nice dynamic destruction system for what ended up being ArmA2 back in 2005. Now, anyone who has played ArmA2 knows that when it came out 4 years later, it lacked any sort of dynamic destruction. Why? Well the developers explained it nice and simple... there were just far too many technical issues they could not solve, not the least of which were optimization for large environments, AI reaction to the destruction, solution for multiplayer, and streamlined content pipeline. Those are not simple issues to solve in this case.

The one and only game to date to even come close was in fact Red Faction: Guerrilla. It had physics drive destruction that was quite impressive, and they were even able to pull it off in multiplayer. It was quite an accomplishment, but there's a slight catch. The RFG developers have stated that they were pushing the 360 to its limit... yet RFG was lacking quite a few features that would have hurt it drastically if it was not RFG. The AI was terrible in the game, and lacked any sort of thinking ability (such ability requires a lot of memory/processor power). Sure the AI would realize if a building was destroyed or not, but since the AI didn't interact with, or try to use the buildings for cover in the first place this was not nearly as big of challenge as it could have been for a game such as ArmA2 or even an Elder Scrolls game. Also, the world map in RFG was very sparse and has little in the way of detail... which was fine since it was on Mars. But what if you wanted a world that wasn't bland, and closer to that of Oblivion? Given how resource heavy decent forest can be, RFG's destruction probably wouldn't work in such a game world at this time. The other major thing RFG did to cut down on non-destruction related resource use is make 99.9% of their NPCs randomly generated, and thus remove the requirement to keep track of their data once the player leaves the area.

So a quick recap... the one and only game to ever actually use dynamic destruction had these drawbacks.

-Bland, sparsely populated map that only worked because the game was set on Mars.
-Terrible, and very shallow AI that could do little other then run in and attack
-Random NPCs
-NPCs couldn't really use the destruction themselves, unless they accidentally shot a building you were in

Think about that for a second. Three years of strait development on RFGs GeoMod 2.0 physics engine resulted in a game that was only possible with those drawbacks. Do you really want to see such drawbacks in an Elder Scrolls game? That isn't even getting into the fact that physics based destruction is completely and utterly wasted in a hand to hand combat game. Sure, you could make spells that could destroy buildings... but would they really spend years developing a destruction system that someone might find a practical use for once or twice every 20 hours? Not a chance. Also, lets not forget that Skyrim is certain to use interior cells... so building destruction is out anyway. If you can't do building destruction, whats the point? Destroying game objects would be pointless, and would almost never be used practically. So were talking about a ton of development resources that would be used for very very very very little practical reason, and thats just not going to happen.

Again, these types of tech demos spring up from time to time. Until you see something running in a full functioning game, it doesn't mean anything. Taking a tech demo like this and turning it into a fully functioning game is like going from launching a model rocket, to launching the space shuttle. Either way I guess this is all a moot discussion since this destruction demo is not a "GameBryo demo", but rather a physics demo someone did and used GameBryo... and Skyrim is not using GameBryo anyway, but rather a brand new internal rendering and graphics engine. And believe me, Skyrims engine will not have any sort of complicated physics destruction.

CryEngine and iD Tech 5 own this x10.

skyrim isnt even mentioned on their titles page. if they were doing it you would think that would be up there as a selling point. and no it doesnt matter if the game isnt out yet. ive seen not yet released games mentioned for things like physx so why wouldnt gamebryo say it. its just not gamebryo and thank God it isnt. that engine is just not comparable to other engines out their today.

We know that there will be logging, and I remember seeing a pic of a broken tree, that looked like it had been broken in-game, not modeled that way.

DMM, also known as Dynamic Molecular Matter is truly unique in gaming still. Not many games use this besides Star Wars Force Unleashed as I'm aware of. It works rather well in simulating the molecular structure of materials. Also, it's pretty CPU intensive and incorporating this in Skyrim is rather trivial in my opinion. Would be cool though, but I doubt it.

When a developer says "It's a whole new engine." You can bet it's probably just that, if they were using Gamebryo again, you could bet there would be mention of that on the Emergent website. That's a title announcement you would want to parade around.

Besides, Emergent is no more and Gamebase now owns the Gamebryo distribution rights. As far as I know, no deal has been struck between them and Bethesda, indicating that this is an entirely new engine.

DMM is an amazing piece of tech. Crysis and Rage have nothing on it at the moment in terms of pure material based physics. And Red Faction/black and white did not have this. They had their own solutions. Red Faction's structural physics are unmatched, but are to the point where the game designers had to take architecture classes to prevent the buildings they were creating from imploding under their own weight. However its material based physics were not nearly as impressive.

The only game so far to use DMM has been Lucas Arts The Force Unleashed. It is very impressive in game, and when the tech is pushed it can do some pretty awe-inspiring stuff.


All that said, Elder Scrolls is not ready for DMM. As much as I love new tech in the game, and would love to see as much advanced stuff in Skyrim as possible, DMM is not one of them, yet.

DMM would be to much of a game changer at this point. Radiant AI would need to be 10x what it will be in Skyrim in order to react to DMM within the game world properly. Not to mention basic quest structure would have to be thoroughly rethought out in order to accommodate for players just burning down villages, forests, etc.