Would adding tessellation functionality be within the scope of what OBGE did for Oblivion?

No. OBGE has more or less been limited to screenspace effects, meaning post-effect shaders that run after everything else has already rendered. With very limited information as well, such as a reconstructed depth map. From which we can do some things but nothing very extravagant. We have to reconstruct the world normals as well, and this doesn't even include the normal maps, as we don't have access to them from view space. So people like Tomerk have created Skyrim-like effects like a snow shader, but without normal maps it's not nearly as detailed. And it can't even be excluded from rendering on certain objects, such as NPCs.

It's possible if Skyrim used a deferred shading setup that a Skyrim Graphics Extender could access the G-Buffer and do a bit more in terms of post effects, but nothing as low level as hacking in tessellation.

Considering the way they keep talking about their lighting engine I'm hoping they go deferred. Having more artist freedom with light placement seems like a good fit for a title like Skyrim. We have also seen deferred work well with open environments before like Rockstar's RAGE engine, Cryengine 3 is as well.

This is one of the reasons PC games are cheaper to buy new than console games so you do realise that by doing this the cost of games will switch over with PC games costing around the ￡10-￡20 more than consloe games to bring them more inline with the amount of time it takes to utilise the hardware to its full potential,

also the marketplace for PC games against the Console's is a minority, games developers are in business to make money so why cut their marketplace by more than half just so they can get 2 years ahead of anything else that is released at that time, when games take anything from 2-6 years to develop anyway.

Just so you dont think this is flaming, I have 3 consoles (yes I got the Wii as well.......For the kids.......honest) and a gaming laptop., and I prefer to play Elderscroll RPG type games on the laptop.

It would be within the scope of what MGE did for Morrowind, though. MGE hijacks quite a few internal methods so that it can do stuff like water caustics, waves, and atmospheric scattering.

By simply using the DX11 API, it increases the chance for an SGE to make use of DX11 features in a similar way. If they had stuck with DX9 only, it would've required reimplementing the DX9 interfaces on top of DX11, which is a helluva lot of work, before anyone could think of injecting DX11-specific calls. That's not to say it'll be particularly easy, but it makes it easier.

I myself wrote the caustics for OBGE... It's certainly not very low-level... not as low as hacking in tessellation. Waves and atmospheric scattering are also possible in OBGE, we just haven't gotten there yet, or haven't done it.

Also, quote/unquote "supporting" DX11 and using DX11 are entirely different things. What Todd has said equates to "the game runs on DX11 hardware but uses none of the features". I'm not going to repeat myself from other threads, but Todd has even said the shader system is DX9-only... Tessellation and Compute are both shaders so those are immediately ruled out. And the new shader stages in DX10-11 are Geometry, Hull and Domain, which are basically most all of the new functionality in those DX versions. Nobody has yet said that there is a DX11 version of the game. Todd's quotes are basically a PR-friendly way of saying "this is a DX9 game"... Anyway I'm not repeating myself any further.. I've said all this in another thread.

I will have to disagree with all of you who say he means future games, because of his wording. First of all, the tone o fthe entire excerpt seems to be fairly saturated into talking about skyrim. And right after he says we arent right now, he commas to say because we want to author it so it lookds great. In reference to Skyrim. In no place whatsoever did the topic venture into talk of the series or other games, neither did it leave open endings. The talk seemed fairly concerned with Skyrim only, so i believe he means a later implementation of tesselation into Skyrim after its initial release.

Its been known for years that mods will run on consoles, but you have to work around some coding and Microsoft and Sony have been, for lack of better words, less than helpful. It is possible that if TES can change their minds the feature can be added for console players, maybe even through a DLC. For now, however, its something we'll have to wait for and hope one of them will crack, because most likely once one of them starts making money off it the other will follow shortly.

Wrong thread? This is about BGS incorporating full DX11 support into Skyrim, which isn't going to happen. Todd was clearly referring to future titles (Fallout 4 and TES VI) in regards to tessellation and DX11 shaders.

Console hardware (Xbox 360 and PS3) are way too outdated to take advantage of these features. Which is why we probably won't see a lot of AAA game developers making a legitimate jump to DX11 until consoles catch up with the next generation.

Does anyone remember one of the older generations of video cards, I think it was ATI, had driver support for tessellation for DX9 games? I remember using it in Morrowind and it was absolutely hideous and caused there to be gaps in between seems of the world. Not this is necessarily the same tech, but it just makes me think of how bad it can be to apply tech to a game that wasn't designed around it.