that wasnt an exaggeration. that was a flat out lie in my view. one of the things modders noticed in oblivion was that some of the meshes had way more polygons than they needed to represent the same shape. lots of mods and tools came out that optimized meshes. the end result was negligible for mid and high end computers and minimal for low end computers. as phitt pointed out there are millions of polygons in any given scene and having a suit divided up into one less segment isnt going to save you anything. if they had just come out and said that they were doing it so that they could make different varieties of the same armor i would have been fine with that myself. im willing to give up one armor slot for a variety of different steel and leather armors so that not everyone looks the same. i just dont like [censored] being shoved at me.

even if this were true that would mean that the xbox is so pathetic and decrepit at this point that it needs every single extra polygon it can get to render a scene........if that was the case then PC should have been the lead platform from the get go.

Those are some pretty serious claims.
Please be prepared to eat your words, or, alternatively, we should all get ready to downgrade Bethesda's word to meaningless status.

Let the Epic Technical Conundrum begin!

you really don't know what Pyff does do you.

Worse dressed...?

In every TES game i've played, i've mixed and matched armour with clothing because it makes my character look so much better than if they wore a full set. SO much better. I don't see Skyrim being much different, even if they do put a little more effort into armour this time. I mean, I'd hate to wear what the generic Dovahkiin wears, and i'd hate to wear what the Orc in the Orc screenshot wears...

There is no reason to merge other than they can finish the game faster to make more $$$$ quicker.

You mean the Pendragwn Youth Film Festival?

Okay...everyone has their own opinions. But Bethesda stated that one reason that they merged it is so they could be more creative in the armor design or something like that.

Caves, in general, don't move much. NPC's, on the other hand, do. What the OP didn't mention was the part about animations, which is actually where the performance gain comes in. Two pieces of armor means two meshes that have to be deformed. One piece, one mesh. It's a valid issue, especially if you want to have lots of NPC's on the screen. Given enough NPC's, the savings of combining the armor really adds up.

I don't like it either, but there is a performance advantage to making the armor one piece - especially on resource limited platforms.

As for cooler armors, it's more like cooler armors with less effort, since they won't have to do as much testing and adjusting for clipping. I haven't yet seen an armor, though, that couldn't have been done as two pieces or more.

Actualy its very likely an effect of HOW the render engine renders npcs vs critters and plants and rocks.

Very likely npcs even simple ones take up alot of space because of HOW they are rendered and how many systems control that rendering.. as in the animation middleware and all..

So you can cram 500 trees on screen no problem but 20 drunks is a problem.

Thing is combining the bits of that npc render means less things being carefully controlled.

So...more armor variants...yea...

The illusion of more armor variants.

Yes, I do realize that, and I did say that it was an extremely simplified example. Do keep in mind however, that the cave itself and any other objects such as containers, switches, clutter, etc. are likely to be far less detailed in comparison to character models and major items (weapon/armor) models. Also keep in mind that not all of a model is going to be rendered either because it is out of view of the current scene (frustum culling/clipping), not facing the camera (backface culling), or simply not visible because while it is in the camera's field of view it is obscured (providing they've actually implemented occlusion culling). Actually, the background architecture and associated textures are going to be the one thing that remains in memory throughout the entire time that you are present in a particular location. NPCs, their items, and other stuff are what is going to be jumping in and out of memory. As such, its more going to be we have video memory - X available for the dynamic items in a scene, where X is the amount of memory required for the level geometry and associated textures (a constant in any particular area). Depending on how they've done the foliage, they may be able to get away with fewer models for plants and especially trees with some clever vector manipulations at the level of the vertex shader. Likewise rocks and other similar items are easily changed at the vertex shader level by manipulating the vertices (scaling, transforms, etc.) rather than have completely separate models for every variation.

There is a performance increase due to fewer render calls and data passing. How much performance is gained is unknown, though apparently combined with the easier art direction allows for enough of a gain to justify it. I'm guessing it probably more to do with art direction and clipping issues, though I honestly can't say for certain without actually looking at the engine itself. Personally I'd rather they were separate, and we got separate pauldrons back to boot. Unfortunately that isn't happening, and I'm trying to explain the possible technical reasons behind this for those that don't understand why merged greaves and cuirass don't equal the same performance of separate greaves and separate cuirass, even though it is roughly the same overall amount of information. I'd love for Bethesda to release a detailed technical explanation of why the merge was made and just how much performance was gained by it. Unfortunately that isn't going to happen, as the guys who know the technical stuff are likely far too busy at this point to give a detailed explanations, instead giving simpler and more easily conveyed messages to other employees to give to us.

My thanks to whatever kindly passing moderator fixed the title.

Also, good point regarding animations Morovir, one I had neglected to consider.

There's no point in arguing with Phitt because he knows everything there is to know about programming and exactly how the Creation Engine and it's new renderer works. :rolleyes:

Ahh ok gotcha, the illusion, hmm well then... :goodjob:

Too...many....words! Cannot compute! Self-detonation activated.

Actually, he was correct in his criticism, since in my effort to simplify the explanation of the rendering process I did indeed omit some important information.

Armors are made up of many different pieces (and I'm not just talking about boots/gloves/helmet). Just look at the 'bare chest' armor on one of the screenshots. It has to be made of at least two different pieces (armor part/skin part). Now look at all the so called armor variations with different pauldrons etc. All those little things are very likely independent pieces. If you still have no 1st person whole body rendering in Skyrim (and looking at the trailer it likely will be that way) then the armor even has to be made of several different pieces anyway. Whether an NPC is made of 20 pieces or 21 pieces doesn't matter. Especially when a huge amount of other things (whether they're rigged/animated or not) is stressing the CPU/GPU. And certainly claiming that they can 'put more people on screen' due to that change is a ridiculous exaggeration.



One object like a simple rock may be less detailed, but the total amount of triangles rendered per frame or larger objects like houses are not. Actually an armor mesh will be tiny compared to the total amount and equal to a house for example.

No idea about backface culling, but that doesn't make a difference for the amount of objects. Occlusion culling they had in FO3, but only for interiors.

Rocks and the like have been separate models in Oblivion, FO3 and I'd be very surprised if they were not in Skyrim. And there are tons of different objects in a single scene where your vertex manipulation method wouldn't work anyway even if they used it.

To me it's as obvious as something can be that merging a single object in the whole scene (even if there are 20 NPCs on screen and thus 20 merged objects) is not going to improve performance noticeably. You also have to keep in mind all the other things that matter when they say 'we can put more people on screen'. More AI (!), more animations, more dialogue/sounds etc.

The only way to prove this 100% is to get the game, split the greaves from the cuirass and look at the difference. Just like some people wouldn't believe that my car doesn't drive faster when I remove the cigarette lighter from it until they actually drive with my car with the cigarette lighter removed. :shrug:



There is no point arguing with a really devoted fan because he will believe what Bethesda tells him no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. It's funny, because you don't need to know much about rendering engines to understand that this is nonsense. You just need to look at the bare numbers. Unless the Creation Engine has a special problem with meshes called 'greaves' this is pretty obvious. But in that case renaming them would probably be the easier solution.

The merged armor doesn't really bother me I'm used to fallouts whole body suits but it was nice to get a breakdown of how the change improves performance.

This statement claims two things: 1. BGS wasn't going to be able finish game in time for 11.11.11, w/o merging cuirass and greaves. 2. Merging cuirass and greaves=profit.

Care to elaborate? Care to substantiate these claims?

You also seem to think that BGS is lying.

Got any proof? By proof, I mean solid evidence that substantiates your claim, not more trolling/butthurt whining.

It's not about me believing everything I'm told. It's about respect and giving them the benefit of the doubt. Besides your basing your assumptions on what you know about the previous Nif format but it's entirely possible the new morphing capabilities will take a heavy toll on rendering. We just don't know.


Precisely, thank you. At least your not ALL doom and gloom. I'll be more than happy to point my finger at Beth and say "boo ha" along side of you if it turns out your assumptions are correct. Honestly though, Beth knows damn well we will find out once the game is released and that is why I find it hard to believe they would make a statement that can so easily be proven wrong.

If the Creation Engine gets noticeable performance increases from merging a two pieces of armor together the only conclusion that could lead any sane person to is that the new engine must have terrible optimization or be extremely poorly designed. Which sounds much less likely to me than the possibility that Bethesda is telling us fibs.

Stopped reading after the op started patronisingly explaining the difference between RAM/ROM.
Anyway, the only way I can see the merge affecting performance is because it reduces the number of items in each cell slightly. It doesn't lower the poly count in anyway, so I don't see that it will really make much of a difference.

Why should we trust a Lead Artist's (remember, it was Matt Carofano who answered this question, not a programmer) opinion about what the engine limitations and capabilities are? I worked with artists in the past and most of them are terrible at the technical side of things.