"robes and clothes and hair look terrible"

I can't wait for this topic to die - I seriously cannot understand the levels of negativity some of you guys will stoop to...

Thanks for the thread Buzz Killington :celebrate:



That image has been cut and zoomed in from the scene in the trailer.

How is the poll biased? there is a "no way" option if I am not mistaken.

Not exactly no- sorry. But I remember he said it was something they wanted to try, and he did mention the word "physics" as something the team wanted to imrpove

/shrug I can't understand at times why folks feel such a need to dig their heels in the sand and defend something that it obviously not up to the standards they are setting with the rest of the game.

Case in point: http://au.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/elderscrollsvskyrim/images/0/2/?full_size=1

You can literally see the blocky square edges of the texture not to mention just how flat and "cardboardy" it looks. Hair in video games stopped looking like that in the late 90's. Why anyone would even want to defend that is beyond me. The rest of the image looks absolutely brilliant, but the hair is just bad. As I said at the beginning, I have a pretty good feeling it is just placeholder hair, that doesn't change the fact people want to defend it so badly. :facepalm:

This forum in particular has so many folks that just want to argue for the sake of arguing that it makes feedback nearly impossible. Or maybe its just the weird priorities this particular fanbase has. We have to have a dozen different modes of traveling. We have to have walking/running/sprinting, swimming for lakes and rivers obviously, then since we have mountains we have to have climbing skills, then we have to have horse mounts, then carriages in real time, then carriages that teleport you instantly if you don't want to wait, then magic map fast traveling, then recall scrolls, then recall spells, then mage guild teleports, of course levitation, then flying on dragons, and unicorns, and all the other ridiculous things folks want. I mean seriously! Just how many different variations of the exact same game mechanic do you really need?

But bring up hair, one of the most prominent features of every single one of the hundreds of npcs you will interact with in the game and folks are fine with just throwing a mop on their head that looks like it came out of Street Fighter II. /sigh I should just quit visiting this forum.

Skyrim will be a great game regardless, true. That doesn't mean it should have bad hair. :tongue:

No it didn't.

Thank you for providing a timely and very illustrative example of the other points I made in that post.

@ Obstructionist,

I think it's interesting that you seem to relate requested gameplay features (however absurd they may seem) to a more casual form of fan, when imo graphics are far less important than the gameplay.

Sorry i'm on my phone and had to be quick. I've seen worse hair way after the late 90's, so I wanted to point that out.

Casual or not has nothing to do with it, and I've said repeatedly that gameplay is always of utmost importance. That doesn't make graphic quality irrelevant.

I've noticed threads like this one always go poorly with people scrambling to defend Bethesda/trolling to get a reaction from the OP. If it was posted with the title "Poll: would you like to see Hair and Cloth physics in this iteration of the TES?" then things would be different. Those sorts of polls are far more successful, as I believe they give people the chance to talk about how they hope things will be, while the other may be perceived as nitpicking/criticism.

Biased Thread Title = robes and clothes and hair look terrible

Unbiased Thread Title = What do you think about the look of the robes, clothes, and hair?

Biased Poll:

cloth physics

• bethesda should realy, realy try with this,
  
• it would be good, but i wouldent mind if Bethesda didn't try,
  
• no way

Unbiased Poll:

What do you think of Skyrim's cloth and hair physics, based on the sceenshots?

• Bethesda has done a really good job, and I'm satisfied.
  
• It's not great, but it's good enough for me
  
• I hope Bethesda fixes this. These screenshots look terrible
  
• I'm not going to buy this game if it looks like this
  
• Other

I'm pretty certain the picture the OP used the guy is wearing a hood just from the look of it. first time I saw the picture I didn't think much of it but the environment looks amazing the arrow quiver isn't hovering a few inches off his back looks way improved over Oblivion.

The scale of the game doesn't have anything at all to do. You don't animate the hair of some guy two klicks away, behind several building and a mountain range, in the direction the player (or camera) isn't even looking at. You animate what's directly on screen, makes a visual difference, and you have the time for (meaning that the simulation quality gets adaptively worse the more stuff is happening right in your face).

And even if the PS3 or XBox 360 version of Bethesda's engine can't handle cloth physics, doesn't mean the PC version of the engine shouldn't be able to do it.

I've mentioned it on a few occasions, but I've recently become aware of a simple fact. Any sort of critical discussion of graphics is not socially permissible on this forum. So what you want about gameplay, but when it comes to graphics, if you're not full of praise, you a whining crybaby and a terrible person.

Cloth physics would be a nice touch, but I think it's better for the devs to spend time in other areas. If anything, the only real issue I have with that screen-cap is the low-resolution. Perhaps the devs should spend their extra time improving textures before adding physics.

That is not true. Graphics just are not discussed rationally. There are stereotypes that computers are way more powerful than consoles and it's the consoles that are holding back the graphics of computers which is recited over and over again and turns ad hominem in nature. The problem with this is what is holding back computer graphics is computer software.
If you don't believe me here is a tech article discussing it. http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1
If you swear by using computers check out the second page of the article and see if that doesn't change your mind about what kind of playing experience you can have with a console.

That's right. The only rational people are those who either think graphics don't matter or think the graphics are awesome.

In a big battle with a lot of folks on both sides with cloth physics in the midst of the battle, I'm pretty sure it would. I mean it crashes when you exit a game too sometimes..

It's hair and it's a bug with the hair rigging, it's no problem having long hair without cloth physic, loads of games have it, you could have it in Oblivion if you put the hair in the hood slot, it work pretty simple the lower part of the hair is parented to the chest, the medium part to the neck and the top to the head, if you turn your head, it don't affect the bottom hair part much and the neck part is stretched and bent. In the picture it look like the bend zones are wrong or they used a very simple mesh for the hair, if done well the only issue is clipping then wearing bulky armor.

This might be solved by cloth physic but main benefit on hair is that the hair behaves more natural and flow backwards then running.
However main benefit of cloth physic is capes, robes and skirts, you will not use it on shirts or pants as the benefit is to small.

You ask for too much, Mr. Jack.

Would be nice and all but would probably push the game a full year or more back from its current state. So I can deal with it as is.

What are you basing that on?

The problem with that article is that its basis - the words spoken by that guy from AMD - aren't actually true and were taken heavily out of context, something which he himself put right. There is certainly a performance hit from the abstraction layer, but that's inherent.

The thing is, there is nothing technical holding back PC graphics. If there were, there'd be something bottlenecking, and there isn't - even on the most graphically demanding games, even mid-high end games have room to spare. If we were bottlenecking either in hardware or software, they wouldn't have any spare power. They do. Technologies like Eyefinity or 3D support have had to be made up simply to justify the existence of higher end cards. There is nothing inside the machine holding it back, it's simply not being used.

While the lovely John Carmack puts the performance gain from writing without abstraction layers, "directly on the metal", so to speak, at about 2x, even conservative estimates put modern hardware at 15 or 20x faster than console hardware. As it has always been, the constant platform of a console is far more efficient, but the moving platform of a PC overtakes it quickly through sheer overwhelming brute force. The idea that PC games don't look 10x better is also somewhat flawed - running at 2.5x the resolution, at twice the framerate, is already running the game much, much better than a console - even if the game looks the same. However, most games, console settings come in at about medium/low to medium. 10x better isn't really that outrageous - and the highest end cards have significant spare power running things even harder than that.

Graphics are discussion quite rationally, whether you agree with it or not. Even on console, there are better looking open world games. Contrary to popular opinion, the amount of NPCs that aren't actually loaded, or the map that's waiting to be streamed from the disc, have very little bearing on texture quality, or animation quality, or shader quality. The GPU doesn't care how much stuff is there for it to do later, and it doesn't care about AI, or streaming the local environment, or whether your cities are open.

The hair does look pretty bad :/

Just sayin' >.>