Now that TES5 has been announced, and it has also been confirmed that a new graphics engine will be used I thought it might be fun to speculate on the technical specifications of the engine. It has already been confirmed that Bethesda won't be using iD tech5. Since these are predictions, I've noted down the probably or belief I have in each one from 0% to 100%. Based on the limited information that has been released by Bethesda about their new tech, and educated guesses about level of optimization that can be achieved, what do you guys think?

General engine capabilities
[70%] I suspect that there will be approximately twice the number of polygons on screen at any time (compared to FO3).
[70%] I think there will be dynamic shadows outdoors
[80%] The game will feature screen space ambient occlusion (or some AO variation)
[50%] I think that the texture resolution will be the same as Fallout 3

Outdoor graphics
[70%] Water will feature better texturing, refraction and Fresnel effects.
[50%] 3D water surface
[85%] I think trees will have static foliage (as opposed to the Speedtree floating foliage)
[65%] Dynamic skybox (clouds changing shape as well as moving across the sky)

City graphics
[70%] I think that cities will increase in size, to 2 or 3 times as large per loading area as Oblivion cities.
[80%] Cities will be more populous (up to twice as many NPCs on screen at any time)
[70%] There will still be a loading screen when entering houses

Animation: will likely be the biggest change from Fallout 3.
[90%] Entirely new animation system, at least comparable to recent games like MW2.
[40%] Dynamic animation interaction (like in GTA4/RDR and AC2/3)
[10%] Dynamic facial animation (detailed facial animation that reacts to in-game player action) a la L.A. Noir

Did you do some kind of actual statistical anolysis, or are you just blowing numbers out your [censored]?

No statistical anolysis, just making (educated?) guesses based on what has been mentioned in interviews, tech in other games, and knowing what the main limitations of previous Bethesda games were.

For example, it has been mentioned that Bethesda acquired a motion capture studio some years ago, which combined with the fact that animation was a major weak point in their previous games leads me to believe strongly that they will have a new animation tech that is at least comparable to games like COD.

Then I would recommend ranking it with words rather than numbers. i.e. from high to low likelihood, and make it clear it's an opinion. When you assign percentages it leads people to believe that you have actually done some kind of anolysis (i.e. gathered data for how engines are upgraded over time and such), whereas words make it clear it's estimations.

Just a bit of advice.

I think those numbers seem quite realistic and insightful. I mean as ballpark numbers, like they're obviously meant as.

Some things i wonder:

1. Apparently there's plenty of snow, so will footsteps be visible for a time, depending on how windy it is and whether it's snowing?
2. Will snow make nights brighter like in real life? Here in Finland in late autumn we tend to anticipate the first snow because it makes it seem a lot brighter outside.

I wonder if they've come up with a way to handle NPCs moving through doors, other than just the fade in/out of Oblivion.

That's a very interesting question. I suspect that they will handle this in the same way as Oblivion, because I'm guessing that some of the underlying technology is going to be the same, and that it would be quite difficult to implement.

1. That would definitely be possible to implement - I would guess that this is the sort of feature that would not make it into the final game due to development time restrictions. Maybe this could be added as a mod?
2. I would hazard a guess that the snow would not contribute to lighting, since I think this would be incredibly difficult to implement / be computationally demanding. I might be wrong though - does anyone know of any lighting solutions used by games that could produce this sort of effect?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLZU-JC6Hqc, possibly.

I'm hoping to see some motion-capture animations. They've always got those small details that can make all the difference.

Nice!

I think this is very likely to happen.

Projections like these are just wildly conjectural and carry no weight unless there is a reliable source (or, simply, only what Beth or an official interview with a current Beth employee has claimed).

Estimation is one thing, but this is incredibly precise for a game with almost no technical information, eleven months from release and with not even an in-game screenshot to go by.

Didn't they say that it would look like your playing on a new console.

This, and at least some sort of dynamic animations system (it doesn't need to be Euphoria, just something that can blend the mo-capped animations into ragdolls smoothly). Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

Please.

EDIT:
They did, but that's just PR-speak. Vague statements like that don't carry much real meaning. Besides, consoles have reached a point where that actually happens so often that I hardly know what it means anymore.

Yes they did. Good thing is: I believe them...

The whole idea is to have some fun making educated guesses about the graphics technology that will be used for TES:V. When screenshots start being released, we then get to see how good the predictions were.

I'm using the percentages to illustrate the strength of my belief. This is the complete opposite of being precise - it is an acknowledgement of the lack of precision.

I think the new engine will do the same stuff as Oblivions did.
Open world.
Newest version Speedtree.
Terrain generation that doesn't need artist placing every rock and shrub by hand.
Better particle system that doesn't cause huge FPS drop.
Better handling of LOD models and terrain.
The engine knows what is visible and what is not (if you are staring at a big rock so that it covers the whole screen, there's no need to draw the town behind it).
Radiant AI 2.0
TESCS
World detail consists of building block meshes.


It's hard to say really, because I haven't worked with the engine, thus I don't know its limits. If bethesda decided to make new engine it most certainly means that they have ran into the limits of what the engine can do without rebuilding the whole thing. Self-made engine pretty much means you can build it to do what you want it to do.

http://www.speedtree.com/
The newest Speed tree hand-modeling looks epic! a lot more variation done easily!




TES4 CS did have that option region generator*

Yeah, I agree with all of those. I think it's almost certain all will be included in the new game.

I hope it's more like a 90% chance. Fallout 3 isn't a bad looking game, but Skyrim has the potential to be really, REALLY beautiful...just like Oblivion was when it was first released.

I don't expect a game to look like Crysis, but I really hope textures have improved this time around!

That's incredible. I hope this is used in Skyrim.

Oblivion had this and it was hands down the biggest problem with the core game. the less a human touch factors into the world building, the more boring the world will be.

I'm 100% the texture size will be at least equal to FO3's textures. I think that there is a chance that the textures will be larger, but I'm not sure how well the consoles would be able to handle this. My general impression has been that FO3 texture resolution is about on par with other AAA console titles. Is this a fair assessment? (I think there is a higher chance of larger textures on the PC, because the hardware is less of a restriction.)

I believe ZeniMax bought a license for NaturalMotion's Euphoria middleware a couple of years back. It creates animations on-the-fly so characters deal with situations realistically. It's used by Rockstar in GTA and that Redemption thing.
I can't see them not incorporating it in their engine. Of course, you never know.

There were also some people suggesting they'd use Umbra Software's Occlusion Booster, which basically calculates what objects are in line of sight and generates only those, instead of loading content per cell. Apparently Gstaff picked it up and brought it to the attention of Todd.
There's even less of a guarantee they incorporated this in their new engine, but it's a possibility. Let's hope they either bought a license or came up with something comparable themselves.