I watched the game paly trailor, and something looks a bit off to me.

The textures on the rocks look raher low detail, the textures on the city look rather low detail and the UVs look stretched. and the biggest thing, the dragon, it bends over to attack and the texture on its body looks awful.

Are we going to have realy realy low resolution dds textures again like we did in Oblivion. Cause that isnt good enough any more. Or was that just for the xbox 360?

In the trailor I didnt see any examples of Bump Mapping, Speculator Occlusion, or Ambient Occlusion either. So we may as well just be playing Oblivion again with a new snowy theme.

The trailer is footage of the Xbox 360 version, so we can probably assume that any low resolution textures you might have noticed are due to the limitations of the Xbox 360. We might be able to get higher quality textures on the PC version in the default game, but without actually seeing what the PC version looks like, we really can't know how much better it can look, we might as well say "The game will look good." for all it tells us.

All pics and the trailer have been from the 360. The PC version will likely (though not definitely) have higher resolution textures.


The trailer was made from a build about 11 months from release. One of the online GI articles has a video that shows killmoms working on the trailer, and that was shot sometime in December, or maybe November.

Most of Oblivion's textures are 512x512.
I hope for Skyrim,at least for the pc edition,at least for the highest settings,they will make most of them 1024x1024

I really doubt anyone can actually see AO, unless you are comparing it, but bethesda already had this factored into their textures when they make them
as for bump mapping yes you did, anything that wasn't flat had a bump map or normal map, anything that the specuality was changed will have a normal map, also with xbox260 you wont be sitting right up at the screen so the textures will look better

Is it just me or do the scenes from the dragons point of view flying over the landscape look less sharp then the scenes where the player sprinting through the forest?

yes becuase your view is blocked by clouds

One is further from the landscape than the other.

It seems like some parts of the land don't match though. When the player is running to the cliff edge you can see a bright green tree/shrub/plant behind the player when it first cuts to the scene. But when it shows the dragon flying overhead all you see is regular trees. You can't see that bright green tree/shrub/plant. Is it possible they are actually separate places because the land doesn't match in those two scenes?

Yes the Movie was shot on Xbox 360 and they have promised better textures on PC, as he said in the podcast, you sit closer to the pc screen than a TV so you would see smaller details.
As I understand Oblivion had higher resolution textures on PC than console to.
However remember that was a high end PC game then released, setting system demand to high would reduce sale.
Fallout 3 and New Vegas is far closer to Skyrim than Oblivion,

Just went back and watched it and you are right. I noticed it too?

a few games have made their low res textures look very high via overlays (halo,cod,crysis etc) that dont take up much room- this would be very good for skyrim

What is overlays?

its like a texture over a texture. similar to a decal

It means the texture is not uber high res but rather has another level of detail added over the texture to add more details and look like there's more material effects on the module. It's a layered effect in other words.

Smart, with the decal system in Skyrim I thought they could use it on walls and similar, but my thought was mostly to add details and defects to walls and similar to make a segmented wall look more different.

Essentially this. When you have two textures tiling at irregular intervals, one on top of the other, it makes it seem like a single higher resolution texture. Because they don't tile together, it makes it more difficult to actually see where the base texture repeats, thus creating the illusion.

Weird isn't it. Anyone else go back and notice this?

Here's an idea what the full resolution PC textures are going to look like:
http://i.imgur.com/nW4ci.jpg

Todd Howard has mentioned in his podcast that the PC version will have higher res textures....so if you want more image quality, PC is the obvious choice.

You know what, I'm a bit fed up of threads like this. I have a fairly high end PC, and I couldn't give a flying you-know-what about the bloody textures or polygon count or UV mapping or dynamic shadows or whatever it is you're on about. I don't even know the right terminology for most of it, and I doubt I would notice it in game unless it were pointed out to me. I want interesting quests (loads of them!) based around a good plot, nice weapons with some unique handplaced items, a good spell and combat system, interesting foes and believable NPCs, an open world that I can explore at will, and as far as I'm concerned it can all be the same graphics quality as Morrowind, which btw I still happily play now, and don't feel 'let down' because it's not got all those things that apparently games need these days.

If Bethesda had said "we're going to release a new game using the same engine and graphics as Morrowind but based in a different province with a new story" I would still be soiling myself with excitement waiting to get my hands on a copy of the game.

That's what I'm most looking forward to. It's all I want. All I need.

Then I hope you have spent tons of extra money on making your PC (or PC choice) so high-end for other reasons than gaming. Otherwise (having in mind that you could have bought a much cheaper PC and run Skyrim or any other game on mid-low settings) that'd be pretty "you-know-what"....

I agree, looks horrible some places. Others are fine, but I don't want the same low res textures as in Oblivion and Fallout. Consoles or not. Other games do it just fine, even though they're open ended. Assassins Creed as a good example. Texture size in those games are just fine. The fact that the game (Skyrim) is huge isn't really an excuse. They should use load balancers and proper distant lod models anyway and make sure occlusion culling is enabled and properly optimized.

Battlefield 3 has awesome textures! :whistling:
http://i.imgur.com/S1fr9.jpg