Well thanks everyone, pretty much answered my questions. From my point of view it would seem what they have hardly constitutes a new engine, considering the changes between oblivion and skyrim so far appear to be less significant then the changes between morrowind and oblivion, two games that supposedly used the "same" engine.

As has already been pointed out this obviously is probably good news for basic modding since it probably means not much will change. But it also probably means any "big" dreams that weren't possible or were very difficult in oblivion will still be impossible in Skyrim, such as larger maps, seamless worlds etc. If I am going to be totally honest I am not a fan of the engine, there is much better tech out there, but if Beth wants to take the path valve did with source and polish a gleaming turd because its what they know its up to them I suppose

Apparently you didn't see my post.


http://twitter.com/n...015054991069184

http://forums.bethso...st__p__16786625

FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!

Has nobody payed any attention to my posts or the person above me? There is NO EVIDENCE that it is the same engine. All evidence points to the contrary besides one article that could very well be totally wrong as they got there source second hand and the original source did not report it that way!

Really? Which tech would you claim is better than the BGS engine for RPGs?

This view is full of conjecture and assumption without much substance - I have never seen a better engine for open world RPGs, so I would love to hear which are better and have had more success.

None of those things are "Gamebryo things", though, but rather stuff that Bethesda added into it.

Gamebryo is just a renderer, nothing more.

When and where exactly do you miss the "ALL" in the "It's all new" sentence?

This thread is pointless: It's all new. It has been confirmed by the devs themselves. The Wouldyoukindly guys have screwed it up in a way it'd make spanish gaming magazines writers look intelligent in comparison. Period.

Frankly the evidence in the tidbits we know do not point to it being "all new" lending credibility to the statement it's a reworked (maybe heavily) gamebryo engine. There is even a quote about popping issues still being a problem. My bet is on it being mostly the same and IF they have rewrote it I am guessing they pretty much just replaced the parts that weren't their own, with something very similar. Their version of Gamebryo was no doubt already extensively tailored by them for oblivion (renderer was probably all thats left?) However that might also mean a welcome performance increase and the possibility of better lighting (yay?)



I concede that there is no direct tech that compares for use in an open world RPG, but it's blatantly obvious that the engine is simply not even in the same league as Cryengine or IDtech5, even the Witcher looked much nicer. With tech like all the realtime polygon culling Cryengine does and its voxel terrain, or the megatextures used by Rage I am sure the rather basic stretchy heightmap square cells with thousands of prop models slapped over the top of it looks a little dated. I personally feel it's getting a bit like the Source engine, except without the source engine's upside which lies in its performance. Basically I am confident with the sort of money gamesas must have they could come up something better. At the moment it looks like a slightly modified oblivion with MUCH MUCH better art.

Does it look good?


If yes, I don't care if it's an updated engine from a SNES game. The result is all that matters.

I would expect some similarities for Creation and Gamebryo. I mean if you have a team that's use to working with one tool for so many years wouldn't you want some things to be similar? I assume it's a brand new engine created from scratch that may behave in similar ways due to:

1. Familiarity with the tools.
2. They know what works on a technical level.

But that's just my guess. All we have to go on is the fact they have told us it's a new engine.

Ok, let me add some clarity here. Bethesda started MW using a proprietary engine constructed from various middle ware all found in the Gamebryo kit. The Gamebryo middle ware kit has a renderer and game file formats(those belong to Gamebryo) and a host of 3rd party middle ware such as Havok and Speedtree.

How Bethesda puts those components together is solely their creation(as is the CK) and the only thing that makes it a "Gamebryo" engine is the presence of the Gamebryo renderer. All the other middle ware can be licensed directly from their creators.

Over the years Bethesda has built their own versions of most of the middle ware they had previously licensed. Once they built their own renderer they can then call the engine their own at last regardless of still licensing some middle ware such as Havok Behavior and continuing to put the components together the same way as before.

Used for linear, faux-open world games that don’t have nearly as much enemy AI or equipment (anyone can wear anything, it can be looted/changed/what-have-you on the fly).

Which benefits from mega-textures but is also not fully open-world and has to trade off lighting—all lighting in RAGE is pre-baked on a compute farm for hours, which means no dynamic day/night cycles, pretty important for an open-world game.

Again, you can have anything, but you can’t have everything.

It was comfirmed by one of the developers that it is indeed a BRAND NEW engine not related to Gamebryo.

I remember reading way back that it was just a heavily modified gamebyro engine. Then they all of a sudden release saying its an all new engine which I think is false. If it does exactly what previous engine did but just did it better with nothing really new then to me it is just an updated engine.

^^ What "new" do you want the engine to do?

Hi there, I'm a game developer myself ( http://hardcodex.com/ ), so I hope it lends some weight to my words.

First of all, if we're talking about a company that's doing a series of games, there's no such thing as a "brand new" engine, in the sense that no one would be stupid enough to throw a massive amount of man hours into the trash bin just to get a "fresh start". If you look at the id Tech engine progression (Quake - Quake 2 - Quake 3 - Doom 3), each step represents a modification of the previous one (it's pretty safe to make such conclusions since the full source code for Quakes and roughly half of the source code for Doom 3 is publicly available). In some cases, when modifications had been significant (e.g., Quake 2 vs. Quake 3), the next engine was labeled as a "new" one; in the case of Quake vs. Quake 2 transition, they both represent the same "id Tech 2" generation, because Q2 was basically Q1 retrofitted with colored lightmaps. Still, even we take a look at Q2 vs. Q3, the next engine was obviously based on the previous one.

Consider this as well: if you're developing an engine completely from scratch, your level design team will be sitting idle for most of the first phase of development.

So, to reiterate that: any engine Bethesda is working on is most likely a modification of Gamebryo as it was seen in Fallout 3; however, since they're giving it a new name, updates to it must be significant/are seen as such by Bethesda (I hope you can catch the slight difference here).

However, these updates will mostly touch the overall world structure, AI and general NPC behavior etc. In terms of graphics, don't expect Skyrim to be revolutionary, simply because no revolutionary effects/techniques have been developed in the meantime. CG is very much like contemporary science in this respect: once someone develops something new, they try to get out a paper as soon as they can to "stake their claim". Once Carmack developed Megatexture tech, the news was out, even before any games using it were released; immediately after developing & testing their SSAO method, Crytek issued a paper on the subject.

However, there are some visual features you can expect from Skyrim:

- most likely, they will update to the current version of SpeedTree ( http://www.speedtree.com ) which they've been using for rendering trees & vegetation, so you can expect more realistic & detailed things in this department;
- overall, the level of detail will definitely increase;
- from what I can gather from the screenshots, they'll use dynamic shadows for omnidirectional light sources (lamps, candelabra etc.) and hopefully for directional sources as well (sun, moons); however, the latter needs to be verified;
- most likely, they'll get you ambient shadows as well, using the aforementioned Crytek's SSAO tech ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Space_Ambient_Occlusion );
- a pure speculation here, but I really hope they'll develop a more diverse landscape model, as opposed to Oblivion's rather "flat" one.

Also, you can expect Skyrim to have a different "look and feel" (a more bleak one for sure), meaning they'll tweak the HDR parameters, possibly reduce specular effect to make it less "shiny" etc.

I know [censored]e about engines but maybe not load everytime you enter a house or a region of the map perhaps or even load when entering a city.

Please don't spread misinformation. Megatexture is a technology that allows storing enormous texture information on disk and loading small chunks of it (that correspond to the landscape in the current vicinity of the camera) in real-time using streaming; it doesn't pose any limitations on lighting solution or its dynamicity.

@vintager
I thought they said they wouldnt use speedtree this time.

I didn’t say that mega-textures precluded dynamic lighting, just that lighting in idTech 5 is NOT dynamic, making it ill-suited for Bethesda’s games.

I guess I've misunderstood you then, sorry.


Unless you have access to some information that I'm not aware of, I really do not think id Tech 5 has any pre-baked components, lightmaps included. In fact, Carmack eliminated any "pre-bakery" as early as in Doom 3, which had a completely dynamic lighting solution. It's very impractical to store lighting information on disk nowadays, because it can be calculated on the GPU at a relatively low cost.

I think what you mean is they don't have a day/night cycle, in the sense that the sun just sits in one place.


Good to know! Well, you can still expect more realistic trees & vegetation

I have no doubt they'll be reusing some code from their previous engine, but the whole thing desperately needs an overhaul and I believe BGS recognizes that. Most likely they went through it line by line, tossed out and rewrote huge chunks of code and added more optimizations. Recall that they had to toss out real time shadows for Oblivion due to performance issues. Just think about that for a moment. Skyrim is being developed for the exact same platforms that Oblivion was. At the very least the lighting would had to have been completely redone from scratch.

I estimate we'll see at least a similar difference in the engine as between Morrowind and Oblivion. Many of the elements in the construction set will be familiar but hopefully more streamlined. It would have to be if they're developing the entire landscape by hand.

id Tech 5 goes back to utilizing precomputed lighting, although I'm sure they use a combination of that and dynamic lighting. And if lightmaps were impractical HDD space-wise, then why would Unreal Engine 3, Source, etc. be using them?

Good points all around we should listen to this guy. :thumbsup:

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx states that they've dropped SpeedTree and made their own vegetation system.

Unless the devs are lying, I still stick to the "It's all new" phrase.