Just wondering, from what I am reading, and what I am seeing, the "Creation Engine" for all intents appears to be a moderately modified Gamebryo engine. Has it actually be confirmed that this is a a brand new engine? I have had experience working with Unreal, Source, Cryengine and NWN, and I can honestly say that the statements about the map being divided into cells just like oblivion, having almost the same map size and cell size as oblivion, the overall appearance and details like houses still being in seperate cells to me all points to it being pretty much the same engine. For those who have experienced working with other engines you might agree these details do seem to point to it being the same engine...

The reason I am curious is I intend to mod and details like these are useful, and I also am curious from a technical standpoint since I felt Gamebryo was rather garbage.

What do you think is the difference between a "new" engine, as opposed to an "updated" one.

In non-circular terms please.

There must be some inspiration, after all they worked quite a while with Gamebryo. But they probably got to know better what they don't like about Gamebryo and kept that in mind when they made the new engine. Is there any other game of this scope with no loading cells? I mean a game of this size and with this number of objects that you can interract with.

It's not a new engine, it's a heavily updated and modified version of the Gamebryo engine.

And that's a good thing. A very good thing.

If they had decided to create a completely new engine it would end up not feeling like The Elder Scrolls at all and modders would have to re-learn how to mod all over again from scratch instead of having thousands of hours of experience with the basic idea of how the engine works at it's core and how to mod with it.

"New" engines end up svcking 99% of the time. I'm very happy this is just a heavily updated version of the Gamebryo engine with all of it's strengths and none of it's weaknesses.

DX11 support

Yeah if they don't have Directx 11 support on the PC I'm going to be pretty damn annoyed at them.

Stop living in the past, Todd Howard! Yes we realize you are in love with a 5 year old console that's outdated as all oblivion and that's O.K but please don't drag PC gamers down to console levels!

Well, that's a pretty odd way of distinguishing between a "new" and an updated "updated" engine - and not one with which the OPer might agree.

But, whatever. If that's the distinction you want to go with, then it's not a new engine.

How do you know that it won't support DX11?

EDIT: and in any event it seems that Gamebryo supports DX11 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo )

Source?

Its not gamebryo at all they already said that. Its something they made themselves.

http://www.wouldyoukindly.com/bethesda-details-tesv-skyrims-new-creation-engine-and-its-awesome-power/

And to the person who said "Its not gamebryo at all they already said that. Its something they made themselves." you are wrong.. see below



http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx <--- Very good read.

Thanks

Updating an engine that heavily will create a new engine. But it could also be a new engine who has some properties from the old one. Almost the same thing thou.

Sounds more like a modded engine than a new one

Its semantics really. Some say it's so updated that it's "new" and some say its just a heavily updated/modified Gamebryo engine.

Where did "wouldyoukindly.com" get that info? It surely wasn't in quotes.

These have nothing to do with Gamebryo as far as I'm aware. There's nothing in Gamebryo that forces all games to be "cell-based", exterior-interior separated, open world RPGs. These features all seem like design decisions made by Bethesda for most of their modern games and lie separate from Gamebryo, which for all we know just managed to get the rest of the engine onto a screen. A lot of their code in Oblivion does have "NI" (NetImmerse, pre-Gamebryo) in the class names, though, so it does appear that either their code was originally based off code from when they relied more heavily on Gamebryo itself, but had since modified it, or a lot of it was straight from Gamebryo, who still used the "NetImmerse" title in their class names. Either way they seem to have still had some pretty old code, given that calling class names "NetImmerse" dates it all the way back to Morrowind.

Ways to detect if the new engine was stripped entirely of Gamebryo may be difficult. They're likely comfortable with their workflows from Fallout 3 and Oblivion. They may keep the NIF format, similar INI options, they may have kept the class names of all the functions similar but stripped out most of the old code and put in their own.

In any case, what Gamebryo did for Oblivion/Fallout was probably not very important for modding or modders. The creation kits were all Bethesda's own doing, even the ESM/ESP/BSA formats may have been theirs from when they first did Morrowind, I don't know. But I would say "probably". ESM/ESP = Elder Scrolls Master/Plugin ... BSA = Bethesda Studios Archive ... But that's just a guess on my part. Gamebryo mostly had to do with portraying everything on screen, and not much else. The scripting, AI, whatever else was all Bethesda's doing. I'm not sure why you thought Gamebryo was "rather garbage" but people say this a lot. I would agree that Gamebryo was certainly limiting... It certainly didn't seem to allow for very good animation, the lighting system was crap, etc. But I think a lot of people thought Gamebryo was inherently glitchy, or messed up, which I don't know where people get this myself.

Exactly :thumbsup:. It's really a pointless debate.

If there is an issue here at all, it's whether "new"/"updated" tells us anything about the capabilities of the Skyrim engine. So we should focus directly on that instead, rather than going at it via this horribly indirect and useless method of asking "is it a new engine or an updated engine?"

If anything, Gamebryo has been changed so much that it is no longer recognizable. That's why they are calling it by a new name. It pretty much a new engine now.

Gamebryo gets a rap for a lot of things I don't even think it can handle. The actual Gamebryo package is a renderer with a bunch of hooks for other middleware, so things like SpeedTree (also used in Arkham Asylum, if I recall correctly) drop into place seamlessly for the end-user studio.

Is it really inconceivable that BGS wrote a rendering layer in less than 2 years alongside everything else? Especially since they had a library of custom rendering components from Oblivion and Fallout 3?

I'm pretty sure the engine being heavily modified still means that it's simply updated. Heavily updated. I guess it really would all be semantics then... it's a heavily updated engine with new features then. I'm not sure if simply quoting the article is against the rules, but the GI article simply says, "Bethesda went back to the drawing board and rewrote every major system powering the gameplay experience. The result is the newly dubbed Creation Engine and Kit."

They talk about their reworked Radiant AI becoming Radiant Story, so it sounds like they just used the previous build as a base and made it better.

Who cares if it's modified or new. It's semantics, let it rest.

And Radiant AI and Radiant Story are two different things.

http://twitter.com/nickbreckon/status/14015054991069184

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1148218-new-engine/page__view__findpost__p__16786625

/thread

You can't argue with Bethesda employees.

Where did this random "Wouldyoukindly" website get it's information? It sounds like they got it from Gameinformer and read information that wasn't there.

"As part of their massive cover story reveal, Game Informer has the scoop on what Bethesda has dubbed the “Creation Engine”, and damn it all if it isn’t ten kinds of impressive."

It doesn't say they got info directly from Bethesda at all, and just go claiming it's made off Gamebryo.