If you read my other comment you would see what Todd Howard said.

It was before Fallout 4 was announced that he said he likes that the power that the PC's, PlayStation 4 (PS4), and Xbox One have today that he can develop video games with no loading screens at all and that the Player Character (PC) walking up to a house can listen to the NPC's talking and doing their own stuff in their house and look through the windows.

This was in a interview at Gamescom 2014 if I remember correctly?

That must be because everything is in the same cell.

Bethesda games have things in different cells. You can't see in windows because it is in a different cell.

Once again I have to explain that Todd Howard did in fact say in one of his interviews some time ago that he likes the power that the PC's, PlayStation 4 (PS4), and Xbox One have today and that he can develop video games where the Player Character (PC) walks up to a house and can listen to noises and the NPC's talking from inside their houses and inns and doing their own stuff.

Like Merc 616 said. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt uses Umbra for that stuff and maybe Todd Howard is going to be using Umbra to support it in the Creation Engine for The Elder Scrolls VI.

Who knows.

I'm sorry, I was on my phone and it was very difficult to read posts. I had missed your post.

Well, he said that with actual hardware they can develop videogames without loading screens and then they publish Fallout 4, that has a s.hitload of them. Quite reassuring!

I think it's because Fallout 4 was already completed being developed when Todd Howard said this.

All they were doing before they released Fallout 4 for sale was polishing and fixing as many bugs as they can.

Where we should see results with this is in The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5.

Let's hope for the best. Anyway I liked a lot about what he said, like the possibility to hear voices and see people through the windows doing their chores and living their lives. It would add a new dimension of realism. Seeing by night illuminated windows that aren't mere yellowish textures would be awesome.

Yep, RAM was the biggest limiting factor with the last gen consoles. As you said, PS3 had two 256 mb allocations and Xbox had a single 512 mb allocation. It's pretty easy to exceed these limits if you start adding stuff to your game. In my modded game, for instance, I am typically running with about 1.5-2.5 GB of system RAM plus another 1-2GB of VRAM. So, that's 6 to 8 times what the last gen consoles were capable of running.

Granted, my game is moderately heavily modded, but doesn't really add very many more NPCs (a few in towns with ETaC) and only a few more enemy spawns in select areas. I've got SMIM and a bunch of 2k textures, and a lot of gameplay/UI/HUD/Map altering mods, but not that much that adds new "stuff" in a visible way. But incremental changes add up.

Personally, I don't think the game would have been that much different if the 2011 era consoles had more memory (maybe open cities, maybe better memory allocation on PC, but maybe not much more than that). Most of the stuff people complain about seems to be conscious design choices made by Bethesda, rather than an artificial limit placed on them by the old consoles. But who knows.

Maybe he did say that. He won't be doing it in any Elder Scrolls or Fallout game they have made because they use cells. He very well knows this.

They would not have needed to labor any differently had the cities been made open from the beginning.

No...but had they designed the game with those open cities....it is said that consoles could not run the game and Beth did not want to lose the lucrative console market.


Something still doesn't sit right to me. I mean theres no issue to have the above ground part of Helgen loaded with the cell as you approach it. From distance it looks simplistic and non detailed.....it only gets filled in and 'resed up' as you get closer.....same with Falkreath and dawnstar etc So why not Whiterun? Or Solitude?


Why is that not possible to have an ungated Solitude that lookes low res at distance and gradually fills with detail in as you approach?

As you move forward in the game approaching areas become properly drawn and receding areas become de-resed .... i.e. The draw distance. So why are cities not handled like any other areas you approach?

I suspect that the five major cities are too dense to load into last gen consoles as an exterior space without exceeding their memory. There is a lot more stuff going on in a small area in Solitude than Dawnstar or Falkreath. Many more buildings, more NPCS, more clutter along the street. The game loads the cell you are in plus the two beyond that in a grid that is five cells square centered on the cell you are in. Put too much stuff in those five cells (plus memory used for the low res LOD meshes beyond the five cells that are loaded and all the persistent references the game has to keep track of in cells that are not loaded) and you could easily push the game over 512 mb of ram.

Decreasing the number of cells loaded at any one time won't work because it would make everything look bad, since you would be seeing low res LOD meshes much closer than they are designed to be viewed, and increasing the resolution of the LOD would further drive up the amount of memory needed to run the game.

I see!

Thank you my furry friend

A logical full explanation at last

Cheers

Rick

It really depends what resolution you're playing at if its only 1080p then a RX480 for ￡200 or a GTX 1060 for around ￡250 will handle everything you can throw at it including an ENB. I've got a GTX 1080 but I have a 3440x1440 monitor which is roughly 3x the number of pixels to drive as 1080p. Even so a 480/1060 would be good enough for Skyrim but it would struggle with more modern titles at that resolution, FO4 for one. Yeah you could push the boat out and have 3xTitan's in SLI for 720p but it would be mahoosive overkill.

You are aware of the fact that PCs have to have a minimum requirement too? That minimum requirement is much lower than how consoles run games.

Actually, high resolution textures, especially when there's a whole lot of them rendered, eat up tons of RAM all on their own. That's why I don't even understand why so many small objects like weapons have 4K resolution options at all, it's so needless. Even 2K are often an overkill, only large objects need textures that big to keep the detail and reduce repetition.

No they don't. True, PC usually surpasses that within a year, but on a console's release date it's akin to a medium built PC. People who game on PCs usually have something a little bit better than an average PC build, and tend to forget what a non-gaming setup actually looks like. It's not a big difference, but ps4 performed a bit better than what you'd get in a PC for the same price.

I look at these comparisons of PC and ps/xbox games, and I'm mostly puzzled. Sure, view distance draws a bit further, and shader is slightly better on the PC version, but that's as far as it gets. And it's completely unfair to compare with maxed out settings, because PC that can run a brand new game on maxed out settings is usually far from average. A friend of mine got Witcher 3 as soon as it was released, and his PC, for which he paid ~1200 dollars only 2 or 3 years before the game came out really struggled on maxed out settings. He can run it at max now with a PC he recently got for a bit less than $1800, and seeing the ps4 version he said it's run on the equivalent of PC's medium settings. And ps4 came out 3 years ago, while Witcher came out last year. I'd say that's great for a mere console. Just to compare some more, my PC cost me around $150 more than I paid for the ps4, and I got it 2 years ago. It can't run Witcher 3 at all, and the PC was custom built by guys we know, so we got the best we could for the money we had. Furthermore, I don't meet the minimum requirements for Skyrim SE either. PS4, however, can run it.

No. Happier too. It is not a feature I need or want in this particular game.

"I know"

But I had suggested that I'd have been hung drawn a quartered....because of exactly as you say....those on pc....being all enthusistic and that...DO mostly run very capable rigs....many home built, custom or gaming specific machines (with higher vital statistics than your home office set up)....and that IS the benchmark they compare consoles to....fair or not.


However....time also plays its role and whilst a particular generation of console does not get upgrades..its as you bought it....lots of pc players swap out chip sets gpu etc to improve their set up....so yes, the five year old console build will be well behind the upto date pc build.


XB1 will be a huge upgrade for me.....but in the tech race...its already history.


Next upsetting brainwave......consoles with slide in slide out chipsets.....upgradable machines

Yeah, but it's stupid, it should be compared with medium settings, default settings, at least in my opinion. Someone can buy a PC for several thousand dollars, it's completely illogical to compare that to a $450 machine.


Yeah, I was just talking about the release. Heck, even a 2 years old console is already getting behind the standard, 5 years old is ancient. I agree, I think consoles that will be able have their pieces replaced are a very possible thing in the future.

Even in a PC, replacing aging pieces individually is frequently not that productive. If you use good components when you build a PC, then its all going to age at the same pace and you may be better just waiting and then replace it all at once. I built a PC a couple years ago, literally days after the Z97 motherboards came out (May 2014). Since the new mobos were backwards compatible with Z87 chipsets, I opted to pay a little extra for for the Z97 mobo instead of a Z87 mobo so I could replace the processor when the new ones came out. Well second gen Haswell is out are out now and so is Broadwell that uses the same chipset, but they are only marginally faster than what I installed over two and a half years ago, not nearly enough to justify paying anything to replace it, much less the hassle of removing the cooler and cleaning and reapplying thermal paste. The next gen processor is likely to require a new motherboard socket, so then you are looking at replacing both motherboard and processor (and anything else that is incompatible with new chipsets/chips) and at that point you might as well replace everything, except maybe the case, rather than messing around with piecemeal replacement.



I suppose piecemeal replacement might be useful if you were on a budget and scrimped on an easy to replace component like a GPU when you built the thing, but other than that, I don't find piecemeal replacement to be as useful as one might think. To me it makes more economic sense to save your money until you have the money to buy a good PC and then replace it all at once. Piecemeal replacement means that you spent money on a component you are going to throw away and replace before the end of its useful life, which might make the thing cheaper to begin with but you end up paying more in the long run.

Yeah,that's why I don't use many 4k textures, except for a mod added texture that doesn't come in a smaller high res version, the notice board texture. I use an optimized set of official high res DLC textures that reduces the size of many of them to 1k and Skyrim HD lite version, along with aMidianborn.

Basically, it all comes down to individual tastes, and what someone finds important. When Skyrim first came out I played it on slightly above medium settings cause it was gf's laptop bought for her university, it was not even remotely intended for gaming (it could even nicely play on maxed out settings, but then I had some stuttering in places like Riften). To be completely honest, I could play it on minimum as well. "PC master race" thing only shows how much people care about the graphics, because console version doesn't offer an inch of difference in gameplay. I'm not sure if that's because I started out with crappy gameboy and ps1 graphics, so I got used to it, or if I generally just don't care as much about how the game looks (although I would lie if I'd say I don't care at all, it's not an important factor, but if I can I'll make my game as good looking as possible). I don't play shooters either, so constant 60+ fps is not pivotal for my gaming experience.

Okay, but how is that related to the post of mine you quoted, where I was arguing that the ability to replace components individually really is not that much of a benefit for PCs since most of the time you are better off replacing everything rather than replacing an individual component?

Yeah, I use graphics mods that improve the vanilla look while mostly preserving it because I can so why not, but the real reason I built a PC was for gameplay mods. All of the mods I have made alter gameplay and most of the ones I use do as well. I don't have or need mods that add "new content" and my graphics mods are there since I have a PC that can run them but I don't really need them. I do need my gameplay altering mods though or I wouldn't be playing Skyrim anymore.

To bring this back to PS4 discussion, with only an esp file you can alter gameplay extensively (although certain things like full on survival can't be done). But at least PS4 players should have a nice selection of gameplay altering mods to choose from.

Uh, where did I say it was supposed to be directly related? My point is just that in my opinion people seem to be too fussy about graphics, and that extra view distance and texture resolution, and, again in my opinion, graphics make a lesser piece of the overall gaming experience.


Directly to your post, yes, it's usually better, but some people don't often have money for the whole thing at the same time, and some would benefit from at least being able to replace only one component, if only for a slight improvement. For example, I want a better PC because, aside from my love for gaming, I also love to sculpt stuff with millions of vertices, and currently I can't even reach one million before the software crashes. For now I'll only have to only satisfy myself with RAM, because with everything else I'm currently focusing my financial resources, I simply don't have a thousand dollars for the dream rig I want. And it's what the PC master race often waves around with, being able to replace components. Replacing everything is basically buying a new PC, which is not an argument that console haters want to use.

They already have low-res LOD for those cities. Nothing about that would change much, if at all. It was strictly the memory requirements of the open world cities on the consoles that stopped it from happening.


Technically speaking, SSE would have zero problem with this now, but that would be a radical departure from the original game and they specifically said they wanted mod and save compatibility to remain in place.

Bummer. Still getting it anyway. Hopefully modders can come up with something a little similar, even if not quite as deep.

I know, right? Not sure why some would expect Beth to drop whatever they're doing lately to add a feature which was not in the game to start with.

Then I guess I misinterpreted some peoples' comments here on these forums. At first it sounded like this sort of content was cut due to console system hardware limitations, but I see now that they were instead talking about stuff like cities loading in their own cells. Thanks for the clarification.