I just noticed this tweet by Pete Hines
http://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/23715609720135680

I noticed that tweet as well a hour ago... Seems interesting...

What does IMHO means?

In my honest opinion?

I'm not sure if I trust Todd Howard anymore. I think he's going insane.

Todd is a legend!

In my humble opinion.


Who? What? That was Pete tweeting, not Todd.

Isn't this Pete Hines anyway...

Oh yeah, It's Pete Hines. Just kidding, it's me that's going insane.

Why do you think todd's going insane?

HAHA, yeah Pete was telling me that after I was complimenting him on how well the trees look.

off topic but i think the tavern chick was the best looking thing in the article. if one can be married in skyrim, im gonna find that one!

and i think the trees looked good too btw

Speed Tree has some impressive physics these days... I envision one of those giants lumbering after you, tossing trees out of the way furiously as he attempts to grab you. At the very least, smashing them from the trunk up, sending debris flying.

Of course with dragons comes fire. And I hope to see trees burn, leaving behind a shrivled black stump more akin to something you'd see in Fallout.

And I don't think any of us are ready for the weather effects. The true shadows that clouds cast in Red Dead has already blown my mind. Skyrim is likely to show us a thing or two about bad weather.

I wonder if they'll have some kind of volumetric cloud system. Mmmm, that'd be interesting to see, how it would come into play from the weather changing and what not.

I wonder how the woodcutting is going to work? Can we actually chop down a tree and then put it in our inventory? I think we would get encumbered way too quick. Would the trees respawn after a certain amount of in game days like enemies in oblivion dungeons? So many questions...

I will clear cut all of skyrim, if we can chop down trees

If? I thought we could? What I'm wondering about is how they are going to handle being encumbered because the inventory is going to get full real quick with all the heavy trees.

well, I'm just worried that it's going to be "you can only chop down indicated trees" instead of having free reign to chop them all down

Nobody except the devs knows for sure.

Trees in the player's inventory? What are you smoking?

It takes no more memory to repeat a physics simulation then it does to put it in the game in the first place. No tree would be place in the environment if it didn't behave the way they intended it to. Which is to say If we can cut down any trees, we can cut down all the trees.

As for doing it as work? You're likely tasked to a single specific area at a time and won't have to concern yourself with lugging around the lumber yourself... Not for very far, anyway.

Maybe we will be able to be at cloud level while climbing mountains :woot:

there was a picture in GI that may or may not have been concept art of a mountain with clouds ringing it about halfway up, which i assumed was High Hrothgar. i thought if it WAS an ingame shot that the clouds might've been just a nice setpiece for that mountain and not indicative of anything else in the gameworld, but if there are volumetric clouds and fog then maybe it's a real thing.

I think that shot looks way to stylised, and well... awesome, to be an in-game image.

it's not about how much memory or work it would take
it's about the potentially game breaking problems that could cause in game
I drag a dozen trees to the side of a mountain and use them as stairs to get where I should be able to go
cut down trees to serve as obstructions for scripted running or paths.
also, the visual problems clear cutting the world might cause.
spawn points would no longer be shrouded in forests, things like that

Off course there are going to be logistical issues but they face challenges of that magnitude every single day. I was being optimistic based on it's potential. But I'll bite.

Don't drag trees. I couldn't drag an ogre without enough strength in Oblivion so this doesn't seem to be an issue. They fall, they maybe role but you don't carry them.

The possibility of an OPEN open-world brings back the possiblity of levitation so stacking logs is redundant to good world design.

AI driven NPC can get themselves over and around obstructions and if not... Well your trap worked, congradulations.

The visual problem becomes yours and yours alone. You did the crime, you wanted to commit the crime you spent that many hours cutting down that many trees to good for you. Enjoy your barren wasteland. I killed all the NPC in Oblivion once. All the ones I could find that COULD die. It was fun.

You chop them by punching them, one block at a time. Then, the leaves stay magically floating in the air.