I haven't seen anyone else remark on this, but I just want to hear what everybody thinks. In the trailer shown on E3, there's a sequence on the tundra in front of Whiterun. If you look at the grass, you can see that the grass is only visible about 50 meters in front you, then it all turns into a muddy texture.

The other sequences and areas shown look alright, most look great, but it's this particular area that seems to have a huge lack of detail with a true draw distance of but 50 meters. Pretty much like Oblivion.

http://www.imagehosting.nu/images/whiteruntu.jpg

I don't know if I'm overreacting, maybe I'm just spoilt by non open-world games. I don't know much about the hardware and the requirements in the 360, maybe this is as far as they can push it?

cough*xbox360*cough

Or they haven't worked it out yet. We don't know how old the images/demos are (only when they were released) and we don't know how much more work they are going to put in.

I'm pretty sure grass is drawn in a different distance like everything else... just like in Oblivion...

So even though grass doesn't show up, rocks, ruins, bridges, etc... can.

Please keep in mind the demo we saw looked a lot like the one the press described a few months back. So there is a possiblity that is looks better now. Also that was on the Xbox 360.

The grass difference is what bothers me. Its just as bad as Oblivion's.

I realized that myself.
And I'm pretty sure it's neither cause of the Box nor cause of an early version, I bet we'll see exactly the same draw distance in the final version.
But I'm also sure we'll be able to make some adjustments in the .ini after the release, and there will be lots of graphic-mods within the first few weeks.

Not sure if it's the Xbox 360. I look at Red Dead Redemption (which is a console game) and I see a huge draw distance for grass (and bushes) and such.

For instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L76TTv10PkA&feature=player_detailpage#t=416s

Perhaps the Creation engine isn't as nicely optimized as we thought? Could be wrong though.

I keep the grass turned off in Oblivion for exactly that reason. The maximum draw distance for the grass is too much shorter than the view distance, and I loathe the abrupt transition from grass to no grass.

I would hope that it's handled a bit better in Skyrim, but I wouldn't expect it to be a whole lot better, just because it's running on the same hardware.

I think the engine hasn't been polished completely, but a lot of people will just assume it's the Xbox anyway...

we don't need to "assume" that its the xbox 360, Todd has said so during the footage...

i am not so worried about draw distance, i have a PC, PS3 and X360.... i will play it on my X360 most! i am sure that we will see a better build for the final, remember the pre-E3 problems with Oblivion... The guys work that way!

a low poly distant grass mesh would really help us with this problem, i wonder why nobody has done that for oblivion. just for this area most likely, i hardly noticed it until the tundra footage, flat open areas seem to get this often...which makes me wonder why i didnt notice it much in fallout... in areas where there is a bit more vertical play area its far less noticeable.

I'm getting the feeling that Bethesda perhaps isn't the best with engines & technology.

They can't even make ladders... and Oblivion was horribly optimized.

... and now we see that the grass distance hasn't really improved at all over 5 years of development, despite that Bethesda has stated that the real purpose and the "special" thing of the engine is to draw everything.

Grrrrrr. I HATE RENDERING DISTANCE!!!! They promised there wasn't one anymore on consoles. :cryvaultboy: :cryvaultboy: :cryvaultboy:

Cough*halo reach*cough

they have no glasses in skyrim and as a dragon born you naturally havve bad eyes you need glasses!

@=@

I meant that it won't render properly, because of the 360.

I know that, I meant people will just assume it won't render, because it's the 360... :facepalm:

:whistling:

Though in defence, they implemented several culling and optimisation features for F3. It better utilised the PC hardware, The terrain subD algorithm is superior. etc. Not to mention the artwork and execution is bounds better, in the optimisation department as well.

But there is always something else isn't there. This time the have managed dynamic shadows.. which is straight up shows a massive attempt to optimise.

Yeah, but we've already seen the dynamic shadows are limited to a very close range. It was seen in the tundra screenshot pretty clearly.
Also, dynamic shadows are pretty old stuff right now. Most games got several years ago. We also spotted earlier today that there isn't shadows on grass either.

What I'm saying is... I don't think Bethesda is really that good at engines & technology. There has been improvement over the years of course (I mean, it's not like it would get any worse), but in general I think they're maybe not that good at it

I could be wrong, but that's the conclusion I've come to so far after playing Bethesda's games and now looking at Skyrim.

yall need to calm down. the demo was released around february, which doesnt even mean it was taken from the february "build" of the game...could have been january or even earlier. what im saying is: there is still A LOT of time for bethesda. also, todd keeps talking about how amazing micro AND macro detail is in the game and how awesome the draw distance is and you know, todd is not peter molyneux, normally if he talks so much about something it really looks good so lets just have some faith in the dev team. if the grass thing in the tundra thing really turns out to look like that in the final build i would be really disappointed but as someone already said: look at red dead redemption they had AMAZING draw distance for their grass on the xbox. which tells us: its possible.

i just hope we can see creatures from far away. thats what bugged me the mst in oblivion. besides i wanna be able to see the mammoths on the other side of the tundra. its only natural since theyre such big creatures