I'm sorry, but I just can't buy the reason for the merge (I've seen to many armor mods (Morrowind, Oblivion &Fallout3) that layered well

I dont buy the "fewer less detailed" thing one bit. I think its a poor excuse not to include a fundamental aspect of a TES game just because they didnt wanna spend time on animation it right. And even IF its less detail 'd rather have that. all the armor in the world means nothing to me if I cannot customize the different parts.


Oh and this poll is incredibly biased

What? Just because you say something is like something doesn't mean it is. If seperated greaves are a rock in this water, I think they'd have to be pretty tiny rocks.

Your anology doesn't hold up. Instead of two rocks you now have one rock with almost exactly the same mass as the two rocks combined. So the effect is neglectable. Nice try though! :angel:

Or maybe it's a real big bucket. The point is...it comes down to space. I can't see you getting that much more content, by removing a single option. In order for them to get more content on the screen, they have to make cuts in other areas. The greaves were one of those cuts.

Agree with you, if such unique armors will again become similar to Oblivion genericness, seems I will end with modeling my own sets of equipment as I do before, I cant forget such "unique" robes from Oblivion what have difference only in texture, oh well thats beginner modders work make such retextures, I expect thats devs will make more interesting items like they do before, and what I receive bathrobes with few different textures, and even more such robes was one piece suits certain even don't have gloves and boots, without enchanting limit King of Worms' Robes or Arch-mage robe has lesser quality for enchanting then starting rags.

In Morrowind I can create unique character look with equipment in game, I enjoy in searching and discovering hidden pieces for thats, in Oblivion such customizations was limited, thanks to Nine and praise Azura thats modders make niftools thats help much, after combining meshes and texture replacers I achieve unique equipment look, niftools alchemy replace for me in game customization, and what now there will be even smaller number of customizable parts then Oblivion have?
All hope thats there will be more hidden equipment slots so mod similar to Tailor Maid for Fallout will be available and customization with smithing will be really interesting at last return small part of Morrowind uniqueness.

then they could cut gauntlets, boots, helmets too why bother with minior things if they can do it all at once or even better just cut all armor and we run with the same armor through the hole game if its nicely done, should increase performance too and hell yeah they should make that all npcs look the same or at least every third npc would be a boost too, oh well guess then they could call it Arcania a Elder Scrolls Tale. :shakehead:

Voted for the second option because I like to mix and match. More armor sets is nice but being a PC gamer that enjoys mods having less armors isn't that big of an issue since I can install custom ones that look better. I don't see how merging two slots allows them to put more NPCs in screen, the benefits of merging are minimal mesh wise (if the meshes are adequately built that is... something Beth has failed with some meshes in past games). The game having to keep track of one less slot can improve performance but again it's minimal. Unless it's something tied to their animation system I don't see why this is a huge improvement graphical resource wise.

I also don't see why would making 30 armor sets (arbitrary number) with separated upper and lower body slots be noticeably more time consuming than 30 merged ones. You model the entire armor set anyway when making it. Only thing left is to split it (which doesn't take that much) and export or just export it without splitting. Splitting doesn't take away the detail.

I'm not saying they're lying but I'm having a hard time thinking up any reasons to believe them.

It comes down to how they are drawn though. Someone said above that wearing the greaves and body together in Oblivion didn't improve frame rate, this is because they are still being drawn by the engine separately.

So let's say we have five NPCs in a cell and they were all wearing just greaves and body armour, without them combined the engine is drawing ten items (finding out from the code what the variable is called, locating the resources and drawing them to the screen seperately). With them combined the engine only has to locate and draw five resources, increasing the the amount of power that can be dedicated to something else, such as extra NPCs.

Body and greaves are also the two largest armour pieces (thus requiring more memory) to draw so it is a logical choice (if you are trying to free up power for an engine) to have the two largest parts merged over say greaves and boots, or body and gloves.

One way to think about it is tasks, the engine runs a lot of tasks while playing but is limited by the hardware how many tasks is can run at once. This is why when a lot of things happen on the screen there is frame rate drop (it's not the only reason but it is very large factor) because the hardware can only handle so many tasks before it starts to struggle. Drawing greaves and body separate, is two separate tasks for the engine to perform. Drawing twelve NPCs each with a separate greaves and body armour is twenty-four tasks to the engine. Drawing twelve NPCs with a merged body armour and greaves is twelve tasks to the engine.

With all the new dynamic weather and special effects (not to mention better graphics overall) it makes sense that the devs have to find some places they can cut the engines load to make it run smoothly on limited hardware.

Your problem is that you have not the slightest idea how modern graphics engines work. Hint: They don't draw anything at all. They send triangle strips, textures and shaders to the graphic card. That's it.

I used drawn as a general term, rather than saying loading textures and shaders every time I mentioned it. Let's put it this way, in Oblivion greaves and body armour were separate objects, with their own variables and own textures, located separately in the resource files. When 'drawing' these objects in game it still has to do it separately which takes more memory than if it did it for just one object (merged) as it is now only one resource.

So really my point still stands that creating one merged model is easier for the engine than having the possibility of locating and generating two models separately. They could've toned down in other places and kept in greaves and body slots separate but they know their engine best so they must know what they are doing.

Yes, but the load-to-graphic-memory time has nothing at all to do with render time (remember, Matt claims that the single-piece armour "renders a lot faster" - which is clearly wrong). And in any case, loading two objects of 0.5MB each to graphic card memory is only slightly slower than loading one object of 1.0MB to graphic card memory as long as you know what you're doing (and don't try some silly things like allocating a separate chunk of memory for every single object).

Those two objects can also share the same texture; it's not like anything forces you to have a separate texture for every object ...

Having to choose between these two things is silly. There is no reason why we wouldn't be able to have many different sets while also having separate pieces.

I would prefer a larger number of highly detailed armor sets with each piece separate from one another giving me the freedom to mix and match any piece of any armor set in whatever way I see fit.

I'll admit you definitely know more about it than I do (I was only assuming taking what I know of how computers work) so I'll take your word for it. I just thought creating two models separately would cause more memory usage than one merged piece. Say when generating what an NPC wears (not a set NPC a randomly generated one like a bandit enemy) it has to run a process to generate an item for each slot, which in Oblivions case would be five things (only amour, no jewellery) while in Skyrim it would be four. I suppose this process comes down to have they have coded it and like you said would only save a very small amount of memory, but that could be evidence that the devs are really squeezing their engine and are making a lot of small cuts to improve performance.

Off topic: Do you do 3D modelling professionally or as a student? And if so do you have recommendations of books or programs to look at. I should be starting a course at university in september but as this conversation has proved I should probably look into it more before starting

As stated in the other 2 armor threads, I'd like the clothing to be separate. I want to go shirtless while wearing pants.

The end result of the process would take a whole of 4 bytes of memory more for every NPC who isn't "active" in the world yet, and slightly more (on the order of less than 10 bytes in total) for active ones, to account for stuff like damage to the armour.

Two separate items have a slight overhead as well in memory, about 5% more, looking at the Oblivion NIFs. On the plus side, you can just give NPCs different armour combinations for more variety, saving this space and more in the process (as compared to making every NPC wear a totally different object for the same purpose).



I do some 3D modelling on the modding side; my job is programming, not modelling, so I know the technical side of the equation very well. As for learning modelling: get Blender and go through the http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/, they are great. Also, try out http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/ if you want to make more organic-looking items (this includes some of the armour too). And get a graphic tablet if you have the funds; there's only so much you can do with a mouse or trackball ...

Thanks for links, Iv'e dabbled very lightly with Blender (only the very basic stuff though). I'll have to check out this Sculptris, looks really good.

Actually, that's not how math works. If you have 10 sets of separated armor (helmet, cuirass, gauntlets, greaves and boots) that means 50 pieces of equipment, 10 per slot for 5 slots. If you took every possible configuration, it would mean 10*10*10*10*10 possible combinations. That's a staggering 100,000 possible armor configurations.

Skyrim's armor has four slots: helmet, armor, gauntlets and boots. If they do 30 armor sets like you suggest, that means 30*30*30*30 configurations, or 810,000. Huh. That's way more than 100,000.

They're not going to have 30 sets of armor. But we've seen pictures of the same "armor" slot with different pauldrons, and pauldrons on separate sides of the armor. Presumably that sort of customization won't JUST be for armor. But say they only have 15 sets of armor, and only the "armor" pieces have customization, and that is limited only to pauldrons. Each piece can have no pauldrons, a left pauldron, right pauldron or both. So now there are four times as many possibilities for the "armor" slot. 15*15*15*60 is 202,500, still more than double your 10 sets of separate armor scenario.

It's a mixed bag. I'm cool with whatever Bethesda decided on this one. I may have leaned more towards seperate pieces but there arguments against that were sound. As someone who knows almost nothing about programming etc I didn't realize seperate pieces would slow the game down.

I'm actually torn here. Whereas I loved combining my own armour and really hoped that it would return in Skyrim, the idea of tons of new awesome looking sets is also very appealing. So I can't really say.

It does seem like a biased poll :shrug:

I chose the first option but I'm not sure yet if I won't have much personal choice. Don't know enough about the smithing system yet, so that's why I think it sounds a bit biased.

I'm not voting because the poll lacks my option - "BOTH".

I'm googling oblivion armor and 95% of the screenshots are full armor sets, not mixed. So I don't think it's that big of a deal, really.

I think its hilarious that people are actually saying Bethesda is lieing when it comes to rendering times.

Yes im "sure" its all an elaborate lie to get away with cutting down on the development time of the game they've been working on for 4+ years.

Also, crop circles are really made by aliens! The government just has a huge conspiracy to cover it up, area 51 is bullhorn, its actually an area below area 51 man! Its all a conspiracy man!