Skyrim - Cengine, Rage engine , Cryengine , Udk etc
polycounter lvl 14
Hello , I am first of all a huge fun of the Elder scrolls game and I love the series , the first Morrowind game is what made me interested inmodding andlearning 3d , but from the latest screens of the gameplay video released for Skyrim , altough I am really excited about it and I like the graphics , I can see that there is a huge step between the Tech and graphic look of this game and the other contemporary games , even older like Red dead redemption ( rage engine ) , Battlefield 3 ( Frostbite) , Gears of war 3 ( UDK) , Crysis 2 ( Cryengine ) etc..... so what is wrong wwith this game somehow ? What doesn't make it look at the same level or better than the others ? Is a Artist level fault ? Is an Creation Engine bottleneck or what ?What do you think?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJxq_N5zthc[/ame]
Especially many people have complained about the water showed in the rapids images of the video , I personally like them but I guess they could be made better , but how and with what techniques?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJxq_N5zthc[/ame]Especially many people have complained about the water showed in the rapids images of the video , I personally like them but I guess they could be made better , but how and with what techniques?
Replies
edit:
Okay, on a serious note:
This is the first time bethesda has scaled up their production, and while fallout3 had a bigger team than oblivion, oblivion was quite a small scale production much like morrowind.
epic, crytek and rockstar has all years of experience working with these things already, they've built up some fantastic engines being able to push some extremely heavy stuff, this is bethesdas first time with their own inhouse rendering engine.
Scope: in the elderscrolls games you go almost anywhere, see everything from every direction, and then have massive draw ranges going on top of that, with most objects being dynamic in the world, there's not as much room for visual cheating that the other can take, like having backdrop scenery and selected angles, there's no lightmap baking going on, there's no massive built setpieces that can be sent in one go.
It's their rendering engine and it's doing exactly what they want it to do, and it does it faster than gamebryo did on the exact same hardware oblivion ran on.
And on the water, the rapid currents are most likely going to be improved, since it's nothing technical, just an artistic mis-step, and if you look at 1:35 in the video you'll see some quite beautiful cave streams.
And most important, people are really good at comparing apples with oranges, it's more than texture resolutions, it's more than what special effects you throw at things.
yeah, gamebryo cant do shadows
Who's been complaining about the graphics? That demo looks awesome.
Yeah it can, but it's implementation is really limited and slow. In Oblivion for example, the church in Kvatch where you first meet Martin actually has shadows in it. If you're holding a torch, you'll actually see shadows being casted by the people inside.
It's pretty much what eld was talking about though. It's an open world game with a lot going on and a lot of interact with. Priority #1 is to make your environment feel real and have a lot to interact with. Any sort of graphical gloss takes a backseat to that goal. I'm sure if Bethesda wanted, they could make something really visually impressive, but they'd have to start ditching the open world elements.
That was intended to be a tongue in cheek comment. Its a common comment about gamebryo amoung the 'experts' who bitch about beths games.
What you should really worry about is the animation, or the persuasion game. Or the UI, the hacked in IPAD UI which breaks immersion, looks stupid and reduces speed and functionality of use.
texture wise i mean. obviously the geometry is tree shaped (in the case of trees).
...what?
You hardly even see the dragon's skin. At all. If you're looking at the dragon on the stone wall, then yeah, that's pretty normal.
This looks like rock? O_o
Modding Elder Scrolls games is a big part of the draw, for me at least. I am sure modders will figure out a way to make whatever lack luster more visually appealing, given time. Modders aren't held back by performance restrictions, or at least I never let it concern me much.
Am I the only one who noticed how AWESOME the tree animation is at the very end of the trailer? Look at how those branches move. It's amazing. The water will need some tweaking for sure. But I was incredibly impressed by the clouds in the mountains and such. It's an amazingly beautiful game.
As far as different engines "having better graphics" than others, all modern game engines use pixel shaders and triangles so its not like one engine can magically look so much better than another. Its really just about the skill and number of artists and how much time they have to work on something. Sure one engine might have super good lightmapping or realtime shadows or post processing but all that is achievable in any engine with a little work.
Crysis island is 16 x 16 kms (256 sq km 98 sq ml ) and Red dead Redemption map is 9 x 8 km (72 sq kms , ca 27 sq ml )...
Oblivion map was 40 sq km (10 sq ml ) and the Skyrim map is stated to be about the same size ...
Crysis was sandbox, sure, but there wasn't anything in it... One of the biggest crits it had was that it was empty. Sure it was pretty, but compared to what you could do in Oblivion or any GTA? Not even close.
Just cause 2 is even worse, the maps is huge, but there is almost nothing todo there xD
Back on topic tough, i think the graphics for skyrim looks sweet and so they did for oblivion, fallout 3 or new vegas not so much, i actualy get suprised sometimes on how bad the graphics is(Textures mostly) :P
I willsurely love Skyrim hoping they wont have it supersimplified like Fallout and go back tothe style of Morrowind like multiple pauldrons etc...
Anyway back on topic Crysis has a lot of interactive elements considering that you can destroy most of the plants and collide with almoust all of them , pick up stuff and destroy buidlings, the enemies alsohave an exceptional AI , ok you can't talk to them but they are really good ....
Plsus seems that Creation engine inskyrim does not have SSAO or am I wrong?
looks like Speed Tree to me.
Also, crysis was quite linear and worked with play-areas and background-areas. The imaginary size of the island has no meaning.
We're talking amount of areas where you can actually go everywhere.
But still, they've got a long way to go before they beat daggerfall
As was said, once the game has been out a few months modders are going to up the ante on graphics with high res texture packs and custom shaders, all sorts. Animation is a much harder skill to execute well though and as such never seems to get any modder love until 1, maybe 2 years down the line, so it's my primary concern for them to get right on release. But hell, if it's bad it just means i'll have a side project to last me at least a year
And yes, I agree with Eld, Crysis was definitely pretty darn Linear. Not as much as, say, gears of war, since it was a bit sandboxy. But the actual size of the island is meaningless, because you could definitely not go anywhere you wanted.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=79120 started by Geezus from Bethesda.
In case you want a general Skyrim thread before this turns into one ;D
Crysis has good AI? I don't think so.
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Most AI is as dense as a box of rocks and Cyrsis is no exception. What most people think is good AI, is actually clever level design and triggers.
ok that's fair enough. that screenshot looks very pretty.
i was commenting on the video, since i don't go hunting for, and have no interest in skyrim in general.
I just need to mention that CD Projekt is a publisher, not a developer. CD Projekt Red, a subsidiary of CD Projekt, is actually much smaller than Bethesda; according to their linkedin profile they employ only 50~ people. To Bethesda's credit I'm assuming that their game is hell of a lot bigger than TW2 . Even if The Witcher 2 too is bigger than the original it's still going to be far more linear and smaller than Skyrim.
ZacD: You should play it, but don't even think of trying to "finish" it