***The Official Starfield Thread*** (As endorsed by TNA)

Nutty667 said:
There aint no-way Bethesda are gonna write a new engine from scratch. The next ES will still be an evolution of the CE they use.
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There must be another suitable Engine they could use down the back of the sofa at MS HQ, surely?

What i know about game development could barely fill the back of a fag packet but, other than cost, is there a reason for continuing to frankenstein the creation engine? Object persistence? The physics memes? I’m guessing they must have considered other engines and chose this route for a good reason?
 
PitterPatter said:
There must be another suitable Engine they could use down the back of the sofa at MS HQ, surely?

What i know about game development could barely fill the back of a fag packet but, other than cost, is there a reason for continuing to frankenstein the creation engine? Object persistence? The physics memes? I’m guessing they must have considered other engines and chose this route for a good reason?
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There’s a lot to be said for familiarity it’s true, but sometimes engines just become either not good enough or you spend months improving it that could’ve been used learning a new, better engine like UE5. Although paying for a new engine vs using your own does have disadvantages.
 
PitterPatter said:
There must be another suitable Engine they could use down the back of the sofa at MS HQ, surely?

What i know about game development could barely fill the back of a fag packet but, other than cost, is there a reason for continuing to frankenstein the creation engine? Object persistence? The physics memes? I’m guessing they must have considered other engines and chose this route for a good reason?
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I don't think it's simply a case of learning a new engine. They will no-doubt have loads of tools that help them create missions, characters, levels, plus all the modding tools to think about with their engine data formats, scripts etc..
It would be a massive undertaking to recreate all that on a new engine.

As an ex-gamedev, I hated using bought in engines. The documentation was always crap, you're competing for support with other studios, and they're always over-engineered to try and cater for all gaming styles. It's nice having all the tools pre-built for you, but often using them felt like trying to force a round peg into a square hole.
These days however writing an entire graphics, gameplay and tools is no mean feat even for large studios.
 
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Nutty667 said:
I don't think it's simply a case of learning a new engine. They will no-doubt have loads of tools that help them create missions, characters, levels, plus all the modding tools to think about with their engine data formats, scripts etc..
It would be a massive undertaking to recreate all that on a new engine.

As an ex-gamedev, I hated using bought in engines. The documentation was always crap, you're competing for support with other studios, and they're always over-engineered to try and cater for all gaming styles. It's nice having all the tools pre-built for you, but often using them felt like trying to force a round peg into a square hole.
These days however writing an entire graphics, gameplay and tools is no mean feat even for large studios.
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I hadn’t considered the support aspect of it, we have some tools being used in my work where the documentation is crap or nonexistent and it is a bugbear. Also fighting with other studios for support, never even occurred to me.
 
PitterPatter said:
Read that earlier and i agree with most, if not all, the points they raised to varying degrees. The opening of the game is poor and first impressions count so i can understand why a lot of folk playing thru the main quest are underwhelmed.

I also get the fast travel arguments but i suppose my argument would be, knowing that they had already made the decision to have all these planets and locations in there, what would be a reasonable alternative? Allow folk to fly around freely? Ok well that increases the size of the game enormously but hypothetically lets say they did it. Now they have to have stuff in the voids between worlds otherwise folk will complain that half the game is empty and we soend too much time flying thru nothing. So the game gets bigger again. Then folk complain because it’s unrealistic to be bumping into random characters on a regular basis in the vastness of space.

I suppose my point is, having chosen to have so many worlds etc (whether you agree they should’ve or not) they then need to make decisions on the rest - which naturally involves compromises unless you end up with a game in perpetual development, chewing up resources for fun and clocking in at a 500gb install when released.

I agree less loading screens and fast travel would be more immersive and lead to a better sense of exploration, i just don’t know how that would work in practice. Ideally perhaps a smaller universe to start with but that ship has sailed (pun intended).
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Yeh. I mean, when people were told there would be 1000's of planets it should have been obvious that there would be no realistic flying between them. Realistically, you'd have to do some sort of lightspeed/grav jump thingy bob to do it anyway (which would always just be some sort of animation/loading screen). Also, it should have been obvious that the game would not let you explore entire planets to a realistic scale. I mean a game cannot render an entire galaxy to scale...

I said in this thread earlier that the i think the game could have been much better contained in one system. They could make up some plotmcguffin about grav jumps/warp speed tech being lost or requiring resources they dont have any more after the initial colonisation away from earth. That way they might have been able to model some sort of actual travelling between them and landing/take off (maybe even flying around the planet in atmosphere). Obviously rendering an entire planet at scale would still be unlikely though. But they could have had good large areas on each of the system's planets that were not procedurally generated.
 
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Jono8 said:
Yeh. I mean, when people were told there would be 1000's of planets it should have been obvious that there would be no realistic flying between them. Realistically, you'd have to do some sort of lightspeed/grav jump thingy bob to do it anyway (which would always just be some sort of animation/loading screen). Also, it should have been obvious that the game would not let you explore entire planets to a realistic scale. I mean a game cannot render an entire galaxy to scale...

I said in this thread earlier that the i think the game could have been much better contained in one system. They could make up some plotmcguffin about grav jumps/warp speed tech being lost or requiring resources they dont have any more after the initial colonisation away from earth. That way they might have been able to model some sort of actual travelling between them and landing/take off (maybe even flying around the planet in atmosphere). Obviously rendering an entire planet at scale would still be unlikely though. But they could have had good large areas on each of the system's planets that were not procedurally generated.
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Was never 1000's. Just 1000. Not that it ultimately makes a difference :p

They definitely should have done better with the space portion, that's for sure.
 
Jono8 said:
I mean a game cannot render an entire galaxy to scale...
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Elite Dangerous does a pretty good job of this (although the on foot parts are pretty poor).

Jono8 said:
I said in this thread earlier that the i think the game could have been much better contained in one system.
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I agree with this. Star Citizen has got this right I think. Less solar systems that can be filled with content.
 
Nutty667 said:
There aint no-way Bethesda are gonna write a new engine from scratch. The next ES will still be an evolution of the CE they use.
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I don't have a problem with the engine, I have a problem with the developer failing to put the very basics in for PC's. It's not the fault of the engine that there is no DLSS, no FOV, bad brightness/contrast levels and terrible character designs. etc
 
MissChief said:
There’s a lot to be said for familiarity it’s true, but sometimes engines just become either not good enough or you spend months improving it that could’ve been used learning a new, better engine like UE5. Although paying for a new engine vs using your own does have disadvantages.
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I read that one of the problems Bethseda has, is that pretty much their entire ecosystem revolves around the creation engine, not just the graphics - but how they design quests, how they build maps - basically everything they do revolves around the same engine they've been using for years.

In the case of Starfield - there will be so many elements they'll have reused from the Fallout games, which will have saved them a ton of time.

They do need to move to UE5 - but I imagine it'll be very hard for them, and I imagine the next game they produce will feel a lot different.
 
They probably have an army of developers who came out of uni and straight to Bethesda, so it's all they know how to use properly. This engine really isn't up to the times.

The spazzy physics when over 60fps still seem to be there as well. I've seen it happening a few times.
 
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What bemuses me is that lots of NPC's in cities slowed down performance in the Oblivion era with like core 2 duos. The NPCs don't seem to be doing anything much more advanced these days (arguably less as they don't even seem to have homes and routines). Yet we have processing power miles ahead of anything back then and it still struggles.
 
PitterPatter said:
There must be another suitable Engine they could use down the back of the sofa at MS HQ, surely?

What i know about game development could barely fill the back of a fag packet but, other than cost, is there a reason for continuing to frankenstein the creation engine? Object persistence? The physics memes? I’m guessing they must have considered other engines and chose this route for a good reason?
Click to expand...
Cost, development time, staff training, completely different pipeline for models etc having to be set up. These projects are many years in concept, design, implementation and ditching one entire way of working and replacing with another you may as well fire the existing staff with many years experience and hire a new lot and with mega corporations being extremely risk averse due to terror of killing the goose that lays the golden egg, well here we are.

Jono8 said:
What bemuses me is that lots of NPC's in cities slowed down performance in the Oblivion era with like core 2 duos. The NPCs don't seem to be doing anything much more advanced these days (arguably less as they don't even seem to have homes and routines). Yet we have processing power miles ahead of anything back then and it still struggles.
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Oblivion was incredibly single core dependent get a high end Intel and watch those fps shoot up theres a spreadsheet of various cpus somewhere or other
 
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I'm not reading much of this thread to avoid spoilers, but I have had massive success using one of the various replacement Ultra.ini files available on Nexusmods.

After the new patch last night my performance tanked, I was barely getting 30fps and it felt awful. Noticed the game had put back the original Ultra.ini file. Put the replacement ini file back, switched to "high" and back to "ultra" to apply the settings, and it runs smooth as butter again and looks no worse. It's amazing how much better it runs.
 
Neil79 said:
Star Citizen any good?
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I have only ever played the Free Fly events, and as it stands right now I would say no, it's not that good because of the bugs and poor performance. Having said that, you can see the massive potential Star Citizen has. It could end up being the best space game ever made.

During the last time I played it I woke up in a hospital bed wearing nothing more than a hospital gown, bought a space suit but couldn't equip it for some reason. Decided to go to the space port so took a train which took me there in real time, no loading screens. I ran into an elevator with another player and walked onto their ship. They decided to not kill me and we took off from the planet. I stood beside the pilots seat looking out the window as we slowly rose up through the atmosphere and then entered hyperspace. We dropped out in front of a massive planet and traveled to a space station where at that point the captain of the ship decided they no longer wanted me around so shot me. It didn't outright kill me. As I lay wounded the other player opened the cargo door and spaced me.

It was one of the coolest things I have ever done in a game.

Starfield will never achieve such immersion.
 
lovelyhead said:
I have only ever played the Free Fly events, and as it stands right now I would say no, it's not that good because of the bugs and poor performance. Having said that, you can see the massive potential Star Citizen has. It could end up being the best space game ever made.

During the last time I played it I woke up in a hospital bed wearing nothing more than a hospital gown, bought a space suit but couldn't equip it for some reason. Decided to go to the space port so took a train which took me there in real time, no loading screens. I ran into an elevator with another player and walked onto their ship. They decided to not kill me and we took off from the planet. I stood beside the pilots seat looking out the window as we slowly rose up through the atmosphere and then entered hyperspace. We dropped out in front of a massive planet and traveled to a space station where at that point the captain of the ship decided they no longer wanted me around so shot me. It didn't outright kill me. As I lay wounded the other player opened the cargo door and spaced me.

It was one of the coolest things I have ever done in a game.

Starfield will never achieve such immersion.
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Did you keep telling the captain that the game was crap or something?

TBF, it sounds pretty immense, but SC isn’t getting my money until it’s finished, if that’s even in my lifetime.

A solid 8/10 for Starfield from me so far. ;)
 
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