Slashdot Mirror
Gavin Carter Discusses Elder Scrolls
Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes to tell us Brett Thomas over at Bit-Tech recently interviewed Elder Scrolls producer, Gavin Carter. From the article: "The size, scope and sheer graphical grunt required for Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion requires gigahertz of processing power to run, good bandwidth to update and expand, and gigabytes of hard disk space to store. Things that a console didn't really have...until now." The interview takes a look at the development with respect to the two different platforms, PC and Xbox 360.
Wonder how Microsoft feels about them knocking the release date back another 6 months. I was at the local EBGames recently, and they were mentioning how many people had already called to cancel their xbox360 preorders - and this was just a day or two after the delay was "discovered". I say discovered, because the publisher, Take 2, mentioned it on their financial statement, but it took a week and >45 200 post topics on the elder scrolls forum to choke a response out of Bethesda. Even then, their response was to sliently change the release date in the FAQ. Just in the past day or so the PR guy made a statement, but I think the damage has already been done. Knocking it back another 6 months gives me time to save up for some new hardware to run the PC version instead of buying the 360 like I had planned.
Holy Avatar, you're last RPG fling was Ultima 9? I'm so sorry.
My brother and I actually downgraded our gaming machine from a modern (at the time) video card to two 3DFx cards in SLI (it was designed for Glide) so we could play U9 without it crashing every 5 minutes. Then it only crashed every 20 minutes.
Not to mention being so incredibly awful that it actually made us yearn for the days of cheap sprite graphics and dungeon running in Ultima 5/6/7. Or even Ultima 4. Almost Ultima 3. Not "Avatars in Space" Ultima 2, and not "Glorified Nethack" Ultima though. And I don't think anything will ever make me yearn for the spell casting atrocity of Ultima 8 (and the sad fall of Dupre).
Without Oblivion, XBOX 360 has no real "system seller".
No Halo? no Oblivion? Perfect Dark Zero could be cool, but I don't
see nearly the same level of excitement for it.
I think this is going to have a huge impact on the bottom line
for initial Xbox sales.
I don't know about everyone else here, but for me the first Xbox
was about Halo and Morrowind.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Perhaps, but perhaps not. I've never really been 'into' D&D or RPGs or any of the fantasy stuff. But Morrowind I enjoyed because it was FIRST PERSON, and because it didn't saddle me with a linear plot to follow. My first time through, it was months before I bothered to do the primary quest, because I was busy filling out all the little squares on the auto map, looting every hole I could find and piling a mountain of gear on the second story floor of Ghorak Manor. It was like some big 'ole sandbox to play in, with all the toys laid out for me. I tried Neverwinter last night on a friend's box, and it just wasn't fun. Too much clickie this and wait for maybe something to respond, not enough run around and enjoy the world. Then again, I find D&D players annoying. They say things like "Dee Twenty" instead of "Icosahedral Die." Plato would spin in his grave.
Well... it's as next gen as the xbox360 is next gen to the original xbox. Faster processor, better graphics. I'm sorry you were expecting something more? Take a look at all the games lined up, do you see anything next gen about them? Yeah, they have better textures, more polygons, run in HD, but other than that they are still the same games. TES4 is as 'next gen' as anything else coming out, and believe me getting anything beyond 30fps in this game won't make a difference, it's not exactly quake.
Im.
Gavin Carter: Oblivion will absolutely benefit from a multi-processor or multi-core PC architecture. These improvements have largely been driven by our optimizations for the Xbox 360 hardware. We have built a dynamic thread management system that manages processor load by our specific direction and by priorities. Portions of physics, AI, loading, audio, and rendering tasks can all be moved to different threads to keep the overall load balanced. The net result for the end user is a smoother experience.
I think there are some interesting bits in this response. "We have built a dynamic thread management system" really caught my attention. I have read a number of recent articles [ 1, 2 ]talking about the need for multithread programming, and the difficulty of doing it. It seems to me that the ES4 team has not only embraced the idea of threading, but done so in what I think is a very logical manner.
What I envision of a dynamic thread management system from the quote above seems to be what is needed in the next generation of applications. With clock speed giving way to more cores speed increases will need to come from running tasks in parallel. For a number of reasons that I will not go into here, threading by hand can is difficult to do safely, and in many cases ends up being premature optimization. On the other hand leaving threading to a compiler or even worse the CPU circuitry itself has been seen to be fairly ineffective. The human who writes an application is probably the one most qualified to find parallelism, but may not be the best one to implement it at the thread level.
I envision that this system has allowed the different groups involved to create their distinct tasks and rules that govern how the tasks interact, but instead of trying to hand code that interaction, they have designed a system that does the dirty work of translating task interaction into thread logic for them. Additionally, this seems to be done on the fly so a system like the XBOX360 with 3 PPE cores can execute differently then a new PC with a multi core an AMD or INTEL cpu. It also would seem to allow program to adapt to the loads finds itself under.
I for one would really like to hear more about the way this thing functions. In a post to one of the articles I referenced, I asked about the availability of programming paradigms that would abstract the concept of threads much as many languages now abstract the concept of memory allocation with "Garbage Collection." I didn't get much of a response. I'm hoping some Slashdot reader can fill me in on what is know about thread management systems.
JFMILLERReferences:
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for