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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.
gigabytes of hard disk space to store
XBox 360 core dosn't have gigbytes of disk space.
I shouldn't even reply to this, but I'm a woman and I'm looking forward to this game. Yes, I take the occasional shower every day.
And for all of the dirty D&D geeks out there, I already have a boyfriend.
"And for all of the dirty D&D geeks out there, I already have a boyfriend."
Ah, but one must ask, are his D20s big enough for you?
(And there goes my "always respectful" track record.)
As a college undergrad, I was interested in the Elder Scrolls 2 from watching others play. I never really had a computer that could run it. In Grad school, sans flies, I bought a computer to run Elder Scrolls 3 and was so looking forward to playing a computer/console RPG of the likes I had dreamed of since 8th grade...but when I tried it, I realized, I just couldn't get absorbed. It required such an investment of time and interest that my busy life wouldn't allow. Also, I actually felt guilty playing because I knew how much valuable 'real time' was going to waste. I guess I'm too old to play these games now. Too bad my last fling was Ultima 9. Kind of cool, but not what I had dreamed of playing. Don't you wish the sheeny scales would flute madly?
I'm gay, you insensitive clod!
If you want to try the one that started it all, go here. Its free. Windoze only and you need DOSBox.
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
I'm sorry, but you are just wrong in every point. The 360 supports pixel shader models and lighting systems that don't exist in PC hardware yet.
Why exactly won't the XBox 360 have these lighting features? The GPU in the 360 is a next generation video card made by ATI, like nothing on the market right now. Do you have some insider knowledge that it won't have abilities of current DirectX 9 video cards?
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.
-William Brendel
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 : )
I shouldn't have to say this, but your statement announcing you are "a woman" on Slashdot is akin to saying you're available and looking.
So stating "I already have a boyfriend" only indicates to the rest of us that you're looking for a geekier one than you already have.
My dog does that. What kind did you get?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
"If I comment on this, it might damage your ego."
... it's whether or not you can roll the crit hits.
Possibly. But remember, it's not the size that counts...
(Just digging my well of depravity even deeper, aren't I?)
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.
If the only experience with HDR you have is screenshots then you have no ground to stand on. Its one of those things that looks so much better in motion.
good bandwidth to update and expand
Translation: We're really looking forward to releasing an unfinished game and (perhaps) patching the bugs as you find them.
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
From TFA:
Man, a generation above current PC's! So what has it got?
or is this standard journalists who don't understand quoting people who don't understand?
Apparently you seem to know nothing about the game and just posted something half-assedly controversial to get modded up.
The game has many novel features. First, every single NPC in the game has its own life cycle including eating meals, working, sleeping, idle activities (note that I said idle activities, not just idle actions such as those in Far Cry). This enhances the 'immersion' factor, which was a VERY big part of Morrowind. Oblivion takes place over a fairly large amount of land (the # of sq. mi. is at Oblivion's website), has a weather system, open-endedness that Morrowind had (feels a lot like Fallout in the sense that you have lots of stuff to do other than the 'main quest').
The physics engine is awesome even without cloth physics. Trees, grass, arrows, etc. If you look at one of the gameplay videos here you will see a demo where the player character fires arrows into a bucket hanging from the ceiling or something, and the bucket sways and the row buckles etc. from the arrows hitting it. You can then walk up to the bucket, and you will notice that depending on how the arrows penetrated the wood in the bucket (angle, force, etc.), the bucket is tilting or perhaps moving slowly to a stop. When the player character removes the arrows from the bucket, the bucket moves to reflect each arrow you pull out, taking a different 'tilted' position or whatever as per physics. I don't know about you, but the job they did in modifying Havok is pretty damn good.
Graphics: you have to be retarded if you think the game is just bloom effects. First, you might have noticed the large number of textures and colors in the world (in the cities for example). Graphics = technical quality (engine) + artwork (textures). Second, the tree generation (I believe they are using Speedtree like Gothic and Unreal 2007) is awesome, it actually feels like a forest instead of a few scattered trees with few leaves on them. Lastly, you may have noticed that the shader effects are present almost everywhere, whereas in Morrowind they were (mostly) confined to the water. There is soft-shadowing, self-soft-shadowing, and a host of other effects you would want in a tier-1 game as well.
Sound: If you check out the videos I pointed above, you will hear some of the same songs that were in Morrowind. These songs are extremely well done, and conducive to the atmosphere of the game. Oblivion apparently has many more songs now, as expected, and an awesome all-star cast of narrators that really make characters come through more realistically.
For those who enjoy games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, or really any of the Black Isle works, Morrowind and Oblivion are a must-play.
I'm the guy who liked U8.
There I said it.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.