I’m just ready to be a space-girl in space already.
A large RPG in space? RPG-style? I’m all in, 30fps or not.
I’m curious about this kind of thing from an engine and console architecture perspective. Any gamedevs able to shed some light?
I work in the industry, but not directly on low-level engine implementation details. Personally, my gut thinking is that the Creation Engine is falling behind in terms of modern asset streaming techniques.
Similarly, I wonder if a lack of strong virtualized geometry / just-in-time LOD generation tech could be a huge bottleneck?
From what I understand, efforts like Nanite in UE5 were an enormous engineering investment for Epic, and unless Bethesda has a massive engine team of their own (they don’t), they simply won’t be able to benefit from an in-house equivalent in tech.
Ultimately, I do think the lack of innovation in the Creation Engine is due to internal technical targets being established as “30FPS is good enough” and frame times below 33ms are viewed as “for those PC gamers with power to spare.”
My best guess would be that the engine just has vast amounts of technical debt. Skyrim (pre-LE at least) had a savegame corruption bug that has been around since Morrowind. And while I’m sure they have rewritten huge parts of the engine over the decades it’s not rare to see bugs persist over generations, and modders complaining loudly about it. The engine has never been great about asset streaming either so no surprise here.
I’m curious about this kind of thing from an engine and console architecture perspective. Any gamedevs able to shed some light?
I work in the industry, but not directly on low-level engine implementation details. Personally, my gut thinking is that the Creation Engine is falling behind in terms of modern asset streaming techniques.
In an imaginary world where I’ve poured over Bethesda’s engine source for days, I wonder if I might discover that:
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Asset formats and/or orchestration code used for asset streaming in the Creation Engine are not optimized to a degree where scene graphs can be effectively culled based on camera frustum or player proximity without noticeable dips in frame-time. It simply takes too long to pause actor simulations or too long to stream assets back into memory and reintroduce objects to the scene graph
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Virtualized geometry or other magical low-overhead auto-LOD solutions aren’t in place. As far as I understand it, efforts like Nanite in UE5 were an enormous engineering investment for Epic, and unless Bethesda has a massive engine team of their own (they don’t), they simply won’t be able to benefit from an in-house equivalent in tech
Part of me hopes that they do a demo or open beta or something so that we can see what it’s like at 30fps
I love how Microsoft said that with their exclusive titles they’ll only have to focus on one console and as such the performance will be better. Now here we are and seemingly all of these titles run at 30 FPS. I just hope they will offer a performance option if it is run on a lower resolution. Having these options is exactly what keeps me on the PC platform.
