The Elder Scrolls

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There's a lot of weird lore built up about Hammerfall, like didn't they magically appear from another timeline/dimension? Or at least from another part of Nirn? Or another time in Nirn? I could see some sword magic teleporting to randomly generated wastelands (ie planet zones in Starfield).

It's too bad their melee interaction is shit, no idea how that will be fun with the sword singers and their jank ass melee mechanics.
The short version of Redguard history is that they left their homeland of Yokuda because their sword singing became so powerful that they blew up the continent and migrated to what is today Hammerfall. When they arrived they acted like african migrants in Europe and raped and killed every Nede they could find. Hammerfall is named that because a Dwemer king wanted to found his own kingdom so he threw Volundruung into the air and it landed there.
 
I cannot see a single thing in Starfield that feels feature forward in terms of what it could add to TES VI.
Yeah, that's why the only thing I can really say off the top of my head is open cities and levitation through the jetpack mechanics. (but at this point, I'd much rather have closed off cities that have the appearance of being bigger than being able to levitate into tiny ass cities)

Like, maybe the scale of the map will be gigantic due to the tech to generate the planets? Maybe we will build a new Numidum based on the starship building? (lol I wish)

It's why I'm not so doom and gloom when it come to ES compared to Starfield. Starfield is much closer to a Fallout game than an ES game, but even then so many of the features fit only with it. It's why I really do believe they wanted it to be a 10 year platform sort of deal.
 
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Like, maybe the scale of the map will be gigantic due to the tech to generate the planets?
Starfield has limited size maps that are about as big as Skyrim or Fallout 4 (both of which were just skirting the limits of the engine), so if they did this it would be split into areas like Starfield or Daggerfall. Starfield also still exhibits floating point precision errors (of which you can see in Skyrim when you are in the Dragon Bridge area) so maps being any larger, if the engine even supported it and didn't shit itself, would need either super high precision coordinates like OpenMW, or a floating origin like every modern open world game.

No clue why they don't have a floating origin, you would think still using cells would mean that it would be easy to tether it to the origin of the current cell.
 
I'd much rather have closed off cities that have the appearance of being bigger than being able to levitate into tiny ass cities
It's shocking how much more of a real city Novigrad feels like in The Witcher 3, than anything Bethesda has done. Yeah, the other cities fall a bit flat, and I think if you compare it even to say, 1600s London, Novigrad is still comically small.
 
Novigrad is still comically small.
I get that having a big ass city, especially in what should be an action/RPG, isn't conductive to good gameplay.

But there are still ways to create the illusion without actually making a big giant (boring) city.

Novigrad isn't actually "big", but the main thing is that it doesn't *feel* small. Bethesda has never been able to do that, but I give them the benefit of the doubt in the past because of technology limitations.

But it's hard for me to give them that benefit these days.
 
Can you elaborate on this? Never heard of seeing it from there before and I like reading about these kinds of bugs.
Basically a floating point value is a fractional number, but since it could be 1.1 or 1.00001 you need to 'float' the decimal point for storing the value instead of just storing 1.1 as 1.10000, a value of 1.1 needs less precision than 1.00001. This works until you start getting very large numbers, as the total size of the number is limited by the bits allocated to storing it, so an 8 bit float only has 8 binary bits to store the number in (7 really since 1 bit is used for sign), meaning that the larger your number the less space you have to store the decimal information. Vectors all exist around an origin point, 0,0, so the closer you are to the origin the smaller the whole number and the more precise your decimal becomes, as you move further away from the origin your whole number becomes larger and you have less precision in the decimal space and at some point it ends up being rounded towards the nearest bit.

In 3d games this appears as the vertices of 3d objects starting to wiggle, as the precision breaks down and the location gets rounded to the nearest point it can. The big famous example of this is the Farlands in Beta Minecraft, where the precision breaks down as you go futher out and you start to snap to blocks, and eventually the random noise generation just completely breaks and you get the Farlands. Here is what you can see in Starfield, its more apparent than in Skyrim because of all the micro geometry details and the decals on the gun, so when the precision breaks down it becomes a lot more visible.


In Skyrim it happens when you are around the edges of the map (not actually Dragon Bridge, I was just thinking of that region), but its also barely noticeable unless you are directly looking for it. I took some clips of it happening outside Dayspring Canyon and at Castle Volikhar, as those are the two extremes from the origin, which is slightly west of Whiterun. Hopefully you can see it through the compression on the vid, look at the character's fingers holding the sword, they get jiggly when it moves around.

It's easier to see in the Volikhar clip because its further out along both axis.

VS what it looks like when its not having precision issues, right near where the origin is (not on it directly, just the nearest fast travel point)


Its hard to see unless you are looking for it, and the compression on these clips probably makes it harder, but again look at the fingers. You can also see this happen in the Markarth area, pretty much any location on the outer rim of the map. Once you know what to look for you can't not see it when it appears. It happens a lot in Halo 2 and 3 in the large maps, even still happens in Destiny 2 from what I recall and you can see it in Half-Life 2 in the coast maps, but its become less of a thing in recent years due to the move to higher precision floats or just using a floating origin for open world games, I guess its another thing that just shows how old the Creation engine actually is at its core.

Rudy's ENB for Cathedral Weathers for those wondering.
 
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It's shocking how much more of a real city Novigrad feels like in The Witcher 3, than anything Bethesda has done. Yeah, the other cities fall a bit flat, and I think if you compare it even to say, 1600s London, Novigrad is still comically small.
The size problem is always going to be a thing and that's only more of the case in open world games that have cities within the overworld. Even in games like GTA or Cyberpunk where the city is the world, they're still smaller than any real world city. So long as the city is properly dense, it isn't an issue but you're gonna notice it if you can zip from one side of the city to the other in a car in a minute or two. Cyberpunk fails in this regard as the city, while sizable for a video game city, has very little going on outside of the POIs and thus comes across as a Potemkin village.

What Bethesda has been doing is so pathetic it has to be an internal joke or something. Their grand gleaming metropolises amount to something the size of a one street small town, if that. Even taking into account the 1:10,000 or whatever scale the toddguards fall back on all the time (now being applied to non-TES games lmao), everything they've done in the last 15 years fails as a city even when scaled down. A ten year old could look at New Atlantis, wonder where the fuck the transportation is and why no one has jobs, and probably design a city constrained within the original limits better than what some Maryland tranny came up with in between his dilating sessions.
 
Hate the fucking Soul Cairn so much "Hurr durr let's weaken the player on entry and hide the item to stop it in a dark map that all looks the same so the player spends hours searching. While we're at it let's put a bunch of vaguely cool shit in it because this DLC doesn't have enough padding already" - retard.

Honestly the worst part is knowing that even when I'm done with this garbage map I've still got that painfully long bullshit with the Snow Elves and that one canyon that feels about twice as long as it needs to be.

I was reading @Mary the Goldsmith's excellent LP of Pokémon Reborn and it really struck me why I don't like this DLC. In that LP I linked, the main character is often depicted as being on her phone while the NPCs discuss plot matters, because she might as well be. Dawnguard is very, very guilty of this, too. Serana is yelling at her dipshit parents or arguing with that Snow Elf and I'm just standing there staring into space. At least in the confrontation with Harkon you're part of the conversation, at least to some degree. If it weren't for the sun spells and high HP summons I wouldn't bother with this crap at all.
 
Hate the fucking Soul Cairn so much "Hurr durr let's weaken the player on entry and hide the item to stop it in a dark map that all looks the same so the player spends hours searching. While we're at it let's put a bunch of vaguely cool shit in it because this DLC doesn't have enough padding already" - retard.

Honestly the worst part is knowing that even when I'm done with this garbage map I've still got that painfully long bullshit with the Snow Elves and that one canyon that feels about twice as long as it needs to be.
Soul Cairn feels like a low effort area added by a shitty mod. Featureless landscape full of palette shifted enemies, copy-pasted structures, and bisected by a flat, endless wall. I don't remember the narrative surrounding Skyrim was when Dawnguard came out but it looks like it was shat out extremely quickly.
Dawnguard is very, very guilty of this, too. Serana is yelling at her dipshit parents or arguing with that Snow Elf and I'm just standing there staring into space.
"It's her world, we just play in it. You'll never have her, incel."

- some 32 year old balding bethesda employee in 2012, probably
 
In Skyrim it happens when you are around the edges of the map (not actually Dragon Bridge, I was just thinking of that region), but its also barely noticeable unless you are directly looking for it.
Great writeup and bookmarked, though I already know what it is, I thought Dragon Bridge was a bit too close for it to manifest. Next time I boot up the game I'll take a look, it is really noticeable in Starfield but I don't see what's going on with the finger's in Skyrim, especially with the character rigging in that game is its own kind of jank (I love people in plate armor twisting their spine and that steel 45 degrees to talk to me!)
I have memories of a video where someone tested the world size limit by using commands to ride a horse out as far as possible and the horse started snapping into place like as described but I might've imagined that.
Soul Cairn feels like a low effort area added by a shitty mod.
I liked the Soul Cairn in my first run for being sombre and unlike any other worldspace but in subsequent ones it was fatiguing to go through.
It's really hard to care about any NPCs when scenes with them are like a school play, they stand there with stiff body language and their character is essentially carried by the performance of the voice actor. Part of me plays along and suspends my disbelief like it's pantomime but it's really cheesy when someone like Serana has her more emotional moments but we're just standing around with bad Bethesda animations. Or when that old man in the Dragonborn DLC gets tentacle raped and everyone stands there staring while the script takes 4 seconds to make his daughter scream in horror.
 
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Great writeup and bookmarked, though I already know what it is, I thought Dragon Bridge was a bit too close for it to manifest. Next time I boot up the game I'll take a look, it is really noticeable in Starfield but I don't see what's going on with the finger's in Skyrim, especially with the character rigging in that game is its own kind of jank (I love people in plate armor twisting their spine and that steel 45 degrees to talk to me!)
I'll admit that my ENB with its anti aliasing on top of the video being downscaled from 1440p then compressed does nothing to help you see it, but it is there, albeit however subtle. I think I remember seeing it around the Solitude area, but that might have been in Skyrim VR where the tiny motions are much more exaggerated and it becomes more apparent. I think it also shows up on steel swords right on the blade tip.

I think as for world size limits, Creation just breaks every object that isn't a static reference 64 cells from the origin, and Skyrim is somewhere in the 50 cells area if my memory is correct.

Here is what it manifests as, its based on the position on each axis, so if you only move along the x axis but keep y at 0 then you will only get distortion along the x axis.
 
I think as for world size limits, Creation just breaks every object that isn't a static reference 64 cells from the origin, and Skyrim is somewhere in the 50 cells area if my memory is correct.
Once again I'm wondering if it could be fixed with a mod, since we've come so far and gone past things like the light limit which everyone thought was impossible. Not that I think anyone is actually working on it or probably wants to. Maybe the brains with the answer is at OpenMW, seems like their kind of thing, but they're busy working on that.
 
Once again I'm wondering if it could be fixed with a mod, since we've come so far and gone past things like the light limit which everyone thought was impossible. Not that I think anyone is actually working on it or probably wants to. Maybe the brains with the answer is at OpenMW, seems like their kind of thing, but they're busy working on that.
Can't really be fixed, its an engine side limitation. OpenMW fixed it on their end by using double precision 64 bit floats, so it should never happen unless you are going out as far as other planets. OpenMW is not a mod it is a full engine made from scratch that just happens to play Morrowind, so they are not limited to hacking Bethesda's code. Even with a script extender as ingrained as MWSE with its full access to the scene graph, it cannot fix the floating point errors, so playing Tamriel Rebuilt or Skyrim Home of the Nords or Province Cyrodiil you have to deal with juttery movement and models.

I just looked it up because I had never heard about the Skyrim light fix outside of ENBSeries (which just runs a deferred renderer overtop Skyrim's forward renderer). It's only possible because of the community shaders mod, and it clusters the lighting rendering to only apply lights in the forward render to objects that are within the same cluster as that lights affected area. Community shaders hooks in to the render process in the same way as ENBSeries I believe, but instead of a closed source thing with pre-defined effects it allows you to load custom shaders or modify existing shaders. It's impressive, but floating point precision is not a shader call that can be hooked in to, and is instead a fundamental part of how the engine handles the world.
 
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OpenMW is not a mod it is a full engine made from scratch that just happens to play Morrowind, so they are not limited to hacking Bethesda's code.
Yeah, I don't know if I've been wording my last few posts strangely or what but I know OpenMW is not a mod, I'm just saying the nature of it is why I think they're the kind of people who would be able to create a solution as opposed to, say, people who only know how to do deal with plugins. The fix for the light limit and how its implemented is a total rewrite of Skyrim's shaders, which is what led me to believe that implementing a fix for floating point errors could be a little less impossible.
I wanna see people shove Skyrim into OpenMW, I wouldn't hold my breath but it would be interesting and that's one of the reasons.
 
I wanna see people shove Skyrim into OpenMW, I wouldn't hold my breath but it would be interesting and that's one of the reasons.
The OpenMW devs are currently working on an ESM4 'walking simulator' project, they want to be able to load the future games and their worlds, but not implement any of the mechanics yet. This would benefit both Morrowind modders, as it would allow you to use later versions of NIFs with all the fancy new features (you already sort of can) and it allows for easier integration of future games. In the current non-dev version of OpenMW you can already load Skyrim BSAs and they have a stark benefit over Morrowind BSAs as they allow you to store everything in them and they load faster and compress better.

As for the light limit thing, to add on to my edit. OpenMW already lifts the light limit, but it is still a traditional forward renderer without any clustered shading, so you get performance impact with more lights. They have plans to add clustered shading and the framework is in place for it, they just haven't yet since Morrowind doesn't really ever run into light issues now that they uncapped the 8 light limit, but it would improve performance.
 
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I get that having a big ass city, especially in what should be an action/RPG, isn't conductive to good gameplay.

But there are still ways to create the illusion without actually making a big giant (boring) city.

Novigrad isn't actually "big", but the main thing is that it doesn't *feel* small. Bethesda has never been able to do that, but I give them the benefit of the doubt in the past because of technology limitations.

But it's hard for me to give them that benefit these days.
Novigrad is great. Its crowded, there's shit going on, the districts all feel incredibly distinct, and even has actual sewers to crawl though.

TBH its probably the districts. The poorfags live in crowded squalor, there's a somewhat distinct middle-class area between them and the rich, and the rich live really fucking well. Oh, and like all cities the really poor poorfags are forced outside the city walls and to beg the guards for entry. Unlike most other cities though, each of the districts are big enough that they don't feel like they were place cookie-cutter style, but instead the transition between the rich areas to poor areas or vice versa feels entirely natural.
 
I don't remember the narrative surrounding Skyrim was when Dawnguard came out but it looks like it was shat out extremely quickly.
Most of the talk around Skyrim's first DLC is it was halfway made in the final hours of development, continuing on once the game went gold. I don't think the opinion has really changed. With how werewolf was a thing again but vampire was barebones, it just sort of struck a lot as withheld or at least planned during development. The actual DLC itself mostly feels relatively low effort using textures from vanilla and a seemingly small amount of new anything. No one thought of Dawnguard as "saving Skyrim". It was mostly thought of as a complete game and the DLC just being something new to do, if boring. Dragonborn was seen as the one that improved the core a bit and was "new" despite it mostly being memberberries.
 
Has Starfield changed or affirmed anyone's expectations for Elder Scrolls 6?
Starfield did nothing to change my expectation. Current year already made me believe they'll go full WE WUZ KANGZ with some added slavery garbage where the returned dwemer or the thalmor are enslaving the redguards. Unlike everywhere else in Tamriel, Hammerfell will be strangely homogenous.
All the women will be ugly as sin (more than usual), and sword singing will be ridiculously overpowered. No improvements when it comes to gameplay.
 
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