Starfield - Bethesda's new space IP: will probably be full of fun and easily trackable bugs

[The Ghost of Kviv]

I wish Id Software still open sourced their engines, but it seems that after Zenimax bought them that stopped, IdTech 4 being the last one open sourced.

Carmack was the one pushing for open sourcing their old engines, and he's no longer there. I don't think his heart was in open sourcing it at the end anyways, there was a lot of (presumably) unintended drama due to patents for shadows, and brainstorming with another company's developers that put id at of being sued for unpaid work. The engine that was released was Doom 3's version, not Quake War's version with the improved MegaTextures modifications.

As it stands, Bethesda continuing to throw more stuff on top of their 20+ year old core built from NetImmerse is just stupid.

This is always thrown around by people who have no experience with development (and engineering as a whole). The entire industry builds incremental upgrades, from-the-scratch is very rare, and even then uses lessons and algorithms from old projects. Windows 10 still uses old NT 4 tools, object factories and in some cases when booting. Similar with FreeBSD, Darwin, Linux, etc.

Adding this after writing that rant, I've looked into what is known about the engine upgrades. Apparently they have integrated this rendering framework:
https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge This means Vulkan support, as to whether that will be good or stuttery is up in the air, full multithreading, and possible Linux support.

Right at the top of the README is explicit support for Vulkan and Linux.

Apparently Bethesda has doubled down on full mod support for Starfield.

Todd said so on Lex's interview. And CC is coming back, so they'll get their jew on too. Maybe this time, they'll add an extensible scripting engine, so script extenders won't be needed.

---

There is quite a bit of details they haven't gone through in the direct, I've been watching a lot of breakdowns the past week. My favorite small detail is the sepration of local time on-planet and a universal time tied to Earth's UTC. My least favourite is-accoring to DF-they're using FSR Balanced in the footage

 

[ZMOT]

My least favourite is-accoring to DF-they're using FSR Balanced in the footage

if balanced is already good enough for PR, (ultra) quality should be more than fine. most people will notice hard framedrops more than some artefacts of moving objects in the background.
ofc there's the argument they just do it because they're too lazy to optimize properly, but otoh it makes sense to not limit your game only to people who own a 4090.

it's a double-edged sword.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

This is always thrown around by people who have no experience with development (and engineering as a whole). The entire industry builds incremental upgrades, from-the-scratch is very rare, and even then uses lessons and algorithms from old projects. Windows 10 still uses old NT 4 tools, object factories and in some cases when booting. Similar with FreeBSD, Darwin, Linux, etc.

While I am one of the people who like to meme on Bethesda for this reusing of code my issue with it is actually to do with the fact they do not improve things as much as they could and should be improved. There is no problem in using old Morrowind code but there is a problem when old Morrowind bugs still show up and Morrowind work-arounds still get used instead of actual solutions.

This old code also helps Bethesda because it means the Mod people don't have to relearn everything for every new release. You could take someone who only made mods for Oblivion in 2008 and put them in the Fallout 4 GECK and they would be able to get around really fast and probably make a basic mod out of the box.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

but there is a problem when old Morrowind bugs still show up and Morrowind work-arounds still get used instead of actual solutions.

I'd honestly like to know more about this

 

[General Emílio Médici]

The best example out of the top of my head is the fact that Fallout 76 released with a few bugs that were present on the original release of Fallout 4, as in ones that had already been patched out in later patches and DLCs of Fallout 4 but which FOR SOME REASON the 76 Dev Team didn't bother to fix.

Then there is the fact that they are still having physics be tied to FPS for some reason since the original release of the engine with the Havok modules with Oblivion. Havok isn't made by Bethesda, it is a physics system they licensed from a 3rd party to use and tacked it onto their engine. This isn't actually a issue, loads of engines do this for different things because developing everything in house can be a pain. But Bethesda did a shit job and refuses to fix it up and untie the physics from the frame rate which PLENTY OF OTHER GAMES USING HAVOK already do.

One of the main things is they are still using the same sort of thrown together rendering and scripting with almost no change from the days of Morrowind, except the games nowadays need a lot more shit to render due to prevalence of high definition textures meaning the way the engine loads shit is not adequate and causes too much strain (this should be a lot worse, but Bethesda got saved by the death of HDDs and rise of SSDs hiding their shit code for a while. Anyone who played Skyrim or Fallout 4 without a SSD can vouch how it can be annoying) and the reason why every one of their game's modding lists starts with a script extender as necessary loading.

This is a problem with Bethesda in general, but not exactly with NetImmerse/GameBryo/Creation Engine. For contrast Valve has been using a similar M.O. for their games with the "modified Quake 1" / GoldSource / Source /Source 2 where the engines are building on a similar older foundation and the tools for making mods/games are similar. But unlike Bethesda they have put a lot more elbow grease into upgrading it properly. Hell, Unreal Engine and IdTech and CryEngine and Frostbite are all also daughters of their mothers of older engines. Dig into all of those and you will find code made on previous iterations and their original releases. But only Bethesda keeps being this sloppy.

 

[blablabla]

so how is this shit going to run on a 6700xt

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Oh, I thought you meant real bugs not shit I never notice.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Oh, I thought you meant real bugs not shit I never notice.

The Silt Striders and little spiders did show up in glorious HD in Dragonborn DLC that was nice

 

[Epoch]

I'd honestly like to know more about this

I think most of the bugs that have stuck around are from Havok, since they still were using an ancient version of it all the way until Fallout 76, not sure if they finally updated in Starfield or not. There was a visual bug with the underwater effects not appearing at certain angles, I think that only got fixed in Skyrim Special Edition (I am unsure if Fallout 4 has it, I have not played Fallout 4) where they changed the underwater to work partially, that went back to Morrowind. I am unsure if its still really an issue but the randomly falling through the ground that happens in Morrowind still happened for games afterwards I think.

It's not really apparent in gameplay, but open up the Morrowind Creation Set, then open up the Oblivion set, then GECK, then Creation Kit, besides just the UI being identical, they all still have unused fields for a ton of Morrowind features, like custom spells, the entire armor slot system that infuriates modders is from Morrowind. The entire cell based open world design is extremely outdated and wasn't even in use anymore by the time Oblivion came out, but it seems like they are still using it.

Basically in gameplay, most of the carry over bugs are physics related, but under the hood its all Morrowind.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

I think most of the bugs that have stuck around are from Havok, since they still were using an ancient version of it all the way until Fallout 76, not sure if they finally updated in Starfield or not. There was a visual bug with the underwater effects not appearing at certain angles, I think that only got fixed in Skyrim Special Edition (I am unsure if Fallout 4 has it, I have not played Fallout 4) where they changed the underwater to work partially, that went back to Morrowind. I am unsure if its still really an issue but the randomly falling through the ground that happens in Morrowind still happened for games afterwards I think.

It's not really apparent in gameplay, but open up the Morrowind Creation Set, then open up the Oblivion set, then GECK, then Creation Kit, besides just the UI being identical, they all still have unused fields for a ton of Morrowind features, like custom spells, the entire armor slot system that infuriates modders is from Morrowind. The entire cell based open world design is extremely outdated and wasn't even in use anymore by the time Oblivion came out, but it seems like they are still using it.

Basically in gameplay, most of the carry over bugs are physics related, but under the hood its all Morrowind.

From what I understand they have completely ditched Havok for something else with Starfield (although they didn't specify what exactly).

I'm amazed they still use frame rate tied physics and cell based designs. Didn't other companies stop using these methods years ago because it really tied their hands with regard to what they could do and it simply wasn't necessary or prudent to use said methods any longer since there is no longer such a constraint on the resources that required them in the first place?

 

[Miller]

Then there is the fact that they are still having physics be tied to FPS for some reason since the original release of the engine with the Havok modules with Oblivion. Havok isn't made by Bethesda, it is a physics system they licensed from a 3rd party to use and tacked it onto their engine. This isn't actually a issue, loads of engines do this for different things because developing everything in house can be a pain. But Bethesda did a shit job and refuses to fix it up and untie the physics from the frame rate which PLENTY OF OTHER GAMES USING HAVOK already do.

I remember the Skyrim intro and the carriages jumping all around, or when you enter Alvor's house in Riverwood all the plates and food fly around and block Sigrid's AI path. What a nightmare.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I remember the Skyrim intro and the carriages jumping all around, or when you enter Alvor's house in Riverwood all the plates and food fly around and block Sigrid's AI path. What a nightmare.

I've only ever had the carts wig out on me once

I wish I saw more of this funny shit tbqh

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

I remember the Skyrim intro and the carriages jumping all around, or when you enter Alvor's house in Riverwood all the plates and food fly around and block Sigrid's AI path. What a nightmare.

I almost forgot about the janky physics in that game. It was hilarious.

 

[scathefire]

I remember the Skyrim intro and the carriages jumping all around

That happens a lot when you download mods that have setup at the beginning of the game, that combined with the cart physics will break the entire intro. It's why on a modded game you likely need to use Alternate Start or some other some other mod that changes the very beginning of the game.

 

[Fools Idol]

One of the worst things about Bethesda games is just how small the cities are. I understand why, hardware and dev limitations wouldn't make that piratical but it's hard to ignore how distracting small these places are. Even Rockstar struggles with making their cities all that interesting outside of glorified set dressing.

I think a better way of doing it would be to have the cities be less "open". What I mean is that instead of having a freely explorable environment they should have a series of winding interconnected streets, with the rest of the city being mostly a back drop. They could still get the same amount of intractability with the environment and NPC's but much more focused and dense. It's how games used to fake have a much bigger environment.

 

[Asian tech support]

One of the worst things about Bethesda games is just how small the cities are. I understand why, hardware and dev limitations wouldn't make that piratical but it's hard to ignore how distracting small these places are. Even Rockstar struggles with making their cities all that interesting outside of glorified set dressing.

It's a problem that gets exponentially worse the more contemporary/futuristic the setting gets and definitely hits BGS, known for their capital hamlets, hard. Cyberpunk had this same problem and they got a fucking city planner (allegedly) work on the layout. Ironically, I think that Novigrad and Beauclair from The Witcher 3 are some of the better cities from recent memory but most importantly were appropriate for the scale of the game. It'd be interesting if AI designed environments in the future can fix this because there's no indication it's going to get better anytime soon.

 

[Fools Idol]

It's a problem that gets exponentially worse the more contemporary/futuristic the setting gets and definitely hits BGS, known for their capital hamlets, hard. Cyberpunk had this same problem and they got a fucking city planner (allegedly) work on the layout. Ironically, I think that Novigrad and Beauclair from The Witcher 3 are some of the better cities from recent memory but most importantly were appropriate for the scale of the game. It'd be interesting if AI designed environments in the future can fix this because there's no indication it's going to get better anytime soon.

The problem with Bethesda's world design is that it is so haphazardly thrown together. It's just blobs of random buildings placed into a big mostly empty wasteland of nothing. Games like Gothic 2 gives you fully explorable, fully interactable world like Bethesda but are far denser and that game was made on a shoe string budget and is 20 years old. Not everything can be a masterpiece like Gothic but the point still stands.

Assassin's Creed is usually pretty good, Syndicate's London is especially good mostly because they don't try to condense the full city down. They replicate the most relevant parts of London with the rest of the city being a backdrop which I think is the best way to do this sort of thing. Mass Effect is probably the closest to Starfield so it'll be interesting to see how they compare. Bioware couldn't make a full sized space station but the Citadel certainly felt like one thanks to these of tricks and illusions.

The big worry about Starfield is that it's a Bethesda game.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Man, you think Neil Degrasse Tyson is going to sperg the fuck out about all the shit Starfield gets wrong when it comes out?

 

[ZMOT]

Assassin's Creed is usually pretty good, Syndicate's London is especially good mostly because they don't try to condense the full city down. They replicate the most relevant parts of London with the rest of the city being a backdrop which I think is the best way to do this sort of thing. Mass Effect is probably the closest to Starfield so it'll be interesting to see how they compare. Bioware couldn't make a full sized space station but the Citadel certainly felt like one thanks to these of tricks and illusions.

mass effect had the big urban spaces in the background and mentioned them in dialogs. don't think most people noticed but all of citadel arms or whatever were densely populated.

as for size, that's a problem not limited to cities or bethesda. most games have heavily condensed areas where shit that supposed to be a dayride away is 5 meters outside the gate, I guess cities just make it more obvious. unless they start making everything more appropriately sized (unlikely due to the manpower requirement and ai/procedural generation still looks off) this won't change anytime soon. you'll also inevitably get people whining about it and begging for fast travel.
ironically older games handled that better because they had to, instead of turning everything into a single big open world meme, you only had "open world" areas which were loosely connected. this gave the feel that area A is still some distance away from area B etc.
starfield could do the same, imagine coruscant but you're only allowed to land or enter certain walled-off spaced. it would even make sense in regard it's some bumfuck planet with fences, but an inhabited place where you logically can't enter everywhere nilly willy - videogame-protag or not.

 

[Epoch]

starfield could do the same, imagine coruscant but you're only allowed to land or enter certain walled-off spaced. it would even make sense in regard it's some bumfuck planet with fences, but an inhabited place where you logically can't enter everywhere nilly willy - videogame-protag or not.

Star Citizen does this, major cities are full scale from outside, but the actual explorable on foot area is a small section, but it still feels large because of the dense detail around it, and areas are spread across the full scale city and require public transit to go between. It's the same sort of thing with their space stations too, the only actual 1:1 locations are planetary outposts. Bethesda seems to be taking a lot from Star Citizen for Starfield, wonder if they did this for their 'largest city ever'. Serves them right, Star Citizen has had a decade and its still a laggy prototype that makes millions of dollars somehow.