Skyrim - The Technology behind TES V

Gameinformer takes a look at the technology behind Skyrim.

Though Skyrim's Nordic setting is a more rugged environment than the Renaissance festival feel of Oblivion's Cyrodiil, the new setting isn't lacking in breathtaking views. To create a diverse country filled with steep mountain passes and dense forests, babbling brooks and violent waterfalls, glacier coastlines and snowy tundras, Bethesda went back to the drawing board and rewrote every major system powering the gameplay experience. The result is the newly dubbed Creation Engine and Kit.
“The big things for us were to draw a lot of stuff in the distance so we have a really sophisticated level of detail, more so than what we've had in the past for how things stream in and how detail gets added to them as they get closer to the camera,” explains Bethesda Studios creative director Todd Howard.

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More information.

Is this guy trolling? Camera planes fool! Use occlusion next time fool! Quadtree, octree. Cells were never special to your silly fallout 3 / oblivanon games.

Lol lets focus the camera in a real small area and thus performance will be great! no you idiot. my name is Prosper and the game i am making is using a free version of Unity3D and it will look better still than their game.

.. maybe it won't look better entirely, but it will not have any of the performance issues of Beths.

Really the issue isn't whether Bethesdas game can hold up to performance of others, but that their technology isn't showing through these words.

"how detail gets added to them as they get closer to the camera"

LOD!!. Yay. Why not just say your new engine can handle LOD greater than any of your former games.

Also Bethesda, your whole reasoning behind ID Tech 5 has yet to convince me you aren't just disobeying the law. "Make games not engines".

Seriously, you think ID Tech 5 couldn't be open world? You seriously underestimate the programmers who surround man with hair. What is his name.. douglas.. nope. John CARMACK. And John Carmack himself. I bet you a double blind folded knee bashing that your cracka ass has no idea how long these simple yet clever ways of optimization has been documented. WTF. brb shut up mom.

That one screenshot is nice.
If half the stuff in that article is true, it will be a nice game.

But this is Todd Howard we are talking about and getting quotes from. At least half of the information in the article must therefore be a lie or all of it be half-truth at best.

The Radiant AI technology introduced in Oblivion went a long way toward making the NPCs act in realistic ways.

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Remember the movies of the NPC doing practice and reacting realistically in the movie prior to Oblivion's release that touted the brilliance of the Radiant AI system. When it was release it was no where near that and from what packages you can create in the designer were fairly basic. Some custom NPCs were done fairly well but as a whole it was nothing special. Ultima had better NPC scripting and schedules 20 years ago.

Anyway I really do hope they can deliver on what they think they are delivering to us.

I get a Gothic 3 vibe from the screenschot.

figment said:

Remember the movies of the NPC doing practice and reacting realistically in the movie prior to Oblivion's release that touted the brilliance of the Radiant AI system. When it was release it was no where near that and from what packages you can create in the designer were fairly basic.

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You can do all that from TESCS, and there are mods that makes NPC's more "alive" like in that video they liked to show off, and there are mods that makes you meet other adventurers that are also roaming the land just like you (which they also claimed would be in the game)..
It's taxing for the CPU of course, so it didnt work out in the end to have that kind of AI on a multiplatform game for every NPC. The shadows didnt work out either.

It must be nice being a dev, "we have this and that, gonna be awesome, here, we'll even show you!" and then when the game is released people say "wtf? there are no shadows like they showed us", dev says "oh, those? no, no, no, they didnt work out AT ALL for us in the end, sorry! "

Some custom NPCs were done fairly well but as a whole it was nothing special. Ultima had better NPC scripting and schedules 20 years ago.

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Indeed great for the time, beats any Bioware game even to this date, by a longshot. Not sure it was better than Oblivion or Gothic's, but it was well done.. I remember them opening windows, making food, going to sleep and work etc.. impressed the hell out of me at the time. Sad how little has happened in all those years, and that's its just Oblivion, Skyrim, Gothic 1-3 and The Sims that are even venturing there with the AI.

In the end, it's just hype, same for every game. But i particularly dislike how Bethesda has done it since Morrowind (yeah they hyped the AI for MW too).

I was wondering when this new engine was going to get a name. So is this "Creation Engine" completely new, or did they just modify Gamebryo and change the name again?

They've been saying it's completely new, internally developed engine since a few months back, not sure why "everyone" is still doubting (just read something similar to your post on another forum). They give the new engine a name and people are wondering if they just renamed the engine they've been licencing (which i really doubt they are allowed to do). It's never gonna stop, i even hope they'll rename it to Gamebryo2 so people will shut up about it!! j/k

Also, "Change the name again"?

“The big things for us were to draw a lot of stuff in the distance so we have a really sophisticated level of detail, more so than what we've had in the past for how things stream in and how detail gets added to them as they get closer to the camera,” explains Bethesda Studios creative director Todd Howard.

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Erm…the "level of detail" they used in Obliovion was " swap in (pop in!) a new model if you're at distance X" I Should bloody well hope they do proper LOD this time. And that nasty "detail distance" at which point grass tufts etc suddenly appear… it was appaling. I really hope they employed people who understand cutting edge LOD schemes to implement there scheme. Or read the CG literature - I've always been very unimpresed by most LOD implementations out there. And if you can't avoid popping (through geomorphing or something else), then fake it - use fog/lighting judiciously. Popping is a complete immersion killer. I'll remember this quote of Mr Howard's ;-)

Ultima had better NPC scripting and schedules 20 years ago.

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Yeah, Ultima had far superior NPC scripting.... Oblivion comes nowhere near. Even more important all the NPC's in Ultima was interesting and had a reason to be there... while almost all of the Oblivion ones were generic crap..... hope they learned something!

The original Gothic is still the best I've seen. Sure, it was all scripted and not done by an AI, but that doesn't change the fact that the overall impression and feeling of the NPCs was more realistic than anything powered by an AI.

Then again, I do realize scripting all the NPCs of Oblivion would be a hard task, considering how big it is. To me, that just means they should've cut some of the fluff content though.

As far as the hyping in the article……. I think that this time Beth…. is probably aware that NONE is going to believe their hype…… *looks at the comment to the article*

ooops, this time people are going to believe the hype more than ever.....

bemushroomed said:

They give the new engine a name and people are wondering if they just renamed the engine they've been licencing (which i really doubt they are allowed to do). It's never gonna stop, i even hope they'll rename it to Gamebryo2 so people will shut up about it!! j/k

Also, "Change the name again"?

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Why would they not be allowed to change the name of their engine? They can do whatever they want, and yes, they've done it before. The Gamebryo engine wasn't a new engine to begin with, but rather a continuation of the Netimmerse engine.

They should add kicking to Skyrim. Love kicking off people / stuff in Dark Messiah. Its especially fun when done from high places like Skyrim. I call it the "Kicking game" or "Foot game". Its one of the greatest advances seen in computer rpgs in last few years. Age of Conan had it too only with horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-rl3RPC_Mw

Hype or not only time will tell (to be honest, with AAA games you have to consider a good amount of hype is almost always included). But the laundry list given for the technical stuff here is pretty much exactly what my own would look like. So in that sense: so far, so good.
I also have to say I am also glad they are continuing the development of "radiant" AI. While it was a bit of a dud in practice, it was still a good concept in the sense of moving shedules from strictly scripted to an AI based (conditional) behavior. And of course, bugs and all, it was still a marked improvement over MW's static NPCs. So I am looking forward to the second iteration.

JDR13 said:

Why would they not be allowed to change the name of their engine? They can do whatever they want, and yes, they've done it before. The Gamebryo engine wasn't a new engine to begin with, but rather a continuation of the Netimmerse engine.

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Got a source for that, that it's Bethesda's engine and not a licenced one? From what i know its not theirs, thus they have no controll what the engine is called or can make any name changes to it.

booboo: agree with the pop-in, that's terrible, i noticed it a lot more in Oblivion than in FO3 though.. i don't think i've seen a game yet with grass that doesnt fade in though.

bemushroomed said:

Got a source for that, that it's Bethesda's engine and not a licenced one? From what i know its not theirs, thus they have no controll what the engine is called or can make any name changes to it.

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I meant the engine devs, not Bethesda specifically. The rights to Gamebryo are owned by Emergent Game Technologies.

Besides all the technical stuff and the sweet talking screenshot still looks like oblivion.

Tragos said:

Besides all the technical stuff and the sweet talking screenshot still looks like oblivion.

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Reminds me a lot more of Risen, actually (which is a good thing).

zakhal said:

They should add kicking to Skyrim. Love kicking off people / stuff in Dark Messiah. Its especially fun when done from high places like Skyrim. I call it the "Kicking game" or "Foot game". Its one of the greatest advances seen in computer rpgs in last few years. Age of Conan had it too only with horse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-rl3RPC_Mw

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The warden class in LOTRO is a very good kicker.