Skyrim - Steam Preloads Open

You can now preload Skyrim on Steam:

Pre-Load The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim now and be ready to play when it releases!

Battle ancient dragons like you’ve never seen. As Dragonborn, learn their secrets and harness their power for yourself.

Thanks, Vistaer!
More information.

woo hoo, 0.2% and counting!

woohoo, I'm not buying from Bethesda, EA or Blizzard , unless its an electronic sport i'm really into, which is not the case and don't think it will ever be

How much HDD space does it take?

Edit: I saw, it's 5 gb.

Do you need to be buying the steam version to pre-download it? (I suspect you do, but seeing as it'll be updated via steam for all versions I'm not certain)

Daniel.

Being a Steamworks title, you could use the key from another version and download from Steam…though if you have discs, I don't see the point…

9.8% and going … should be done when I get home today

Already done. Ready and willing to try it!

I think he was probably referring to downloading it now from steam until he could buy the the game on Friday from the store so that he wouldn't have to wait for the install to play and would just have to activate.

I just saw the Skyrim box on a shelf here ( France ). It explicitly states that Steam is required.
Anyway, I bought from Steam and pre-downloading at 3.5 MB/s; nearly finished.

Pooey, didn't see this till I got to work. I guess I'll run home at lunch and start it downloading. My internet at home isn't the fastest.

I started it downloading this morning before going to work. Now I've got to stare at the icon for a few days. I'm about 3000 words down on a writing competition I'm doing, so that's probably a good thing.

Bah I want to play around with the mod tools already.

I'm kind of curious what sort compression ratio they managed to get for the art assets. I mean loss-less compression doesn't give you that much wiggle room - an algorithm which improves compression by even a few percent is considered a significant step forward in many cases. Of course that's assuming the compression they had been using in their gamebryo games wasn't horribly outmoded at the time. That's probably a bit much to assume.

Preloaded and waiting for friday!

I'm betting they saved a massive amount of texture size by staying with DirectX9 and they can probably patch it to DirectX10 anytime.

Originally Posted by Acleacius
I'm betting they saved a massive amount of texture size by staying with DirectX9 and they can probably patch it to DirectX10 anytime.

Skyrim is a DX11 game. They only used the DX11 optimization features and not the eye candy features.

Originally Posted by CountChocula
Skyrim is a DX11 game. They only used the DX11 optimization features and not the eye candy features.

You wha….

Seriously - Skyrim uses dx11 hardware functions, not just the dx11 software runtime?

Todd's quote:


"Basically, it's mostly a DX9 game in terms of [how the] shaders work," Todd told AusGamers. "When it comes to DX11 there are things they give us for free in terms of performance gains, and that's really what I meant.

"So we get performance gains out of it, versus an older version, and there are specifics that DX11 does like tessellation and that kind of stuff; we aren't taking advantage of that right now. But that doesn't mean we won't in the future, we just aren't right now."

Originally Posted by kalniel
You wha….

Seriously - Skyrim uses dx11 hardware functions, not just the dx11 software runtime?

Yes, if you have a DX11 card you will get a better optimization and better framerate. (but no tessellation, etc.)

Originally Posted by CountChocula
Yes, if you have a DX11 card you will get a better optimization and better framerate.

Err… I guess it was a joke.