Starfield

Flogger23m said:
The problem is the facial animation technology is just crap. Even if you make better 3D models and textures it will still look bad. The camera angle is also annoying and ugly although with the amount of conversations and dialogue options it may be hard to get nice camera work. But Mass Effect 2/3 had excellent cinematics that made the conversations feel more alive just through the camera angles during conversations. Bethesda games look flat. Add in ugly character animation technology and it looks bad compared to other games. Better than their previous games but still dated.

Although I almost think half the player base enjoys bad animation technology, just like they prefer NPCs talking to someone without the ability to communicate back.
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Since it's a first-person game, I think they're trying to make you have conversations from the first-person perspective to keep up the illusion of you being in control. I understand what they're going for, but the static camera makes it feel... artificial? But then again, if they try to simulate how your eyes and head move in a real conversation it could cause motion sickness. The cinematic camera work in games like Mass Effect and The Witcher work since they're already third-person.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
Apparently Xbox/MS has been helping with QA. Probably even more than that considering how huge and important this game is to them.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/every-xbox-qa-staff-working-on-starfield
https://www.techradar.com/news/xbox...tarfield-has-fewest-bugs-of-any-bethesda-game
https://www.gamesradar.com/starfiel...e-before-xbox-told-bethesda-to-take-its-time/
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Less undocumented features than any prior Bethesda game? Maybe we'll need a community mod just to reintroduce some of those lovely quirks from Skyrim & Fallout 4. Just think of all the fun that we might miss out on since we're now going to be on planets in space. I mean who doesn't want to figure out how to launch a space sweet roll at exit velocity into outer space?
 
Armenius said:
Since it's a first-person game, I think they're trying to make you have conversations from the first-person perspective to keep up the illusion of you being in control. I understand what they're going for, but the static camera makes it feel... artificial? But then again, if they try to simulate how your eyes and head move in a real conversation it could cause motion sickness. The cinematic camera work in games like Mass Effect and The Witcher work since they're already third-person.
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Here is an example of Dues Ex Human Revolution, a game which also had really bad animations for people:



Still the movement of the character Tong is more realistic and life like. Yes not everyone moves around when talking but occasionally they do. But this is a good example of how to make interacting with characters look a bit more life like, less static, and more visually appealing with the camera angles without really changing to third person.
 
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Do we know at this point if this game will have similar base building mechanics like in FO4?
 
w35t said:
Do we know at this point if this game will have similar base building mechanics like in FO4?
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Yeah but they are called outposts. The building mechanics appear to be module-based instead of individual walls, floors, etc. You also assign crew members to them for resource mining and link them using your fleet.
It was shown in the showcase.

GoldenTiger said:
Whose stuff is that (source link)?
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https://twitter.com/Bethesda_ANZ/status/1590841747483295745
 
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TaintedSquirrel said:
Yeah but they are called outposts. The building mechanics appear to be module-based instead of individual walls, floors, etc. You also assign crew members to them for resource mining and link them using your fleet.
It was shown in the showcase.


https://twitter.com/Bethesda_ANZ/status/1590841747483295745
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As long as it doesn't force you to do it I don't mind. I know a lot of people loved that in FO4, I never bothered with it except for many the few tiny portions it made you go through it for tutorial purposes.
 
https://twitter.com/KindaFunnyVids/status/1671208039700115458



- 10% of planets have any life on them.
- Some planets have one biome, some have a LOT of biomes per planet.
- Need to prepare suits for weather rolling in, things change.
- Fully surveying planets and systems gives a lot of money.
- Creatures can fight each other, you will see it - one of the development problems has been aggressive high level creatures killing off all other creatures on a planet.
- No mounts. You explore on foot. You cannot ride creatures. You explore 'around' your ship.
- There is a trait and skills for playing solo, so you can play without companions.
- You can assign companions to ships you're not using (or dismiss them). It sounds like your fleet can have other companions flying them.
- There are multiple robot companions. You could technically entirely crew your ship with just robots. Todd doesn't want to oversell it, though.
- There is radio, but it's local to one location.
- If you steal a ship, they're all upgradable.
- You have to register a ship after stealing it.
- All the ships in the game are built using the built in ship editor - anything you see, you can build too.
- Ship building is a late game activity. Needs skills and costs a LOT of credits.
- Very happy with Creation Engine 2. Have really pushed the tech. Things not shown include volumetric fog which interacts with GI lighting, and physics and gravity changes under the hood which they lean in on.
- Todd thinks Digital Foundry did an incredible job on the 30fps Starfield coverage. Their vision is 30fps for the game on console, they are focused on making it feel great.
- "Starfield is a modders paradise". Mods are supported, and we plan to participating in modding community.
- Outposts is a deep system. Requires resources, character skills, you can connect outposts between planets with your ships and crews. Not meant as an early player system.
- Outposts can be an economy generator.
- Bethesda love the game, they're humbled by the excitement, the excitement is fuel over the last two months until release.
- You can romance 4 companions in the game.
- Pass on answering if there's black holes in the game.
- Vasco cannot wear a hat yet (hi modders).
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So this game is using Creation Engine 2.0 which is Gamebryo but I still have no faith in this game mainly the colors just look dull.
 
peppergomez said:
Thanks
It sucks there's no vehicles to explore on the planets. There should be some sort of a hoverbike or at least a jetpack with sustained flight
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He specifies during the stream that he thinks the jetpack is sufficient enough for traversal. There are jetpack upgrades in the skill tree that we probably haven't seen yet.
Skyrim had horses, all they had to do was replace it with a hoverbike or something.
 
rumors hint at ray-tracing support (RTGI and RT shadows)...hopefully it's available at launch...what's the main story causing the player to explore all these planets?...searching for something or someone?
 
polonyc2 said:
rumors hint at ray-tracing support (RTGI and RT shadows)...hopefully it's available at launch...what's the main story causing the player to explore all these planets?...searching for something or someone?
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It's hinted in the showcase.

The player is hunting down advanced alien technology/artifacts. Probably similar to the protheans in ME.
 
I always have to take anything Todd says with heavy guard and a grain of salt.



Comixbooks said:
So this game is using Creation Engine 2.0 which is Gamebryo but I still have no faith in this game mainly the colors just look dull.
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Let's make sure of something here.

Is this a new engine or not? Because they are way overdue to move on from Gamebryo. Like ten years ago they needed to move on from it.
 
Q-BZ said:
Is this a new engine or not?
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Not new. There are 25 year old gamebyro bugs in their recent 'Creation Engine' titles. They modified the engine and renamed it Creation, but it's Gamebryo at its core.
For good PR they have been saying "new engine" and "creation engine", but it's not entirely the truth. It's not a complete lie either, as it is no doubt heavily modified.

This isn't a bad thing mod wise, as mentioned before modders are experienced with their engines and will be able to release mods fairly quickly after release.
 
Drexion said:
Not new. There are 25 year old gamebyro bugs in their recent 'Creation Engine' titles. They modified the engine and renamed it Creation, but it's Gamebryo at its core.
For good PR they have been saying "new engine" and "creation engine", but it's not entirely the truth. It's not a complete lie either, as it is no doubt heavily modified.

This isn't a bad thing mod wise, as mentioned before modders are experienced with their engines and will be able to release mods fairly quickly after release.
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Creation Engine is over a decade old anyways, even if the new version is improved. I am sure it will be good enough but I also assume there will be bugs and it won't be as good as other modern engines.
 
Drexion said:
Not new. There are 25 year old gamebyro bugs in their recent 'Creation Engine' titles. They modified the engine and renamed it Creation, but it's Gamebryo at its core...
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must be a pretty big modification as they added RT support...
 
polonyc2 said:
must be a pretty big modification as they added RT support...
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The issues with Gamebryo were never really at the presentation layer (graphical and visual features); but with the core/mid layers (for eg loading/streaming assets, memory management, multi-threading balance and handling of the world grid) Visuals could always be tweaked even if the core code was a bit unstable at times.

That said in the 64bit era where the engine is a 64bit exe running on gaming rigs with 32gb+ of ram and super fast nvme's to fetch/store, the experience should be much smoother.
 
Drexion said:
The issues with Gamebryo were never really at the presentation layer (graphical and visual features); but with the core/mid layers (for eg loading/streaming assets, memory management, multi-threading balance and handling of the world grid) Visuals could always be tweaked even if the core code was a bit unstable at times.

That said in the 64bit era where the engine is a 64bit exe running on gaming rigs with 32gb+ of ram and super fast nvme's to fetch/store, the experience should be much smoother.
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We can see a preview of the supposed improvements with 64-bit in Skyrim SE. The game was ported to 64-bit with that release and it did run smoother than 32-bit, especially with mods, but still has issues. We'll have to see if they made any meaningful updates to the engine since then that leverages modern I/O.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
https://twitter.com/KindaFunnyVids/status/1671208039700115458

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The most significant comment Todd Howard makes here, for me, is when he acknowledges that many of the people working on Starfield have been at Bethesda for more than 20 years - they’re learning and evolving… together.

BioWare, Arcane, dozens of smaller studios that have tasted success (such as TellTale) have been unable to retain their talent.

I just think this gives Bethesda the upper hand - and it’s probably the chief reason I believe Starfield could become a classic.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
I wish one of the interviewers asked about directstorage. The game "requires" an ssd.
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Considering a lot of direct storage 1.2 work with HDDs now, maybe that will stop to be a big deal for the devs side (before being fully one).

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/...storage-2-1-hdd-support-game-load-speed-times

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-1-2-available-now/

Force Buffered IO​

DirectStorage currently opens files in unbuffered mode. This allows us to avoid unnecessary copies, getting the data onto the GPU as quickly as possible. However, we heard from some developers that they’d like to be able to use the same code both on high-speed SSDs as well as legacy hard drives. The legacy hard drives require buffered IO in order to mask the long seek times. For this reason, we added the ability to configure DirectStorage to open files in buffered mode.

This can be enabled by setting the “ForceFileBuffering” field in DSTORAGE_CONFIGURATION1 to TRUE. Note that buffered IO is incompatible with BypassIO, and therefore DisableBypassIO must be set to TRUE when using this option.

I just rebuilt a test with DS 1.2 and it is nuts

I went from 1.6-1.8 GBs max effective bandiwth with gdeflate on a 5400 rpm HDD (versus 9.5-10.5 on a 980 pro nvme) to 12 GB/s on an hdd, the speed I am seeing on a regular 5400 rpm HDD are obscene , that seem just impossible:
1.2.1
Uncompressed:
64 MiB staging buffer: .......... 7.50074 GB/s mean cycle time: 91028069
ZLib:
64 MiB staging buffer: .. 1.47824 GB/s mean cycle time: 1451598689
CPU GDEFLATE:
64 MiB staging buffer: .. 1.39946 GB/s mean cycle time: 1608221294
GPU GDEFLATE:
64 MiB staging buffer: .......... 13.3013 GB/s mean cycle time: 21689237


vs
1.1.0
Uncompressed:
64 MiB staging buffer: .......... 0.187416 GB/s mean cycle time: 18944774
ZLib:
64 MiB staging buffer: .. 0.655402 GB/s mean cycle time: 1228148562
CPU GDEFLATE:
64 MiB staging buffer: .. 0.687908 GB/s mean cycle time: 1518062836
GPU GDEFLATE:
64 MiB staging buffer: .......... 1.35936 GB/s mean cycle time: 13035219

That drive do around that in sustained read-write, 180-200 mbs, this is a 10x upgrade for GPU decompressed game asset.

it must be using some workaround drive speed I do not understand, even with a 15gb file to try to make sure it cannot be HD cache I see fast nvme type of performence coming from my old seagate drive.
 
I'm personally not too woried about the graphics for this game. I don't expect to be wowed by them. The trailers and gameplay videos looked good enough, but nothing like the crazy UE5 stuff I've experienced.

Yeah I would like to have better graphics, raytracing, and DLSS support, but that's really not what makes Bethesda Elder Scrolls style games great. It's the open world, being able to play however you want, all the crazy game interactions you get with so much freedom. That's why Skyrim was played for so long.

But also I have a 4090 so I'm sure I'll be able to tune the graphics well enough to get good FPS. Hopefully that's not an issue for people with lower end hardware like it was with Cyberpunk.
 
sharknice said:
Yeah I would like to have better graphics, raytracing, and DLSS support, but that's really not what makes Bethesda Elder Scrolls style games great.
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DLSS isn't to make graphics great, so having a 4090 is kind of irrelevant unless you're getting bad frame rates at 4K. DLSS often results in a big frame rate jump with a relatively low image quality hit. So people with lower end Nvidia GPUs likely will not be happy. If I can run this with 90-100 frame rates I won't mind either, but if my PC only gets 60 frame rates I would have liked for there to be a DLSS option.

FSR doesn't look as good and kind of fails the high frame rate with minimal image quality loss battle. From looking at it, I would rather turn down settings before resorting to FSR.
 
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At least it will probably up to date FSR 2.2+, considering how much upscaling it is doing on console and the launch date, maybe it will be less an issue.

It could be a perfect CPU heavy game to be the first big FSR 3 title.
 
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