How powerful is the "Gamebryo" Engine?

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DeadlyNinja

Veteran
Apparently, it's being ported to the Wii.

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7142&Itemid=2

The reason I ask is that according to the official site, Gamebryo was also ported to the PS2 and Xbox. Now, I have a very hard time thinking up any PS2 game that even looked CLOSE to the Gamebryo Engine, but I don't claim to have seem every PS2 game ever made. Heck, I don't even remember hearing about a PS2 game making use of such a powerful engine.

http://www.emergent.net/index.php/homepage/products-and-services/gamebryo/gamebryo-engine

This engine looks pretty damn good, but I can't imagine how badly toned down it'll look on the Wii. Is there an Xbox (NOT 360) game the also makes use of it? The site has Wii listed now and even includes the Platform-specific optimization.

Is the gamebyro very powerful? I never seen any of the games. I'm still trying to catch up and understand last gen technology like the GC, Xbox, and PS2. Not sure where the Wii really fits into this.
 
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion uses Gamebyro and Beyond3D has a few interviews over the technology in this engine. I'm fairly certain you've seen Oblivion and know that at release it was a damn good looking game for the most part (some issues with draw distance, but those were/have been adjusted).
 
It's a hog I'd say. Oblivion runs unimpressively slowly even on the highest of the high end of PCs today a year and a half after release outdoors.

It was aslo used in Morrowind and it was a hog there as well.

Of course we shouldn't mention THE BUGS lol.. That's a chapter entirely in of itself. Might be more associated wiht the games themselves than the 3D engine though but who knows. Depending on how much the engime actually does in under the surface I suppose.

The falling through the world problems were legendary with both games though and that's definitely engine related.

Peace.
 
Skrying said:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion uses Gamebyro and Beyond3D has a few interviews over the technology in this engine. I'm fairly certain you've seen Oblivion and know that at release it was a damn good looking game for the most part (some issues with draw distance, but those were/have been adjusted).
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I've only seen it in screen shots. I'm not really all that into PC RPGs, but I just googled some new pics and it does look very nice. Now how do you think they'll port that engine to the Wii? Hell, they have PS2 on the list as well!
 
DeadlyNinja said:
Yeah, but I've only seen it in screen shots. I'm not really all that into PC RPGs, but I just googled some new pics and it does look very nice. Now how do you think they'll port that engine to the Wii? Hell, they have PS2 on the list as well!
Click to expand...

Doubtful it'll be much of the same engine, Gamebyro is purely a commercial product. Meaning if it makes financial sense they'll "port" it to any platform. It should be noted that games like Oblivion also used a lot of other middle wear and that could introduce other issues such as the bugs. Its honestly hard to tell anything when a engine is ported, and really I don't personally see the point in guessing about it... so I won't. ;)
 
Civ4 uses it too, to give you an idea of how flexible it is and what devs can do with it. Star Trek Bridge Commander used it as well. Dark Age of Camelot....
 
swaaye said:
Civ4 uses it too, to give you an idea of how flexible it is and what devs can do with it. Star Trek Bridge Commander used it as well. Dark Age of Camelot....
Click to expand...

DAoC if i remember correctly had excellent performance scaling (atleast i had no trouble running 2 clients at once with my old gaming pc when it came out). Are you sure it uses that engine?

As Oblivion and Morrowind is the worst resource hogs ive ever seen. It doesn't look particularly good, but you need a super rig to play on the pc.
 
Ostepop said:
DAoC if i remember correctly had excellent performance scaling (atleast i had no trouble running 2 clients at once with my old gaming pc when it came out). Are you sure it uses that engine?
Click to expand...

http://www.emergent.net/index.php/homepage/news/news?action=news-detail&id=409
Note that Gamebryo used to be called Netimmerse.

Just remember when you complain about Oblivion and Morrowind that those two games do a number of things that no other does. Huge, generally seamless worlds with hundreds of AI objects, among other things. Just because it's demanding doesn't mean it's badly written. They've said too that they have made decisions in Morrowind and Oblivion that hurt performance in order to allow greater artistic freedom.
 
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We are happy with it.

Their most recent demo is quite nice, given the short timeframe it was built in (3 months for 4 people) - and that it was built as a cross platform demo - although naturally the PS3/360 builds are not available to the public. (it does require a gamepad I think though)

My impression is that Gamebryo isn't meant to compete with the likes of unreal3, and they do have some very nice arcade licensing terms.
 
It's not nearly close to what a modern 3D Engine should be.
It's plagued with backward compatibility stuff and patched a lot.

The whole 'SceneGraph' idea is completely deprecated and outdated, at least in the form it is in Gamebryo.

All that IMO, obviously.
 
This thread is about the gamebryo engine, not oblivion
If you know that issues oblivion may have had were related to gamebryo, then feel free to discuss them constructively.
 
Graham, are you someone from Emergent Game Tech? Anyway, what PS2 and Xbox games use the Gamebyro Engine? The site has those 2 systems listed, and I've very curious to see what it looks like on a much weaker system. Obviously it'll look amazing on the 360 and PS3, but I never heard much fuss about it on PS2/Xbox.
 
Graham said:
This thread is about the gamebryo engine, not oblivion
If you know that issues oblivion may have had were related to gamebryo, then feel free to discuss them constructively.
Click to expand...

Err...you know that discussing the "pecularities" of the engine will violate NDA, don't you?
If you do not want to discuss the engine by using the real games examples just say that, you do not need to hide behind "not constructive" wordings; you should know that it can not possibly be constructive this way.
 
It's interesting to see that the engine can be used across so many genres.

That list probably isn't complete, seeing as it lacked Bridge Commander (I just added it).
 
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Correct me if i'm wrong but, wouldn't "porting" (ie translating?) code be a much less efficient way of getting something to run on the Wii?

Seeing as code is created according to the strenghts and weaknesses of a targeted platform(s), wouldn't translating that code be highly inefficient? I never quite understood how you could make code for one platform run sort of the same on another without having to rewrite everything from scratch to fit it on it.
 
There's different degrees of porting. On the whole, porting means getting an engine to run on hardware such that it can load assets and data from a different platform successfully. You can either hand-create a whole new compatible engine that's streamlined for the new hardware, or recompile the code for a new CPU and cross your fingers.
 
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