How powerful is the "Gamebryo" Engine?

[Graham]

Graham, are you someone from Emergent Game Tech?

no.

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.

The thread was being dragged off topic with arguments over if oblivion was a good game or not, which doesn't have anything to do with the engine. If oblivion runs slow, or has average AI then it is a poor reflection on Bethesda not the engine they use. This should be obvious, especially when the engine has no obvious common elements that can be recognised between games (eg, the Unreal3/doom3 lighting, etc).
Comments like:

It's [gamebryo] so horrifyingly written, that even UE3 pales in comparison.

Are blatant trolling, and you are lucky I didn't give you an infraction for it (I was in a good mood). However not so today. I'll be keeping a close eye on you in the future. Take this as your first and last warning.

 

[Rodéric]

If oblivion runs slow, or has average AI then it is a poor reflection on Bethesda not the engine they use.

I completely disagree, the shortcoming of an engine necessarily have an effect on games using it.

 

[psorcerer]

The thread was being dragged off topic with arguments over if oblivion was a good game or not, which doesn't have anything to do with the engine.

Err...and you state that I started it?

If oblivion runs slow, or has average AI then it is a poor reflection on Bethesda not the engine they use. This should be obvious, especially when the engine has no obvious common elements that can be recognised between games (eg, the Unreal3/doom3 lighting, etc).

Err...I say ONLY things that can be deducted from public sources, like Oblivion PerfHUD analysis.
And what we see there is to deal with engine and with engine alone: no material system, which leads to static light numbers division and three passes for PS lighting, texture lighting and specular.
Every NPC is done from ~20 meshes and each mesh is rendered with its own bones and shaders, each vertex has tangent, normal and binormal components (what a waste).
No atlases for GUI, every GUI element is rendered separately, even pieces which have common texture (text with same font).
No CLOD/progressive mesh optimizations, every terrain patch is rendered with the same LOD in the same frame.

 

[Color me Dan]

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.

Thanks for clearing that out for me, I've been wondering about that for a while. I was under the impression that you took the code you had and changed the bits and pieces that were needed to shoe-horn it into the new hardware, thus why i hear alot of bad things about alot of ports.