Oblivion Hands-On

So why not leave it in as some sort of toggle through the console Regular users won't have to worry about setting settings too high and then complaining to infinity about performance. Is this whole switch only about performance or is there implementation as well (rendering issues)

 

Well, quick question: why bother spending the QA time and money to make sure that a feature works properly if you know nobody can enable it and have decent performance for some time to come?

 

well, as a toggable feature, it'd just be "incomplete". It wouldn't be unlike all those extra functions that JC left in Doom 3.

In other words, they've already developed something that works, so why not make it some sort of toggable graphics feature in the console (presuming they have one) where no regular user would access. Who's saying anything about developing it to make it work properly? Just leave it in as an unsupported feature and let the community deal with it.

 

Ah, when I read "toggleable feature" I assumed you were talking about a checkbox in the options menu. That would be really bad for their customer support department.

Anyway, could be cool if hardware has progressed to the point where the full shadowing algorithm is feasible by the time the first expansion is released, and they actually spend the time to get it working by then.

 

Ah... I should have worded it better then!

mm... expansion haha by the time that is out, I just *might* be done playing with Oblivion.

 

thanks for the info chalnoth. Im still a little confused how they could drop the ball on shadows. Im at the point that where I want mad amounts of eye candy IQ if im going to justify bying the high end graphics card later this year.

epic

 

Woah woah woah, you sound like you're giving me way too much credit for knowing anything here

 

Well, according to devs in this thread:

 

It really sounds to me like they chose just a bad algorithm for attempting global shadowing, from some of the statements made in that compressed post. Specifically, I'm talking about:

If the shadowing algorithm cares whether geometry is static or not, then it's not a good algorithm for global shadowing.

 

You're right, but I think there point was that even if they used static shadows for all fixed objects in the world there would still be so many moveable objects in the game that would cast dynamic shadows that it would still render too slowly to be playable. I'm not sure why it took them so long to realise this, though!

You also have to wonder what machine the E3 demo was running. Presumably it would have been a slideshow which they basically offline rendered to a movie and then sped back up.

 

Some more, tipped by Penny Arcade. A little off the lovin'-bandwagon, tho.

http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=1422030
http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=1423229

I found myself thinking it quite ridiculous that 1). He was criticized for dismissing the game "After only two hours" of playing with it, and 2). That he defended himself on that point as NOT having dismissed it "after only two hours".

Me, I found myself thinking that I pay to be entertained and if you can't grab me after two hours investment of my time, then shame on you, and $%@# at the lost investment of $$ you just took away from me for no entertainment. But I'm not going to keep playing just to "justify" the money spent.

 

also, 16 square miles isn't 16 miles on a side. as a perfect square, it's only 4 miles on a side.

4x4 = 16

2x8 = 16

1x16 = 16

i hope it's more of a 4x4 than a 1x16 shaped map!

odd the 360 is stuttery. i hope my new rig eats it up.

any chance this guy doesn't have his x360 set up correctly? or had a bad one?

wonder why none of the other previewers mentioned thes issues?

 

Well, "only"... 4 miles is over 10km. Isn't normal walking speed for a human roughly 3.5km/h? So over 2h just to walk from one side of the game to the other in a straight line. Then again, I guess normal movement speed is probably more like a jog rather than a walk, or else we'd get frustrated about not getting anywhere, but still, it's a major land area. I just hope not too much of it is water...

Not that odd methinks, the game uses a 3rd-party engine and is first-gen quality as far as coding etc goes. I'd been mighty surprised had it NOT stuttered.

You can't really set it up wrong, there aren't any settings in it to set incorrectly. Also I doubt it was broken, either it'll work I think or it won't.

Probably too busy playing the game to report little details like that. That, or else they didn't want to rain on Bethesda's parade by bringing up performance issues in a VERY high-profile game they've been working on for like 3 years.

 

Im not very interested in the shadows of a game...Im more concerned about the plot and generally the magic effects etc etc.
Anyways i just finished FABLE which i found to be awesome and i cant wait for oblivion to get into the market.
I just hope it is better , longer and with MORE magic than Fable

 

1.6km/mile (6.4km)


you might be thinking of 2.54cm/inch

The fact that you can create your own potions and that the world is so much bigger (all those dungeons!) should satisfy your hope.

 

It still seems fun, but who is really surprised? Morrowind had possibly the worst engine of any of the big games. It surprised me to be honest they liscenced the engine from the same developer again. Hopefully a computer with a fast HDD like a 140GB raptor will not have the loading issues the xbox has. I noticed in the previous morrowind that when I moved froma 7200 rpm to my raptor the loading times were decreased by a huge amount so that you did not have time to read the "loading" thing it just kind of bumped, and that was when I had ridiculous stats and could jump across multiple cells at a time. (Corpus strength was up to 1600, and boots of blinding speed plus other crap).

 

It's not so much a question of HDD speed as it is one of RAM size I guess. I don't see how X360 could keep up with a PC with 1 or 2 GB of dedicated main RAM.

Anyway, whoever buys an Elder Scrolls game expecting a flawless technical showcase will be sorely disappointed.

 

I really don't know how much longer I can take this. Every review I have seen has been the literary equivalent of multiple orgasms. The last time I saw a press alignment similar to this was just prior to KotOR 1 and even those reviews weren't as good as these. Has anyone seen *anything* about an official release date? Sheesh, I may need to find a support group somewhere...

 

The draw distance issues should not be present on the xbox360. Chalk it up to 1st gen game + inneficient engine. Morrowind had similar issues with performance. Sounds like a kickass game otherwise. I bet those of us with 2gb ram + 1900XTX's will appreciate the view

 

Draw distance in Morrowind, as I remember it on the PC, was completely configurable so you could scale it to what your PC could handle.