TES V: Skyrim

It looks to me like the new texture pack updated the lighting system, closer to what it would look like by forcing SSAO. Anyone else notice that? I stopped forcing it through the Nvidia CP because the difference with it off is about 20 degrees off my card.
 
Yeah, they are different. Look at the clothes, bed sheet, and the wooden leg of the bed.

Some textures already have very good resolution. For example, the shop sign on my previous post already has very good resolution in normal mode, so you don't see any improvement with high resolution pack (it's likely that there is no higher resolution version of that sign in the pack). The dragon scale armor set is also already very good in normal mode.

Wow you're right..
But the differences are really small, at least in that indoor environment.

I guess the Skyrim HD 2K may be better than this update...
 
Higher resolution textures don't have any affect on performance unless they run you out of memory, in which case you'll get nasty chugs from swapping.
 
I went home, downloaded the patch (took almost an hour, download peaked out around 800Kbps/sec but then dwindled.)

I hop into the game, wander around for like 30 minutes looking at random buildings, trees, bushes, floors, ceilings, characters and finally the internet Geordi LaForge meme comes to mind: "Can't see shit, captain!".

And then realized: I hadn't enabled the DLC in the Skyrim launcher. :rolleyes: :oops:

The performance delta on my 5850 1Gb at 1680x1050 with 4x SSAA enabled and shadow maps at 4096 seems to be somewhere between insignificant and nonexistent.
 
Higher resolution textures don't have any affect on performance unless they run you out of memory, in which case you'll get nasty chugs from swapping.

Running the game for a few minutes last night via my 1.28GB GTX 570 at 25x16, I was getting those hitches. Just not enough onboard memory, so here's hoping the midrange Kepler boards come with 2GB as standard.
 
Higher resolution textures don't have any affect on performance unless they run you out of memory, in which case you'll get nasty chugs from swapping.
Well, that's not quite true, since larger textures also make caching less efficient. So you can still expect a small performance hit even if you don't run out of memory.
 
Running the game for a few minutes last night via my 1.28GB GTX 570 at 25x16, I was getting those hitches. Just not enough onboard memory, so here's hoping the midrange Kepler boards come with 2GB as standard.

By any chance, did you check the peak video memory usage reached while playing the game ?
 
A question.

Just like many of you, my Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPref.ini are set to "Read-Only".

For high resolution texture pack DLC to take effect, do I need to turn off read-only attribute for those config ini files and let the game write to ini files ?
 
Its amazing and at the same time embarrassing.
Seriously one week? Game was in development for 4 years, and yet we couldnt get ssao, seasonal foliage and shaders or physics for cloths and foliage, seriously Bethesda?
This goes to show that allowing individual developers to just do their own thing from time to time is a great idea. That's one thing I think is really cool about Google: they have a 20% time program where each programmer at Google is allowed to work on nearly anything they want for 20% of their time. Projects must be approved, but in general there is a large degree of freedom in what their programmers can work on.
 
Seriously one week? Game was in development for 4 years, and yet we couldnt get ssao, seasonal foliage and shaders or physics for cloths and foliage, seriously Bethesda?
Well, hacking this stuff into the game in a week may be OK for a quick internal demo video, but considering the amount of bugs that already exist in Skyrim I don't wanna know how much more shit this stuff breaks when added in. ;)

I'm sure, with the success they've had, Bethy intends to milk Skyrim for a while with DLC and whatnot, so hopefully a lot of this will see use in the game. I myself really liked the interactive foliage, seasonal changes, snowy footsteps, water currents and the stealth enhancements. Oh, and adoption too... :3

What I'd like to see more are random NPCs travelling about; there's the odd patrol of guards escorting prisoners, and sometimes a lone figure here and there, but mostly the wilderness is completely dead except for bandits and animals. I'd like to see more farmers with carts of produce, khajiit trader caravans, peddlers, messengers on horseback, maybe war refugees seeking shelter, and so on. Some outright battles would be nice too; I hear there's a civil war raging in Skyrim, but you basically never see any of it!

Here and there I've stumbled upon imperials and stormcloaks fighting each other, but that's very very rare. I guess if I start in on the civil war quest chain things might change, but I've not done that thus far.
 
There's a lot of good ideas in the keynote. If any of them see the light of day, I'd be surprised. A neat addition I've always sought in an RPG is more cosmetically oriented things like barber shops and tattoo/piercing parlors. While the game has the option for some facial tattoos in the character creator, I think if they extended the options like the ability to have tattoos on places other than your face, like your arms or legs, would be pretty neat. The house construction was great, though. I'd be cool of you had to gather materials to make it, like wood from trees and stones.
 
There's a lot of good ideas in the keynote.
Do you have a link to the full thing?

Sunk a couple hours more into the game, can't say I see a single bloody pixel's worth of a difference with the new texture pack really, which probably goes to tell just how good this game really looks on the whole. Oh, and it seems to run slower again too, on my dual 6970 boards. Not sure if it's really the case or just my imagination, but it does feel a bit choppier on the whole, both indoors and outdoors...
 
Do you have a link to the full thing?

Sunk a couple hours more into the game, can't say I see a single bloody pixel's worth of a difference with the new texture pack really, which probably goes to tell just how good this game really looks on the whole. Oh, and it seems to run slower again too, on my dual 6970 boards. Not sure if it's really the case or just my imagination, but it does feel a bit choppier on the whole, both indoors and outdoors...

I sure do:

http://www.bethblog.com/2012/02/08/watch-todd-howards-dice-keynote-live-on-gamespot/

It's a 41 minute keynote. I like Todd Howard, though, so he keeps it interesting.
 
Whoah.

Thank You, Dresden! Awesome keynote. This guy's reallyreally funny. I feel like I've seen him somewhere before, but I can't quite remember (excepting the skyrim fun stuff snippet that was linked previously in the thread of course.)

You're absolutely right, he does talk about a lot of good ideas and it's obvious they're a really talented group of people. I also get a little bit sad, because he says they play their own game internally, and there's just SO much stuff that could have been a lot better, with the followers and quest bugs and all those damned layered menus that are SO BAD and cumbersome.

I guess they just become blind to it. They're working on that stuff virtually every day, and it becomes ingrained on them and natural. Also they may feel a sense of loyalty towards their creation, because they made those menus they might not want to criticize them. Maybe. I dunno. :p

Anyhow, really fun and interesting and entertaining keynote!
 
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