3 ms·

Special edition Skyrim is coming out this month, 28th of October, on the PC, not 3 years ago.

eropple 10y ago
"Release date three years ago" was referring to the PS4. Fallout 4's minimum specs on PC, even (i.e., not an optimized platform), are lower than the PS4-equivalents on that platform. I would expect a mobile device (and the Switch is on a Tegra platform, it's a mobile device), three years further down the line, to be able to be at least in the ballpark of "competitive", with allowances and restrictions (lowered draw distance, simplified shaders, maybe reduced texture size depending on the memory budget), with a machine packing a Radeon HD7870. My point is that re-engine'ing the game doesn't change the assets involved (stuff like texture quality or shader complexity has a pretty significant impact on performance), nor (necessarily) the visual effects involved. You could scale UE3 down to run on absolutely laughable hardware and games today still regularly support 640x480 and other silly things. Being "on an engine" means something only when you have hard hardware requirements, like requiring support for SM 4.0 or whatever.
- paulmd 10y ago
  FO4/GameBryo has really weird hardware requirements in general that make it less conductive to mobile ports. It's super sensitive to single-threaded performance, it's super sensitive to memory bandwidth (very unusual for a game), it eats a whole bunch of GPU power in city areas, etc. Portables tend not to be known for those things. It also really prefers to be run on a SSD so it doesn't stutter when it's paging game-world cells in and out, although that could probably be tuned. I generally agree that you can probably stuff it into a portable with some compromises within the next couple years, sure. But I'm glad I'm not a Bethesda employee, that's going to suck and I think the compromises are going to be big. Re-engine'ing a game is a massive undertaking. There's a huge amount of work involved in porting mission systems and event triggers and so on between the two systems. I don't really think it's feasible, I'd see it as much more likely that they port the engine rather than porting the game to another engine (which AFAIK is what they did with Skyrim Special Edition). It's especially unlikely because Bethesda has put a huge amount of work into developer/world-building tooling for GameBryo. They have been on a single engine for almost 20 years now (since Morrowind) and it's going to be a tough sell to throw all that tooling and experience away, even with the engine making ominous creaking sounds (as the FO4 codebase clearly is doing). It clearly needs it though. Like, STALKER was playable on a laptop processor and iGPU ten years ago and the newer games are on par with FO4 visually in most ways. In many RPG senses it was even more flexible and more ambitious (A-Life was similar to Radiant AI). FO4 just runs like shit compared to how dated it looks and plays.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I'm not sure you're actually disagreeing with me here? SkyrimSE is using the upgraded "Creation Engine" variant of the same Gamebryo engine; that's what I was referring to. It's still Skyrim-era assets, for the most part, and that has a much bigger impact on performance and suitability for Tegra-esque hardware than the particulars of that flavor of the underlying engine.
jbmorgado 10y ago
Why am I being donwvoted for making a factual comment? This is clearly an abuse of the downvote system. Any mechanism in place to report this?
- eropple 10y ago
  I think you were downvoted because you misread the comment you were replying to, which generally isn't considered productive. It happens, it's not abuse of the system. (You were then downvoted for complaining about votes, because that is universally considered negative behavior.) You can always email hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like.
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    > you misread the comment you were replying to, No, I didn't misread anything, like the OP then cleared out in answering my original comment, it was him that mixed the dates.
    - eropple 10y ago
      Telling you what you wanted to know wasn't an invitation to argue with me. I am the OP to whom you refer. I didn't mix the dates; you misread the antecedent to which "release date" referred and, in an effort to treat your response in good faith, I issued a mea culpa I then edited out when I realized that I had had it straight in the first place.
      - jbmorgado 10y ago
        What did you had straight in the first place, the fact that your comment wasn't clear about if you where talking about Fallout 4 (like you said in the mea culpa that you now removed) or Skyrim Special Edition, or that you said it "came out 3 years ago"? Because neither Fallout 4, Skyrim original and Skyrim Special Edition "came out 3 years ago", and if you weren't going around editing your comments, my comment would be both factual and properly addressing your original comment.

"Release date three years ago" was referring to the PS4. Fallout 4's minimum specs on PC, even (i.e., not an optimized platform), are lower than the PS4-equivalents on that platform. I would expect a mobile device (and the Switch is on a Tegra platform, it's a mobile device), three years further down the line, to be able to be at least in the ballpark of "competitive", with allowances and restrictions (lowered draw distance, simplified shaders, maybe reduced texture size depending on the memory budget), with a machine packing a Radeon HD7870. My point is that re-engine'ing the game doesn't change the assets involved (stuff like texture quality or shader complexity has a pretty significant impact on performance), nor (necessarily) the visual effects involved. You could scale UE3 down to run on absolutely laughable hardware and games today still regularly support 640x480 and other silly things. Being "on an engine" means something only when you have hard hardware requirements, like requiring support for SM 4.0 or whatever.

paulmd 10y ago
FO4/GameBryo has really weird hardware requirements in general that make it less conductive to mobile ports. It's super sensitive to single-threaded performance, it's super sensitive to memory bandwidth (very unusual for a game), it eats a whole bunch of GPU power in city areas, etc. Portables tend not to be known for those things. It also really prefers to be run on a SSD so it doesn't stutter when it's paging game-world cells in and out, although that could probably be tuned. I generally agree that you can probably stuff it into a portable with some compromises within the next couple years, sure. But I'm glad I'm not a Bethesda employee, that's going to suck and I think the compromises are going to be big. Re-engine'ing a game is a massive undertaking. There's a huge amount of work involved in porting mission systems and event triggers and so on between the two systems. I don't really think it's feasible, I'd see it as much more likely that they port the engine rather than porting the game to another engine (which AFAIK is what they did with Skyrim Special Edition). It's especially unlikely because Bethesda has put a huge amount of work into developer/world-building tooling for GameBryo. They have been on a single engine for almost 20 years now (since Morrowind) and it's going to be a tough sell to throw all that tooling and experience away, even with the engine making ominous creaking sounds (as the FO4 codebase clearly is doing). It clearly needs it though. Like, STALKER was playable on a laptop processor and iGPU ten years ago and the newer games are on par with FO4 visually in most ways. In many RPG senses it was even more flexible and more ambitious (A-Life was similar to Radiant AI). FO4 just runs like shit compared to how dated it looks and plays.
- eropple 10y ago
  I'm not sure you're actually disagreeing with me here? SkyrimSE is using the upgraded "Creation Engine" variant of the same Gamebryo engine; that's what I was referring to. It's still Skyrim-era assets, for the most part, and that has a much bigger impact on performance and suitability for Tegra-esque hardware than the particulars of that flavor of the underlying engine.

jbmorgado 10y ago

Why am I being donwvoted for making a factual comment? This is clearly an abuse of the downvote system. Any mechanism in place to report this?

eropple 10y ago
I think you were downvoted because you misread the comment you were replying to, which generally isn't considered productive. It happens, it's not abuse of the system. (You were then downvoted for complaining about votes, because that is universally considered negative behavior.) You can always email hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  > you misread the comment you were replying to, No, I didn't misread anything, like the OP then cleared out in answering my original comment, it was him that mixed the dates.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Telling you what you wanted to know wasn't an invitation to argue with me. I am the OP to whom you refer. I didn't mix the dates; you misread the antecedent to which "release date" referred and, in an effort to treat your response in good faith, I issued a mea culpa I then edited out when I realized that I had had it straight in the first place.
    - jbmorgado 10y ago
      What did you had straight in the first place, the fact that your comment wasn't clear about if you where talking about Fallout 4 (like you said in the mea culpa that you now removed) or Skyrim Special Edition, or that you said it "came out 3 years ago"? Because neither Fallout 4, Skyrim original and Skyrim Special Edition "came out 3 years ago", and if you weren't going around editing your comments, my comment would be both factual and properly addressing your original comment.