SwampYankee @ SwampYankee @mander.xyz

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3

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418

Joined

2 yr. ago

Correct, but we aren’t talking about them.

Uh... you were talking about them. Those are the two examples of bugs that you provided. I literally wouldn't have made the comment if you hadn't brought them up.

such as restoration bonuses buffing enchantments, the various duplication glitches, and basically everything involving horses

Like if you had said these originally, I wouldn't have even argued with you. I never personally experienced those bugs, probably because I don't play games like I'm a QA tester, but I know many people did.

Not really - plenty of other games use Havok physics and don’t suffer from the same issues, or at least not to the same degree. Perhaps there’s a reason other developers using the Havok physics engine don’t make games with huge quantities of dynamic objects loaded at once.

I've definitely fallen through the world in several of the games listed there. But anyway, specifically, I said persistent physics objects. You can drop a cabbage in Whiterun, walk to Solitude and back, and the cabbage is right where you left it. In, say, GTA, you get out of your car and look away for 5 seconds, turn around, and it's gone. Most games work more like GTA, where a limited number of objects even have full physics simulation, and those that do are only in memory if you've looked at them in the last x seconds. Otherwise, they unload and are lost forever.

Now, whether it's even worth having so much physics-enabled clutter is another question. It certainly contributes to immersion, but is it more trouble than it's worth?

Chaturbate TOS:

You may not, download, reproduce, sell, rent, perform, or link to any content made available through the Platform, except as expressly permitted by the Community Member and/or Independent Broadcaster, as appropriate, responsible for such content or otherwise as permitted by the rules of the Platform.

Virginia revenge porn law:

Any person who, with the intent to coerce, harass, or intimidate, maliciously disseminates or sells any videographic or still image created by any means whatsoever that depicts another person who is totally nude, or in a state of undress so as to expose the genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or female breast, where such person knows or has reason to know that he is not licensed or authorized to disseminate or sell such videographic or still image is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

It's clear from the TOS that unless Mrs. Gibson expressly permitted dissemination of the materials, that the sites on which they were reposted AND the GOP operative "had reason to know" that they were not licensed or authorized to disseminate the content. That said, it's hard to prove malintent in a political context. GOP operative could simply argue that there was a public interest in this information being shared.

clipping through collision boxes and falling through maps

These are famously common bugs across games in all genres running on all kinds of different engines. I'd go so far as to not even call them bugs because computers simply don't have the power to calculate collision down to the picosecond/picometer. Every game that's ever been made has sacrificed precision in physics for performance.

Perhaps the reason it's more noticeable in Bethesda games is because they typically have way more persistent, physics-enabled objects. That's actually a strength of the engine, and something no other developer really even attempts.

I guess I'm lucky to live & work somewhere where the system kinda works, but the boomers are a great well of institutional knowledge, and the kids are working hard and changing the game. The ball was kind of dropped in the late 90s & 00s, but now millennials have surpassed gen x in terms of responsibility & authority in my industry and the zoomers I've had the opportunity to train are legit. I'm not sure what happened to gen x, but they all seem kind of sad and/or lost.

You didn't have to say you were a millennial. The Weeds meme was enough.

In my career I’ve generally had to spend much more than that each week learning.

Important point. If you're in a career that's at all demanding, you are going to be learning for the rest of your life. School prepares you for that. The specifics aren't important, what you should be learning in school is approaches to research, study, and problem solving. Schools could probably do more to make that clear.

Realpolitik go brrr

Funny story, the only ethics required in my engineering degree was a 2-day unit on our professional code of ethics. We had a 20-question true/false homework on it, and the thing about a professional code of ethics is it's not super intuitive. Most of the class thought they could gut feel their way through it, but you actually had to read the code because the wording was very specific sometimes. When it turned out that everyone failed the homework, the professor let us try again.

Ethics!

Means: seized.

Snow: plowed.

Lute: fisked.

It's incredible how fucking stupid news media is, huh?

I'm not sure there are any good arguments in geopolitics.

Russia can cry about their red line all they want, but it wasn't in the treaty. The Revolutions of 1989 made it clear Eastern Europeans weren't interested in Russian control, the Balkans were unstable, and the Chechen & Georgian wars stoked fear in the former Soviet states. All NATO had to do was open their doors, and again, nothing in the treaty forbade it.

This engine is already great for modding, but I suppose it can always be better. Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can't be made seamless? There were open cities mods for Oblivion & Skyrim, so it seems like it's probably technically possible. Seems like that may be more of a compromise related to memory allocation on consoles.

I dunno, I don't expect Bethesda to write a new engine from scratch, no one does that. They made New Atlantis seamless to an extent I haven't seen in previous Bethesda games, so as long as they keep making incremental improvements, I'll be satisfied.

No, just more emotion in the animations. You know how real people will sort of look up & to the left or something, maybe put their finger or hand up if they're trying to remember something? Or they'll look around and move their head a little, scratch their chin, etc. if they're thinking. Or they'll scrunch their eyebrows up and look at the ground if they're sad?

That kind of thing.

I can't remember all that well, I was a child at the time, lol. I go back to Morrowind once in a while, and I do find the writing to be more immersive, as opposed to the more recent games where it's a series of linear, ham-fisted novellas. So far, Starfield seems much improved over Fallout 4 or Skyrim in that regard, but I'm not all that far in.

Also Paralives.

Starfield at launch is more compelling than Fallout 4 or Skyrim, but falls short of Morrowind. It's in the mix somewhere alongside Oblivion and Fallout 3, IMO.

The Creation Engine itself is just Gamebryo with a flashlight duct taped to it. IMO the engine is a huge part of what makes Bethesda games so fascinatingly unique.