Why Skyrim Should Have Been Delayed: An Argument in Pictures
- Thread starter Eccentric Lich
- Start date
Agree, I can't see people who live in constant cold conditions looking like they are photoshopped to death.poiumty said:
I think the original looks better.
Hey OP,
Your card is running far too hot and that is why you are having graphical issues.
The reason for this is that the Graphics card is having to buffer everything above 2gb (which is because there is a 2gb ram limit for skyrim at the moment).
There are several unofficial mods to fix the 2gb limit (I have mine set to use up to 6gb) I suggest you use one.
As it stands the NVIDIA card you have on the laptop is unfortunately not really good enough for this game and I agree with other posters who say that just because your computer can't run it properly doesn't mean it shouldn't have been released.
The card I run in my computer is an old 8800gtx and I thought it didn't render shadows properly...just turns out that it's how my TV interprets the signals.
Your card is running far too hot and that is why you are having graphical issues.
The reason for this is that the Graphics card is having to buffer everything above 2gb (which is because there is a 2gb ram limit for skyrim at the moment).
There are several unofficial mods to fix the 2gb limit (I have mine set to use up to 6gb) I suggest you use one.
As it stands the NVIDIA card you have on the laptop is unfortunately not really good enough for this game and I agree with other posters who say that just because your computer can't run it properly doesn't mean it shouldn't have been released.
The card I run in my computer is an old 8800gtx and I thought it didn't render shadows properly...just turns out that it's how my TV interprets the signals.
Eccentric Lich said:
[Small]Funny, I just built a low-end Alienware on Dells website; and an identically spec'ed PC inc. services, warranty, VAT & delivery (except for the case) at PCSpecialist.co.uk - a trusted website by anyone in the UK.
Here are the results:
Alienware custom build aurora computer - £1373.58 inc. VAT & Delivery
PCSpecialist's custom build gamers computer (equal spec to the alienware, though not the same case) - £706.00 inc. VAT & Delivery
Rip off - and I always liked Alienware.
So get a PCSpecialist computer, it's cheaper with free 3 year warranty - though now you don't have to as you got an Alienware for free somehow.
[/Small]
[HEADING=1]OT Possible fix:[/HEADING] You've got incompatibility glitches; that's completely out of the developers hands. If you've got a GForce card that's to blame because Bathesda refused to put one of those "powered by NVidia" badges on the games case. The programmers at NVidia who sit down with devs to sort out compatibility problems downgraded their priority of Skyrim for this reason, so you need to go on over to their website and download the latest drivers for your graphics card to make the game work properly.
This is not the fault of the developers, they are not card programmers; It's like asking a valet to refurbish your car engine. Or more accurately, a mechanic to clean your car. They *might* be able to do it but it is far from their line of expertise. Graphics cards work on low-level languages whilst programming a game is usually C#, a high level programming language. It's about as easy as knowing English, learning German THEN having to learn ancient Chinese.
There are many types of programmers out there & devs just can't do it all. they can't program PS3's RAM allocation, they can't rewrite a processors clock speed. But they can make games then hire the right people to do it too. It's just a shame those "people" prioritise their job list wrong.
this is also why you, Athinira, are wrong:
"What if the player did this, then this, then this, then this? - then linked them up to this, or did it in a multitude of amounts of possible approaches?. What if they go somewhere before we want them to? What if this NPC dies before during after this quest, and they're tied to these quests? It's a massive domino effect for every single changing variable."
To fully patch the game would take a decade. Even The Unofficial Oblivion patch is still being updated by the community TO THIS DAY, and even that had some troubles with breaking things when trying to fix others.
Here are the results:
Alienware custom build aurora computer - £1373.58 inc. VAT & Delivery
PCSpecialist's custom build gamers computer (equal spec to the alienware, though not the same case) - £706.00 inc. VAT & Delivery
Rip off - and I always liked Alienware.
So get a PCSpecialist computer, it's cheaper with free 3 year warranty - though now you don't have to as you got an Alienware for free somehow.
[/Small]
[HEADING=1]OT Possible fix:[/HEADING] You've got incompatibility glitches; that's completely out of the developers hands. If you've got a GForce card that's to blame because Bathesda refused to put one of those "powered by NVidia" badges on the games case. The programmers at NVidia who sit down with devs to sort out compatibility problems downgraded their priority of Skyrim for this reason, so you need to go on over to their website and download the latest drivers for your graphics card to make the game work properly.
This is not the fault of the developers, they are not card programmers; It's like asking a valet to refurbish your car engine. Or more accurately, a mechanic to clean your car. They *might* be able to do it but it is far from their line of expertise. Graphics cards work on low-level languages whilst programming a game is usually C#, a high level programming language. It's about as easy as knowing English, learning German THEN having to learn ancient Chinese.
There are many types of programmers out there & devs just can't do it all. they can't program PS3's RAM allocation, they can't rewrite a processors clock speed. But they can make games then hire the right people to do it too. It's just a shame those "people" prioritise their job list wrong.
this is also why you, Athinira, are wrong:
Are you even a programmer / ever written a program in your life? The sheer amount of incompatibilities that come up when you add even just 1 more user option is incredible. It's frustrating and heavy on the workload. Bethesda IS Bathesda, a developer who makes THE MOST interactive open worlds going. Sure sure you've got WoW & Borderlands, but really they're just scripted sequences packed together under one overarching variable script - so variations pretty much equal 1; and other than "go kill X beasts that respawn" and "go to X location and kill/collect X" there's no variation whatsoever. They don't allow for it so the devs don't have to worry about what Bathesda do:Athinira said:
"What if the player did this, then this, then this, then this? - then linked them up to this, or did it in a multitude of amounts of possible approaches?. What if they go somewhere before we want them to? What if this NPC dies before during after this quest, and they're tied to these quests? It's a massive domino effect for every single changing variable."
To fully patch the game would take a decade. Even The Unofficial Oblivion patch is still being updated by the community TO THIS DAY, and even that had some troubles with breaking things when trying to fix others.
Yes, I do.Athinira said:
It's because no other games have as many interactive, freely interactive and moveable objects in the world map.
Lets take 3 other open world games.
GTA/Saints Row/Sandboxgame #3:
The worlds might be big, but the only interactive things are often just the cars and pedestrians.
The buildings are solid textures and the pathfinding of most "npc's" are just follow the roads and side-walks. There is some scripted code on how to pass a car parked in the middle of the road but that is it.
World of Warcraft/other MMO's in general:
A solid world with only Mobs, players and NPC's are interactable, and like above, these are on a path.
If two NPC's walk into each other's path in WoW they just walk through each other. If they get pulled off their tracks they can run up vertical walls to get back once aggro is lost. They have simple straight forward scripts to deal with this.
Skyrim:
Every NPC is programmed to find his own route from A to B. If pulled of track it won't run up a wall to get back to his route. it will navigate the landscape to find his way. Not only that, but almost every object in the game, such as plates, cups, food, books, weapons, candlesticks and many more are actual objects in the game. They react to contact, they fall over when you touch them. They aren't static texture glued on another.
Thus it's simply the case of more variables equals more room for error.
I'd say the original meshes look eons better, in spite of that minor glitch which rendered them somewhat blockish. Unless that was the correction you were referring to?JesterRaiin said:
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Not directed at anyone in particular (and something of a side note): I will never understand what compels people to eliminate any kind of perceived 'imperfections' in video game characters, as demonstrated by the screenshots above. I find it rather problematic, myself.
Anyone familiar with that horribly racist "fair-skinned Isabela" mod for Dragon Age II?
I memorised the description, because I couldn't really fathom what I was reading at the time.
"I loved Isabela as a character, but I couldn't stand her overly dark, well, everything!"
- I can't imagine what it must be like for the developers to see people defile and undermine their work like that.
It's a matter of aesthetics.LiquidGrape said:
It's a matter of aesthetics.LiquidGrape said:
It's a matter... I mean, if they implemented mod support then it's obviously no problem for them.LiquidGrape said:
Other massive game worlds treat things as disposable, someone drops a slushy in GTA4, the chances are that slushy will be gone in the morning, or when you walk around the block. Skyrim manages a lot more data than other open world games.
To me, those 'bugs and glitches' look like a typical GFX card overheating issue. I'm guessing it happens after your PC has been on for a few hours. Lots of games do this to my hardware, which is why I tend to stick with console gaming. I've played over 100 hours of Skyrim on 360, and have yet to suffer from a bug, it's locked up once, and that's it. My brother has Skyrim on his PC, and it's never shown issues like that, he has a high spec gaming PC with water cooling and a good case.
I think your PC is definitely over-heating, either the whole thing, or your graphics card. If it's a laptop, then there's not a lot you can do - a desktop would at least let you ensure the cooling is sufficient or add hardware to improve matters. On a laptop, well anyone with a gaming laptop should own a console as well, to save themselves from dissapointment.
To me, those 'bugs and glitches' look like a typical GFX card overheating issue. I'm guessing it happens after your PC has been on for a few hours. Lots of games do this to my hardware, which is why I tend to stick with console gaming. I've played over 100 hours of Skyrim on 360, and have yet to suffer from a bug, it's locked up once, and that's it. My brother has Skyrim on his PC, and it's never shown issues like that, he has a high spec gaming PC with water cooling and a good case.
I think your PC is definitely over-heating, either the whole thing, or your graphics card. If it's a laptop, then there's not a lot you can do - a desktop would at least let you ensure the cooling is sufficient or add hardware to improve matters. On a laptop, well anyone with a gaming laptop should own a console as well, to save themselves from dissapointment.
Am I the only person in the world with no problems in Skyrim (PC version)? I'm still playing with day one patch and I have no issues. No game breaking bugs, no graphical glitches, no freezes, lags, stutters, crashes etc.
Short answer: No.Ranorak said:
Even THESE could have been saved by good programming, and have (once again) NOTHING to do with the game world being huge, but rather everything to do with Bethesda deciding that reusing old systems with buggy code was a good idea.
Not only did you fail to explain the animation and texture bugs in question (which still have nothing to do with having a huge world, even if most things are interactive), but you also don't understand the nature of many of the systems Bethesda implemented and why they result in other glitches in the first place. Watching Bethesda explain some of their glitches in the many news about the subject here on this site (and others) has had me repeatably /facepalm and ask myself "Why would anyone implement it this way in the first place?"
Bethesda just sucks at conducting good programming practices. Period. There is no excuse for it anymore. The best analogy i can find for it is to describe Skyrim as a world class food recipe with a messy cook. The recipe is awesome, but the cook still managed to take what could have been a great meal and make it an average meal that only the really good fans of the meal can appreciate fully.
As a matter of fact, i have, and my conclusion in my previous post (which you even arrogantly PM'de me to tell me was "wrong") is based on actual analysis of Bethesdas games and their design decisions, many of them which they have revealed themself when they are forced to respond to why one of their bazillion bugs once again cannot be fixed.Bvenged said:
And the simple fact is that most of Skyrims problems are caused already in the planning phase of the game, and therefore make it into the core mechanics (which in turn means that it makes it almost impossible for fix, for Bethesda or any developers in the community).
Lets take the PS3 FPS-problem which was mentioned on this site a few weeks ago. Bethesda came out and proclaimed that the bug was pretty much unfixable because the cause lies in one of the core systems of the game. What Bethesda did was that they made it so the game records an event EVERY SINGLE TIME the player touches an object in the game, which eventually adds up to huge chunks of memory being wasted, which causes the FPS issues to the point where the game becomes totally unplayable (this, btw, is also part of the reason for the memory leaks on the PC version, which is why there are fixes out there so the game can use more than 2 gigs of RAM).
Any other game developer with even half a brain could have told Bethesda already in the DESIGN phase of the game that this system was a recipe for disaster. Hell, even i could have told them, and I'm not even a game developer. Now, since the system is an important piece on how the world works, i wouldn't suggest scrapping it unless it is going to make the game unplayable no matter what, but almost any other game studio in the world would have started looking for alternatives to the system. So lets analyze it for a bit.
Now the system was put in place to make it possible for to create the "every action has consequence" system. The idea is to give the game a way to retroactively look up every action the player has done in the past (including picking up objects, talking to NPC's etc.), and potentially modify the game based on it. I use the word "potentially", because most of the time the system either isn't used or could be implemented in a different way.
So lets consider what Bethesda could have done instead.
Now part of the system also records which NPC's you have talked to. This means that every single time you talk to an NPC, the system records that event on a global level, and memory is used. This is a system that would have been much smarter to instead tie to each individual NPC's (in case of NPC's there is procedurally generated, these can be tied to a "group", similarly to when you kill an important quest NPC, another equivalent NPC takes its place with the same options), and only loaded when you are close to an NPC or have to interact with them.
Another part of the system is that it records every single time you pick up or move an item, and adds that to the global event of the current game. And i, for the love of god, simply can't figure out why they felt why that was necessary to do it that way. Individual items that have a significance in certain places (like house decoration) can - or rather, SHOULD - be tied to the instance of the house rather than a global list, so the game doesn't need to have that items properties loaded when you're elsewhere. Items of quest-significance are much more rare than items that aren't, so these can also be tied to an individual list to prevent cluttering. Items that aren't yours (and therefore relates to stealing) can be handled by an individual stealing system that is much less bug-prone and much less intensive on the system.
There were several more elegant (read: not completely retarded) ways to handle this particular system. Even amateur programmers could have told Bethesda that global lists with either variables or objects that are meant to be kept loaded at all times should be limited in size, but someone forgot to give them that memo, so they created a single unified list that records EVERYTHING a player does in a game that takes well over 100 hours to complete, and didn't manage to figure out even BEFORE they implemented it that this would become a problem? It's laughable.
And that's just one example out of many. Other things that makes me laugh is the reusing of old systems from their previous games, when those systems have already proven buggy more than once. There simply is no excuse for this. Once a system has proven faulty, you don't just reuse it. You either fix the problems in the new iteration, or you scrap it and find an alternative and more elegant solution. Bethesda did neither of these, and i can't for the love of god remember any game in human history from other developers that abandoned common sense in it's development to even remotely the same degree.
So to return to your last paragraph:
...the problem (as i just showcased) is that the CORE systems of the game is broken, and any decent developing company would (and should) have picked up on even in the very early development phase. It's still being fixed (or attempted fixed) because the problems are rooted so deep in the gamse, and should have been eliminated from the very start. But once you decide to go with broken systems like the one i just described above, you end up in a situation where fixing it simply isn't feasable and you have to start over (which is why Bethesda should have realized this very early in development).
Skyrim can best summarized as an outstanding and unique recipe with a mediocre cook. The recipe is still amazing, and is still going to be popular for the people who like that kind of food, but it would still be 10 times better if Gordon Ramsay was cooking, and it's a simple fact that once you've burned the food, you have no choice but to start over if you want to get it right.
BECAUSE WOW HAD A FUCKING ALPHA TESTING AND BETA TESTING (WHICH WERE DONE BY A WHOLE MESS OF PEEPS) AND IS CONSTANTLY BEING PATCHED BY HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE AT THIS VERY MOMENT AND HAS BEEN DOING SO FOR QUITE A WHILE. FUCK.Taunta said:While I have seen people complain about the odd glitch occurring and never happening again, you do seem to be having an unusually large amount. I laughed rather heartily at the screencaps.
Kind of an off-topic question: Why is it that Skyrim has so many bugs? I play WoW quite frequently, also a huge open-world RPG, but these kinds of graphical glitches never happen to me. (I've never seen flying NPCs, quest givers melting into the ground, dragons exploring space,etc) The worst seems to be "oh this mob is evade-bugged", which gets fixed relatively quickly. Is it just a difference in the beta, the developer, or what?
Not to mention the fucking differences in gameplay features and that the entire world of WoW is fucking static as shit. Can you knock down every single candlestick and fucking sweetroll that you see in WoW? Don't think so tim.