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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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The tech debt is just glaring at this point. They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
No, they need a competent dev team. To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine. And they can use it for everything from Alyx to Dota 2! If Valve can do it, why can't Bethesda?
Except that Quake is a good engine.
GameBryo is and has always been shit. There are other games from competent devs on that engine, and they also are full of problems.
Building a house with a solid foundation is still important. Quake is bedrock. GameBryo is sand.
Why is everyone always saying GamBryo is shit? I hear this over and over again, but I never hear why.
I think it's because it was designed to be able to handle hundreds of persistent objects in a scene as a priority over graphical performance. That's why Bethesda games have so much collectable junk - because they can.
I think GameBryo can be good, but it needs some badass people working on it, and loads of time and money poured into it.
And unfortunately I just don’t see Bethesda dedicating the resources needed to truly overhaul it.
GameBryo doesn't exist in their engine anymore. I'm reasonably confident that there is hardly anything left in that engine from GameBryo. Their engine has plenty of issue, but they're technically fixable with the right investments. I always disagree that they need to switch engines, and I used to disagree that they should (because it would incur a huge technical lag). They haven't seemed to make the investments that they need to to make it acceptable for a modern engine though, so if they aren't willing to do that they need to change something.
The bones of it are still very much there, holding everything else together. If you've ever made scripts for mods, you'd know this.
I think the most telling moments are when you pick something up off a table and everything starts floating.
All Valve statements about the Source2 port of Counter-Strike say Source2 is a completely new engine.
It's new in the sense they have rebuilt large enough parts of it to fully justify giving it a new name. Certainly it's very far removed from Quake. It's not like they've been sitting on their hands for almost 30 years. But it's not like they rebuilt it all from scratch, either; just the parts they needed to. Old code is still being used, and even new code still sometimes uses the old as a base. The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
It's a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, but I think my point still stands: Bethesda doesn't need an entirely new engine, they need devs who can (or more likely, need to give their devs time to) properly rebuild the parts that need it.
I mean a huge (really huge) number of game engines ultimately draw lineage from Quake. It's either Quake or Unreal.
Nobody is denying that but the claim that Source2 is at its core just Quake 1 is just insane.
I agree that is insane. It's also insane to say the Creation Engine is GameBryo. It isn't. They just need to invest more to update it further.
Starfield contains much idTech7 code, so by the logic of certain individuals Starfield is basically Quake1 just because there is some heritage...
But you wrote "To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996" and that's just untrue. Just because nobody ever saw the need to change the light flickering pattern for no reason other than to make it new, doesn't mean that Source2 is "at its core" still Quake1. Even the community-maintained wiki (not a officially sanctioned Valve document, btw) you've linked only speaks about "some residual Quake code".
Semantics.
Another to look at it is that if Valve properly managed their VCS, you could do
git ls-files HEAD^10000and see Quake/goldsrc code building the foundation for everything that came after. Every subsequent rewrite and refactor was shaped and constrained by what came before and what hadn't been rewritten yet. If they had started with another engine, they wouldn't have ended up here.Beyond semantics, Source 2's lineage is still very apparent. While the engine is very good at what it does, it's without question much better suited to a rather specific class of semi-realistic 3D games. It has a look, a feel, strengths and weaknesses. It can't be Unity or Unreal Engine, and it would have been a ridiculous mistake to use it as a base for Elite Dangerous or Assassin's Creed Valhalla or Terraria.
Funny that you claim deeper insight into Source2 than Valve.
Source2 was first developed for Dota. It's way more likely that its limitations are because it was never developed as a complete allrounder, not because some minor bits and pieces like flickering pattern were developed in the 1990s because that's also where Unreal Engine was first developed.
I'm in awe of how confident you are.
And why wouldn't I be? The person who claimed that Source2 was basically Quake1 at its core had two bits of "proof", the Valve wiki that refers to "some residual Quake code" and light flickering pattern. That's it. Suddenly it's just "semantics". Yeah, right. Valve developers referred to CS2 as a completely new engine. That's not semantics, that's not splitting hairs, that's straight of Valve's mouth.
Ship of Theseus.
When does the ship change from the ship of Theseus into something else?
All statements Bethesda has made about Creation say the same thing. Doesn't mean it's true.
I think that's the point though, they rework the engine. I eat it's not the same engine as it was back in Half Life days.
I got a lol out of "I eat" as "i.e." :')
This voice dictations fault that is, I hadn't noticed that.
I agree, and the same logic applies to the creation engine. However, so many people still, when complaining, say it's GameBryo, which is just stupid. It shows their lack of understanding of how game development functions.
The problem is that the Creation Engine 2 is, in a lot of ways, still the Gamebryo engine. It has all the same advantages, as well as all the same issues. Hell, there are literally bugs shared between Morrowind, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and even Starfield.
You can’t compared CE to something like, let’s say, the Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine has actually had absurd amounts of resources poured into it, effectively making it a new thing. But the Creation Engine simply hasn’t been - it desperately needs more time and money put into it.
I'm confident there isn't much, if any, GameBryo left in the creation engine. Sure, they may share some bugs, but that doesn't mean much. They could be caused by things Bethesda introduced.
I do agree that UE has had a lot more development, and that's the issue with the Creation Engine, like I said. They haven't invested in it like they needed to. They've done the bare minimum to keep the renderer looking modern (though I'd argue Starfield totally failed, specifically with faces), but not updating the core engine. UE is a commercial product on its own though, and it's designed to be a lot more versatile than CE. CE is meant to make Bethesda games and that's it. CE shouldn't ever be expected to compare to UE on everything.
The Starfield engine is already half idTech7 anyway.
Didn’t know that, what parts?
At least the parts that are mentioned in performance tweaking guides that instruct users to edit config files and the parameters are all named
bTemporalAA_idTech7=0etc.I wish people would stop saying “it’s the engine” when they don’t know what they are talking about