Fallout 76

[Jez]

One of the guts I work with has it and texted me earlier with similar feelings.

[Hatredsheart]

However nice the power armour hat is, I can’t muster up a mosquito-fart of enthusiasm for this. Ballhang is my verdict.

Same here mate, this will end up being the only Fallout I've never played. You just watch if they don't Battle Royale the bugger next.

[Lee]

And to no one surprise the Gamebryo is going to be used for Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield according to a interview with Todd.

[Wrathbone]

[Jez]

What a fantastic featureful decision by them

[DjchunKfunK]

It will be a vastly upgraded engine by the time those games come out. Many studios use this way of working it just isn't normally given a name like it has with Gamebryo. This article sums it up nicely.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/11/14/the- ... -misguided

[Wrathbone]

It's essentially an API, but the most fundamental building blocks of Gamebryo on which the rest of its tools are built are massively outdated, and the only way to get around that would be to rebuild it from the ground up. You can't generally change base code without breaking huge swathes of a system. All they've done since Morrowind is improve the higher-level tools.

They need to bite the bullet at some point, especially if they're going to try more online games like Fallout 76. Even if I had a desire to play Fallout 76, I wouldn't in its current state because it poses serious security risks due to the way in which files and information are shared, validated (or not) and processed between client and server, and that's entirely because the basic functions of Gamebryo were never designed with a network in mind.

[DjchunKfunK]

Unless you work for Bethesda I'm not sure how you can say that with any certainty.

[Wrathbone]

It is partly speculation, yes, but I've some understanding of how systems like that work and can make reasonable deductions based on my own experiences with Gamebryo and from comments by experts who know far more about its inner working than I do. The network situation with it is undeniably an abomination - look at the observations made about it a couple of pages back. The fact alone that most stuff is done client side rather than server side is laughable in the 21st century, not to mention outright dangerous when no server validation is done, and it's undoubtedly the reason for the reported lag in controls and similar timing problems. The only reason any dev worth their salt would do client-side processing for the things F76 is doing in the present day is if they were lumbered with a legacy system (Gamebryo) where the API didn't allow for server-side processing. Instead it presumably has some intermediary system which passes everything from client to server rather than letting the server decide what should be happening. It's insanity.

[DjchunKfunK]

I don't disagree about the network stuff, they have done a lot of work to try and get it into the engine. It's the first part of your statement about it being massively outdated and in need of a rebuild.

[Wrathbone]

Well... it is! There's stuff in there from 2003 such as the physics being tied to framerates that really shouldn't be part of a system in 2018.

There are long-standing issues with Gamebryo and its successors that have never been addressed, and it stands to reason that they haven't been addressed because they're rooted in the most fundamental parts of the system that many other parts depend upon. As I said before, with any system like this you can't just change stuff in the base code and expect anything dependent to continue working. Using the laws of physics as an analogy, it'd be like trying to change how protons and neutrons work.

[Jez]

All I know is it looks like ASS...and it's buggy.

[Maturin]

Can't say I came across a single bug while playing FO4. Thought it looked lovely too - the only thing that really (graphically) lets Gamebryo/Creation down is the basic lighting system it uses.

Which I think is one of the reasons why they need to load separate environments for inside buildings, because the broad light setting doesn't come from a starting point (so if it was daylight outside and you walked into a gloomy enclosed house it would have the exact same sunny lighting as outside). But if the internal building is a separate location they can set a dimmer light setting to be more appropriate.

[Mantis]

Isn't Elder Scrolls Online built on the Gamebryo engine? Nobody ever seemed to kick up any kind of fuss about whether that's client or server side processing.

[Wrathbone]

It’s not Gamebryo, it’s supposedly a new engine built from scratch. ESO was made by a different studio - Todd Howard et al were not involved.