(PC) Engine Speed tied to FPS WTF?

Looks funny as hell though

Here's a fun experiment:

1. Download Notepad++

2. Use it to open Fallout4.exe as a text file

3. Ctrl-F and search for "gamebryo"

4. This will take a while, go do something else

5. You found the name of a Gamebryo function!

You're technically right, they're not the same engine. But there is shared code, probably thousands of man-hours of it because why reinvent the wheel if it's only a little bit square?

Many people believe that the Creation Engine is simply them adding on top of Gamebryo, as on their side it looks very similar; it has been shown to have some Gamebryo code in it, but that is not to say that the engine itself at its absolute core is Gamebryo.

I think people fail to realize how much work into aspects such as assets, design engines, and gameplay programming go into these games. Armchair designing is kind of the worst.

Game developers will rarely just throw away an entire codebase and start from scratch for a new game. All their existing technology, tools, pipeline, knowledge, would get thrown away for little gain. Sure you'd have a nice and shiny new engine and maybe some of the old bugs would be gone, but you can bet that there'll be a whole host of brand new fun bugs that await!

As a game physics programmer, having a fixed timestep would be a great luxury; I'm jealous.

I guess this makes me a bad consumer, but if they did start over I would pay money to see what kind of bugs they came up with.

Fallout and Skyrim have always had wonkyness with unlocked framerates - this isn't that new.

I'd love to see the new Fallout running properly on my 120hz monitor but I wouldn't have the hardware to push stable 120 anyways. My aging hardware has saved me it seems.

A bunch of games have this (e.g. the greatest game ever, Dark Souls), and it's a bit of a bummer (especially if they tied it assuming max FPS was 30), but I've never really been bothered as long as the game is good. I'm saying this as someone who has never used a monitor with a refresh rate above 60 Hz though, so I'm admittedly ignorant to how obvious the differences between 144 and 60 Hz are.

Unlike most dev's they need very specific requirements out of a game engine, which is why they have not gone with a different engine and are having to adapt.

I am sure that id software crew are probably developing a revision to their current engine, and that will meet the needs of a new elder scrolls game but it does take time. Not as easy as some people think.

ultimately not an excuse, but when you consider their requirements, it makes sense why they struggle.

The sad thing, orthogonal to the fact that they have been using the same engine for more than a decade, is that the engine still exhibits bugs that existed in Oblivion.

I think the main reason this isn't seen as an issue is Consoles. Although Bethesda games really shine on PC, they've focused development for consoles since Oblivion was such a blockbuster on 360. New gen consoles are already obsolete, but I'd guess PS4 and Xbone sales outstrip PC.

Not tying animation and physics to frame rate is game dev 101. But game dev 101 is pure theory when you're trying to squeeze out performance from obsolete consoles. Physics calculations on frames only, when your target is 24-30fps is a huge performance boost. Its also something that guys like the GB crew never notice or comment on. They just say oh it looks nice on Xbox, even though physics or AI has been gutted in order to push polygons over larger and larger areas. I don't think people realize how quickly outdated, is this new gen of consoles. When the new hardware race for VR starts, I think were gonna see a performance gap like we've never seen before. We might even end up seeing PS4+ and Xbox One + hardware bump revisions.

Although I understand the reasoning, and the real world practicalities. Its probably my biggest annoyance when it comes to games. I don't really mind bugs, or crashes since these open world AAA games now are so freaking gigantic, but deliberate compromise and design decisions like these drive me up the wall.

That is why modern games don't that. They tie game speed to the rendering speed. Mostly because it makes implementing physic system easier. There is nice reddit thread that talks about this. I can imagine that game world running multiple simulations in top of the physics (like Fallout 4 does) is hassle to get to sync properly (most likely systems have different timings and priorities).

edit: tired, made text make more sense in the context, now sleep.

@bushpusherr: I think people are entitled to say what they want on this matter. "Lazy" might be the wrong word but I don't see a reason to defend Bethesda on this. They are one of the most successful big developers out there so it's not like it's some small underdog developer. If this really is something that has been going on for years and years it's kind of ridiculous.

Saying that we shouldn't call them out for something that they never promised is stupid. Straight up dumb. We should expect certain things from AAA games in 2015. Just like how MGSV doesn't have ANY audio settings so I can't turn down the volume in-game when it's blowing out my headphones. I guess Konami never said that the game would have a volume slider but I feel like that's something we should expect. Stop being an apologist for a giant corporation.

So apparently I can't force my monitor to go to 60 Hz? When I switch it, it just swaps back to 144 Hz. I'm gonna go ahead with it for now, hopefully someone will have a solution for me :/

Edit: Nvm, had to do it via Window settings and not Nvidia Control Panel.

I agree with the guys lazy is such a lazy term especially since we don't know how much time they spent updating Gamebryo code base for CE. They could've worked day and night bringing over as much code as humanly possible calling them lazy is just no bueno.

Incompetent is the right word because clearly after all the games they've released they're either lazy or incompetent. CD Projekt Red's witcher 3 was just fine, Techland and Dying light was fine , HELL first timers over at Kojima land literally released a less janky product as their first open world game. All three of those games had issues but not to the degree Bethesda has had with pretty much all their games. We haven't even brought in Rockstar another open world master dev which would really shine a light on how bad of a job Bethesda is at coding.

They're Incompetent and that's an accurate statement based on the games they've released in the past and continue to release to this day. If incompetent is too harsh for you to accept I guess you could lazy but it's one or the other.This isn't a small dev without backing trying to rush a product because they'll close down if they don't release something. This is motherfucking Bethesda who've killed it on game sales and they had zero pressure to release it this soon.

Also 8 hours in (was basically gifted the game) and really enjoying the base building having a really good time even with all the jank. I knew this was really a Gamebryo game and kmnew CE was bs and expected it to be full of bugs and jank so I was adequately prepared and for free it's a decent enough game. I like it so far.

You guys gets way to hung up on words. Does it matter if they are lazy, bad or icompetent? For all intents and purposes its the same thing. Bethesda cant release a polished open world game and several generations of gamers are not happy with it.

I was still getting stuck at computer terminals at 95 FPS. I'm using Dxtory to limit my FPS to 85 and I haven't had any issues.

@nime: Even with my 980Ti I'm still getting drops to below 40 in some city areas, a steady 90 everywhere else. Locking it to 60 is good enough for me but the microstutter is a bit of a pain.

Exactly the same in Fallout 3 and New Vegas when I played them - Less graphically intense games but I had less powerful hardware.