The Elder Scrolls Online

Utnayan_sl said:

They rewrote the renderer you fucking idiot.

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'The Elder Scrolls Online' is not using the HeroEngine

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-elder-scrolls-online-is-not-using-the-hero-engine


"We started ZeniMax Online from scratch, with no employees and no technology," Game Director Matt Firor explained in a Game Informer interview. "We had to build everything ourselves. It takes a long time to write game engines, especially MMO engines, which are inherently more complicated than typical single-player ones. So, we decided to license the HeroEngine to give us a headstart. It was a useful tool for us to use to prototype areas and game design concepts, and it provided us the ability to get art into the game that was visible, so we could work on the game's art style. Our plan is for ESO to be a world class MMO, with the most advanced social features found in any MMO to date - so while we were prototyping the game on HeroEngine, we were simultaneously developing our own client, server, and messaging layer that were specifically designed with ESO in mind. Think of HeroEngine as a whiteboard for us - a great tool to get some ideas in the game and start looking at them while the production engine was in development."

As I said, it was used for prototyping. They are not using the HE for their game.

Dang, this NDA needs to drop so we can grill Pyskel and get the actual goods. Not Black, since he's a little too rah, rah, and not Ut, who, well is himself...

Recalcitrant_sl said:

I'd like to point out that on Sunday you said the loading times were "a lot better" than Saturday. They weren't, of course. And now you're claiming they were cleared up on Monday. They weren't, people (including myself) had the same problems- client crashes and disconnects on top of the loading screen and general lag. Maybe if you're on site you got smooth game play, but everyone in the chat of my campaign for Cyrodiil was complaining of 5-10 second ability lag each day. Every time I went near a zerg the client would desync: every player character would freeze/run in place and I could run around them for 30ish seconds before timing out back to the log-in screen. This happened on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Now, I don't have the greatest internet in the world- and clearly some people were able to play without having that problem as seen in the video posted earlier in the thread. But if 7 down and 1 up internet isn't good enough to join PVP in ESO I think there are going to be quite a few disappointed people. And it wasn't some obscure issue on my end- I posted on the bug forum about it in a thread with quite a few others.

Claiming there was smooth gameplay last weekend is just as ridiculous as Ut claiming they removed the "simultronics code" or whatever he says.

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It's obvious that one's absolute disgust for the game is clearly no different than someone else's zealotry for it they are just at different ends of the spectrum but they both lead to exaggerated opinions.

pyksel_sl said:

That's great for you but there are certainly quite a few others playing it besides yourself.

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Fair enough, was just trying to explain my earlier post. I think it's still safe to say that if this is a rewritten HE, they've done an amazing job. I'm no graphics expert, but I can appreciate good textures, lighting, etc. Having smooth framerates with 100s of players in a battle is nice, too.

Gecko_sl said:

"...with the most advanced social features found in any MMO to date" - Matt Firor[/I]

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What exactly was that quote referencing? I didn't see anything related to "advanced social features" in beta.

Would one side please play/post to win in this fight?

All this unverifiable not to lose stuff is rather unsatisfying and it's been going on for a few pages now. Give us some substance pls.

Recalcitrant_sl said:

I'd like to point out that on Sunday you said the loading times were "a lot better" than Saturday. They weren't, of course. And now you're claiming they were cleared up on Monday. They weren't, people (including myself) had the same problems- client crashes and disconnects on top of the loading screen and general lag. Maybe if you're on site you got smooth game play, but everyone in the chat of my campaign for Cyrodiil was complaining of 5-10 second ability lag each day. Every time I went near a zerg the client would desync: every player character would freeze/run in place and I could run around them for 30ish seconds before timing out back to the log-in screen. This happened on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Now, I don't have the greatest internet in the world- and clearly some people were able to play without having that problem as seen in the video posted earlier in the thread. But if 7 down and 1 up internet isn't good enough to join PVP in ESO I think there are going to be quite a few disappointed people. And it wasn't some obscure issue on my end- I posted on the bug forum about it in a thread with quite a few others.

Claiming there was smooth gameplay last weekend is just as ridiculous as Ut claiming they removed the "simultronics code" or whatever he says.

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Nope, here's where I'll be honest: I didn't play Monday: I took some reports from a different forum as being true when maybe they weren't. Sucks, cause I thought they got a handle on the load times.

pyksel_sl said:

As far as that particular addon is concerned, your questions would probably be better served on the official tester forums where we're talking about it. I'm sure I've said too much already about it but I think you get the idea.

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Utnayan is too scared to post on the closed beta forums in fear Zenimax will catch him and ban him from a beta test of a game he despises.

Gecko_sl said:

As I said, it was used for prototyping. They are not using the HE for their game.

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Plenty of devs lie about new engine vs copy/pasting large sections of a previous one as part of marketing. I linked earlier in the thread about CoD ghosts first claiming it had a new engine, then backtracking for release and say they "iterated" on the old engine.

There's no way to prove one way or another unless someone does some kind of complicated digging. I do know it has a lot of similar problems (knockbacks making you fall through walls/floors, going quickly down a cliff causes world objects to blink in and out) and I was almost instantly reminded of my brief stint in early SWTOR, which is why I had looked up whether or not it was using HeroEngine in the first place. At this point it doesn't really matter if it's the HeroEngine or not aside from semantics, what does matter is that they fix the stuff that's broken.

Utnayan_sl said:

Simutronics - I keep adding the L because Simutronics is fucked up to type. I always end up typing simultronics as in simulation.

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Yea, but "removing the Simutronics code" doesn't make any more sense. Simutronics made 100% of the code for HeroEngine at the time it was licensed during early alpha. If they removed all the Simutronics code, then you're just saying they're not using HeroEngine- which is exactly the opposite of the point you seem to be trying to make.

Xaxius_sl said:

What exactly was that quote referencing? I didn't see anything related to "advanced social features" in beta.

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Marketing BS. It was Ut's proclamation <again> that TESO is using the Hero Engine, or Hero Renderer, or whatever the fuck he's talking about..

I could care less if it does or does not use the Hero Engine, personally. The graphics and game look fine to me. The bigger issues seem to be phasing and quest bugs, which I'm not sure have anything to do with HE or TESO-E...

Recalcitrant_sl said:

I'd like to point out that on Sunday you said the loading times were "a lot better" than Saturday. They weren't, of course. And now you're claiming they were cleared up on Monday. They weren't, people (including myself) had the same problems- client crashes and disconnects on top of the loading screen and general lag. Maybe if you're on site you got smooth game play, but everyone in the chat of my campaign for Cyrodiil was complaining of 5-10 second ability lag each day. Every time I went near a zerg the client would desync: every player character would freeze/run in place and I could run around them for 30ish seconds before timing out back to the log-in screen. This happened on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Now, I don't have the greatest internet in the world- and clearly some people were able to play without having that problem as seen in the video posted earlier in the thread. But if 7 down and 1 up internet isn't good enough to join PVP in ESO I think there are going to be quite a few disappointed people. And it wasn't some obscure issue on my end- I posted on the bug forum about it in a thread with quite a few others.

Claiming there was smooth gameplay last weekend is just as ridiculous as Ut claiming they removed the "simultronics code" or whatever he says.

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The ability lag will be server side and nothing to do with your connection. The load on the server increases exponentially with the number of players present. Basically, they need better server code or better servers. But again, the whole point of a stress test is for them to gather data on this so that they can fix it. I just want to see a fixed version before it releases.

From my experience the large scale PVP ran pretty smooth. I wonder if them not implementing any combat log has anything to do with it.

Flank_sl said:

The ability lag will be server side and nothing to do with your connection. The load on the server increases exponentially with the number of players present. Basically, they need better server code or better servers. But again, the whole point of a stress test is for them to gather data on this so that they can fix it. I just want to see a fixed version before it releases.

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Ability lag was widespread so I definitely chalk that up to the servers, but the full desyncs were hit or miss (ie Flake there didn't experience it and there were clearly defined zergs so it couldn't have been everyone). I do wonder how exactly they update all the positions/directions/abilities used between client - server - other clients. I would assume it polls every X ms and you get an update from everyone. Games like EVE dilate time with more people, PS2 and FFXIV cull excess player models past a certain distance and other games just lag. Draw distance was pretty high in ESO and I didn't notice any culling- maybe the packets were too often or too large and overwhelmed my connection (sort of like how some people have problems torrenting even well under their speed cap because of the large number of open connections). I never had frames drop precipitously in a zerg (I was even able to record footage while running through hordes of frozen players), so some issue with how the game transmits/receives data is all I can think of.

That's why I really don't like NDAs- some of these problems would be easier to highlight if people were allowed to record/upload it.

The complaints about lag, again combined with an NDA up 6 weeks before launch , then thrown in with the mega server bit , have me still leery of doing the pre-order. But I am a launch whore , I know there are always launch issues , but just enjoy that goofy first week or two of a new mmo. My own weakness I guess. The only reasonably major one I skipped was FFXiV first time around.

I would be wary, you have usual launch issues with multiple servers but in this game you have 1 giant server, I can't imagine the issues that are going to happen. Even worse if there are queues like there was during the weekend(which were a hour +).

Yeah that's my issue with this , queues for the mega server mean I can't choose to go to a new lower pop server , and the mega server infrastructure doesn't seem to have been exactly spiffy so far either.

does anyone else think the draw distance is fucked up in TESO, while the up close graphics are pretty the fog is really bad even at fully maxxed out, on a pretty beefy PC. These aren't my screenshots but it shows the problem




and give the hero engine shit a rest, who gives a fuck it doesn't have any of the problems swtor launch does with its engine (2 process rendering, having to use shitty textures for closeups, not being able to draw more than 50 players, having to load every single players texture in a zone, etc). The only real issues are the shit-tastic zone cutups (loading screens everywhere!), fucking doors with tiny instanced rooms (mo loading screens), and the occasional Z-axis stuff that have plagued most MMOs. Those 3 things are probably because they are porting this game to 360/ps3 though, goddamn console-itis.

For me ultimately it comes down to not wanting to reward Zenimax for churning out a mediocre product, at best. Its not like Assassins Creed 3, Dragon Age 2, or Battlefield 4, where a shitty launch is "meh, whatever" because in 1-2 years another sequel will be out and hopefully they have learned and there are 20 other similar games this year. This fucker took 7 years to make, and goddamn it you should have done a better job, assholes. When its 50-75% off and/or f2p i'll take it for a spin to show there is definitely a market for it, but I'm not giving you $60 + 15/mo for mexican levels of work.

spronk_sl said:

does anyone else think the draw distance is fucked up in TESO, while the up close graphics are pretty the fog is really bad even at fully maxxed out, on a pretty beefy PC. These aren't my screenshots but it shows the problem

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Didn't really mind anything about the art except for the animations and some areas with broken/missing textures. Had fog, but I really didn't notice it while playing more than other games. I probably keep my camera angled down toward the floor more than most- I could see it being a bigger problem where there's not much on the terrain to differentiate from the horizon (your first pic) and from certain angles that highlight the distance (second). There was a draw distance slider that I didn't touch, but it wasn't maxed out to start. I believe there was also an option that would make distant objects specifically blur, like a camera focusing up close.


The zone cutups you mention are certainly strange, I don't know how they do them exactly. In one spot I was indoors, but there was a texture missing around the door itself. I could see through it, and above you could see other players both standing and moving around. So I imagine the buildings are part of the same physical zone... just underground and the loading screen covers teleporting you there.

spronk_sl said:

does anyone else think the draw distance is fucked up in TESO, while the up close graphics are pretty the fog is really bad even at fully maxxed out, on a pretty beefy PC. These aren't my screenshots but it shows the problem

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That just shows someone who didn't crack up the draw distance in options. Even at Ultra, you had to move the slider further to the right to max out draw distance. I just went through my shots and the fog isn't anywhere that bad.

*Edit* It also could be that the fog increases because of weather, since I noticed it was raining in those screenshots.