Gamebryo is not bad

[luj1]

I've had the realisation that the engine Bethesda uses since Morrowind in every game they develop is not actually that terrible

Well your realisation is just wrong.

• the engine is written in FPU code (20 years old coding standard) introduced with the Pentium 1 CPU
• they compiled their games without using any of the optimization flags for release build
• as a result games like Skyrim were not even being able to use 2 CPU threads
• you still can't fix debilitating engine bugs such as z-fighting because of terrible errors in code (it's impossible to fix)

After their last PC game Morrowind, Bethesda produces half-working industrial algorithmic garbage and gives you the toolset to fix it yourself. All their money goes to marketing and Hollywood voice actors.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

The one thing that triggers me about the engine, and it's most likely engine side since it is present in all their games: Hey guys, does crouching actually work in Bethesda games now? Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4 crouching does NOT change the collision size of your character, try to crouch through any low opening and it does not let you. Jump on a table and get physically stuck (head in ceiling), crouching does not fix it, despite the camera moving down. This is some serious decline of design basics that has slipped passed each and every hand working on the games for 1.5 decades. WHY?

This is also Bethesda designers fault. I mean, check these:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/76783

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the engine is written in FPU code (20 years old coding standard) introduced with the Pentium 1 CPU

this is meaningless, there's no such thing as "FPU code"
If you meant it contained x87 subroutines, it wouldn't be surprising in the least that an engine dating back years would still contain such code in deep, dark corners. x87 was pretty state of the art when Morrowind was being developed, after all. I believe it was just beginning to be phased out with SSE2 around the time of Morrowind's release. I'm too lazy to break out the Agner Fog manuals, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still had decent performance because virtually all existing x86 CPUs are CISC(? perhaps there were some very early x86 CPUs that were designed as RISC?), the instructions are turned into micro-ops before they're executed so what you see is not what you get.

As a historical sidenote, x87 is still useful to this day because it's higher precision than standard 64-bit double floating point and more performant than high precision software alternatives. x87 operates on 80-bit (iirc nonstandardized extension?) floats, so it's common for it to see usage in physics sims that require high accuracy or programs that manage money.

 

[luj1]

fine but its a bad engine and skyrim barely works

its like a corpse

 

[blessedCoffee]

Shitthesda ruined Fallout first and foremost. You can pack Failturd 3/4 into the best engine available and both would remain just that, failed turds.

Yeah, as a Fallout sequel, they failed miserably. As a FPS you can turn your brain off, and have fun watching mushroom clouds while you're shooting generic gangs in a parking lot, they made it. Most people who bought Fallout 3 and other Beth installments for this franchise, never played a classic Fallout demo or tutorial before. So don't expect Fall 5 to suddenly go back to the old school gameplay and aesthetics, people who prefer the original are not their target audience – if they were, at a certain point, that's certainly not the case, anymore.

"Failturd" cracked me up, never heard that one before.

 

[Ravielsk]

The engine itself is not the problem. The problem is that Bethesda keeps using it, to borrow a lovely Czech phrase, like a straightener on a bender. They essentially keep trying to build games by cheating them into existence by taking shortcuts to shortcuts and the result is a bad game that only looks unstable and buggy because of the absolute lack of effort put into it. For example melee combat in Skyrim, Oblivion and Fallout feels janky because its essentially programmed like a touch spell from Morrowind. So its always hitting only one target even if the animation went through five dudes on the way to said target. But to even facilitate this they have to make the hitboxes on everything gigantic and give the NPCs autoaim on their swings otherwise they would never hit anything. The engine is not responsible, its a stupid design decision that works in a graybox but completely falls apart when used in a 100+ hour long game. About 80% of problems these games have are like this and the remaining 20% is just the product of Bethesda implementing half or less of a feature and just letting it sit there unfinished.

Bethesda could move over to Unreal 6.5 tomorrow and they would have the exact same issues as they have now.

 

[Hag]

Biggest issue with Gamebryo is how fucking terrible the name is.
Also its inability to process quaility textures is comical. But that name though. Terrifying.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

I've had the realisation that the engine Bethesda uses since Morrowind in every game they develop (I think Starfield also has it) it's not actually that terrible. During the years I've seen people online claiming that this engine is outdated, or even that it's the cause of why these games tend to have so many problems and bugs. But after years seeing what the modding community can achieve with it, I just think Bethesda are a bunch of useless game developers.





These videos are just examples of what can be made on this. Yes, I know. These mods are the typical muh inmershun improvements. But there's also a lot of quest mods very solid designed. And complete overhauls about how the RPG stats work. Shit, there's even an entire game (Enderal) made using Skyrim as a base. Even porn, adult content videos have been made using the modded game as framework



tl;dr

Gamebryo is not bad and Bethesda it's just impotent garbage. Thanks for reading me.

I've said this before and I'll say it again, the Creation Engine is one of the finest examples of software engineering in games. The vast majority of people, including Jim "Cuck" Sterling who is one of the forerunners of CE bad campaign, are not equipped to have any opinions about the quality of the engine itself. They can complain about the bugs, but that's mostly a Q&A problem.

 

[Ravielsk]

I've said this before and I'll say it again, the Creation Engine is one of the finest examples of software engineering in games. The vast majority of people, including Jim "Cuck" Sterling who is one of the forerunners of CE bad campaign, are not equipped to have any opinions about the quality of the engine itself. They can complain about the bugs, but that's mostly a Q&A problem.

This is partially the result of sanitizing the engine for the masses. Unless you go out of your way to mod in some debug options the game will not even tell you why it crashed or what even happened. With source engine or even unreal when there is a problem you get a error message of some sort. So often the solution can be easily googled and identified as the users fault but with CE you just get a crash to desktop and finito. For the average user this is an impossible obstacle to overcome because they have no idea what to do even if the problem is as banal as a missing texture.

Its an issue Bethesda made for themselves and vultures like Jim Sterling simply exacerbated.

 

[Atlantico]

I agree that there is probably nothing wrong with the engine (whatever it is called) that Bethesda is using. There was nothing wrong with Frostbite 3 when Bioware used it.

The problem is mostly management at both companies that insist on using these engines, because it's cheaper in theory. In reality both engines require maintaining and updating along with the game design and ambitions. That costs money and time and resources.

Both of these engines, which is just a collection of APIs and game-design tools, could be fantastic for whatever you want — but it is not free and it is not cheap.

 

[quaesta]

What I'm skeptical about Gamebryo's continued development isn't in it's capacity to make a game. We see it CAN make a game. My hesistency comes from the future of Gamebryo handling future technologies. We saw how buggy Fallout 76 was, and that was due to trying to create an MMO. Even Elder Scrolls Online was made with the HeroEngine, not Gamebryo

 

[Nifft Batuff]

One word: persistence. Almost no games does that anymore.