I know. But this is a case where we are going to need to decide whether to move with the times, or if the times will move us. All good things must come to an end, and eventually we are all going to need to learn a new engine to keep this series going. It's not pretty, but its the only way forward.

One place that Bethesda could start looking is CryEngine: open-world, pushing the graphics envelope, and easily moddable. If Bethesda can take a few leaves out of CryTek's book and create a similar engine with the flexibility they need, that might be enough to insure TES VI is just as impressive visually as TES IV was back in 2006. As for the cost... I think Skyrim will take care of that on its own.

And now, back to our original topic.

After killing all enemies within both Ustengrav and Morvarth's Lair, it still does not show "Cleared" on the Game Map. Does this have something to do with the ash piles?

How can I compile that script with TESsnip?

Probably because if the CK pushes out ready to rock without being infected or depend on anything except simply having the game, just like TESCS, by the time they "integrate" workshop most folks will already consider it a useless piece of crap since well established MOD sites will be absolutely bursting with huge variety of quality stuff ready go.

As far as ash piles my 1st assumption when I raised a helper and they turned to ash matches others thinking, otherwise you could just repeatedly bring it right back for ever. The cleanup script should definitely do the trick and there is very, very likely to be a ton of that type of thing for entities all over the place eventually so it helps clean out "who knows" how much junk it piles on the engine over time.

I've noticed that "Ghostly Remains" also persist indefinitely. This is really bad if you use the Spectral Assassin a lot, since every time he dies his "corpse" will persist. Not to mention any quests that have you defeating a lot of ghosts, anomolies, wraiths etc.

these problems were present in earlier bethesda games, but i wonder if it realy is a problem. yes, every ash pile is a reference with coordinates. so what? yes it is a bug in the garbage collection, but do 10000 ashpiles realy matter? it increases your savegame size but i doubt you would be able to destroy a character with this. you could also try to remove the ash piles manualy with wrye bash or something. if i would take a gues an ashpile with cell-id, coordinates and loot would be a few bytes. lets say 10000 ashpiles are 3mb savedata (which are never loaded simultanously). how fast can a modern pc/console take for calculating this data? just saying, because a lot of people fear for their characters when blasting enemies to dust. anyway, a fix would be nice

ps: sorry for bad english

Yes, it does matter. More bloat records in your save means higher risk of corruption. Also, the lag issues on the consoles seem to depend on the size of the saves.

Fixing this problem would help to reduce the save filesizes on consoles, which could help with the lag issues.

There are plenty more items that bloat the save up, too. Fired arrows do not get cleaned up, equipment dropped by guard NPCs does not get cleaned up, and Ice Wraith ice piles and ghostly remains do not get cleaned up, either.

There is a lot of stuff this game should be cleaning up but is not. This results in huge amounts of bloat over long periods of play (some people have saves as big as 20Mb!). Mine are now at 12Mb and continuing to climb.

CyrEngine does NOT have the AI capability like the Creation Engine. There has to be a give someplace people... to get a vast WORLD such as Skyrim to interact with everything, tract quests, items, dropped things, NPC interacting/doing things/etc... that would NOT be possible in CryEngine. The CryEngine is a beautiful engine, but it's a game engine based on scripting, not on "free will". Creation Engine does have scripting as well, but a majority of things are going on while you're out and about exploring.

I also recall plenty of invisible walls or restrictions in Crysis and Crysis 2 where it'd kill you if you stayed in a "inaccessible" area. So, it's not all hokers and sunshine either.

For what it does, the Creation Engine is very remarkable, though I do think they need to rewrite the engine from the ground up. Some of these carry-over bugs are truly disturbing.

I just said use CryEngine as a starting point. They only need to replace the render, really. Creation Engine's Gamebryo-based render is very dated at this point and will not survive the next console generation.

If, in our dreams, Bethesda were to get a renderer similar to CryEngine (the rest of their engine can stay as-is), I think we will be pretty well set visual-wise. That's all.

The ash likes are annoyances and I can say they are in my world and they do not disappear. Now weapons and arrows enemies leave are staying in random places. Also when the weapons drop and stay where ever they tend to randomly float in the air. I hope Bethesda resolves these issues, I would hate a corrupt file because they have yet to fix a problem that has dated back to '08 with Fallout 3.

has anyone tried this:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1309945-relzskyrim-respawn-and-deadbody-timersrelz/

qwert

The rendering engine isn't what's keeping track of the coordinate data for all the ash piles etc. It's only rendering what it's being told to render. The problem of not cleaning up stuff is going to be in a different segment of the code. So chances are, yes, this is in fact a bug of Bethesda's own making that they either don't have the skill to fix, or are just plain lazy and don't care. Either condition should be seen as alarming.

Yea, its actually that simple. And, you forgot 'Moon Sugar'.

Corpses clean up no problem, unless they are supposed to be there (Desecrated Corpses, for example); so one would think a logical designer would apply the exact same flag to ash piles.

Ash piles also self replicate.

I killed 3 guards in Markarth on the stares looking down to the prison. As you say, I noticed they never disappeared and finally got sick of looking at them every time I went by.

So I opened the console, and ended up disabling over a dozen freaking ash piles stacked on top of each other in 2 separate piles! Not an exaggeration in the slightest. You could see each one disappear as they went.

Thank you Thomas. I enjoyed reading this post very much. Also looking through some of the entries in the game and seeing references to VATS and other Fallout 3 related stuff, I'm wondering if it's not a bit of an insult to our intelligence when Todd said they wrote this new engine "from the ground up".

I've been contributing to this thread on the same/related subject, BTW: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1307522-save-game-bloating-also-a-problem-on-pc/. I'm glad a clear, concise topic has been started about ash piles, but I'll mirror my concerns here that I did there, and hopefully someone can tell me if I'm worried for nothing.

this a mod that removes dead bodies and what not might be worthwhile to look into it.
qwert

That's all Elder Scrolls is anymore. Marketing.

Should my saves be getting larger everytime or fluctuating in size?

I've only got the saves for my latest character and he is somewhere 7 to 10 hours in I would guess but the save sizes go up and down not continuosly up, current is 3770kb largest was 3899kb seven saves earlier.

They go down from time to time, but its kinda like watching the stock market as far as saves go, except the end result is always the same. In the end, there is always a steady trend upwards. Give the game a couple days, then check your save sizes, I guarantee they will have mushroomed.

Ice Piles, Ash Piles, and Ghostly Remains have RNAM - Radio Station subrecord data http://i.imgur.com/XmqLJ.png unless the six forms, 10B3D, 107CA, 11ABC, 11185, 11CFC, and 1171F are all hardcoded forms and RNAM for ACTIs has a different use.

Also, they seem to replicate as confirmed by another user. In a few cases, I've had up to six ash piles staggered with the same coordinates. Ash pile .ess bloating is not just a theory, but a confirmed anomaly...

And what happens when you try to open those duplicated piles? Nothing?

If yes, then I might have come across a couple duped ice piles in my game.

Yup. They cannot be activated/opened. I'd bet, if you ~Click and ~Disable one, there will be another in the same place, and another, and another...

Also, those dead end references do not appear to be hardcoded.

Edit: They're probably external .pex SCPT forms. I'm hoping that is the case so scripts still have FormIDs.