New Vegas developer comments on PS3 lag issues : V - Skyrim

» Thu May 17, 2012 4:18 pm

I think they should remove the corpses out of the places after one day. There's no real need to keep them for ever, if you see what I mean... The same thing goes for moved/discarded loot (except inside safehouses, maybe?). It would make use more careful about how we place our stuff and balance everything else. I know my way of thinking isn't perfect and would ruin role players' mood, but game play wise, it would fix a bunch of things.

» Thu May 17, 2012 8:52 pm

Thers only 3 options for Bethesda since is a bad engine coding and optimization

a) spend time optimizing the engine ( not gonna happen since runs good on PC and X360 so F*** PS3 users) They already got the money now is time to spend time in DLC to score some more cash.

Next bethesda game, develope the game on a PS3 dev kit, that way game would be optimized to PS3 and would also not be a problem to port the game to X360 and PC since they are more easy to develope. (not gonna happen, bethesda is a PC developer and will always be)
c) stop making games to PS3... if u cant code properly for PS3 hardware stop stealing the consumers.

» Thu May 17, 2012 4:52 pm

I don't see how Oblivion proofs the theory to be wrong.
It comes from a developer that has already worked with the engine so he should know what he is talking about. And he doesn't say, that the game is unfixable and the engine basically incompatible, just how the engine and the save system works there is a memory shortage on the PS3 the more data needs to be saved.
That Oblivion runs fine simply means that Oblivion has less to save or a more aggressive clean up to forget things and therefore wasn't affected.

Can't Skyrim attempt to mimic how Oblivion handled things? The engines are, fundamentally, very, very similar.

» Thu May 17, 2012 1:10 pm

Yeah not to mention that anyone who has played Obsidian's games knows that making games work well is definitely not something for which they should be quoted on and/or looked to for advice.

I mean if we were to start naming US/NA developers who have the most broken games at release then Obsidian would rank above Bethesda in terms of jank.

None of that negates his statements by any means as they are an insight into how the engine works and also an example of how well 4J handled said engine with the Oblivion port.

» Thu May 17, 2012 8:31 pm

I think they should remove the corpses out of the places after one day. There's no real need to keep them for ever, if you see what I mean... The same thing goes for moved/discarded loot (except inside safehouses, maybe?). It would make use more careful about how we place our stuff and balance everything else. I know my way of thinking isn't perfect and would ruin role players' mood, but game play wise, it would fix a bunch of things.

Exactly.

I droped some books in mage college ground, when i went back alot of days later the books was still in the ground... this is stupid and not a way to optimize a open world game. We can buy houses, so that should work as a safe place to drop items that not disappear, all other things in dungeons or cities that are dropped outside our safe houses should vanish after 24h or 48h.

Bethesda is a PC developer by nature and dont even realise the console limitations, so they dont even care about optimizing a game for PS3.

» Thu May 17, 2012 1:54 pm

Can't Skyrim attempt to mimic how Oblivion handled things? The engines are, fundamentally, very, very similar.

I don't think Oblivion does handle anything different, it's still the same engine and the same save system.
Maybe Oblivion just has a more aggressive clean up, but more likely it's because Oblivion is simply "smaller", less quests less content less important NPCs and so on.
To mimic Oblivion with Skyrim would mean to remove content from the game. Probably not the best way to solve the problem.
Hopefully a more aggressive clean up to remove dead bodies and other unnecessary data earler from the game is sufficient enough, otherwise I'm not sure if the problem can actually be solved and with upcoming DLCs it should only get worse :/
Let's hope they find some ways to free up more RAM and hopefully use a new engine (a real new one -.-) for their next game.

» Thu May 17, 2012 8:50 pm

This thread and the one with the dragon being stuck and causing lag got me wondering if corpses which happened to get misplaced ever respawn and, if they do, if they respawn right where they died. For example I had a lot of sleeping Draugrs which I just hammered through the rock solid ground/bed/coffin. So they were stuck in the environment, sometimes an arm or a leg will still be visible, sometimes not. Now if they will be stuck there forever because their position parametres aren't tracked down due to a misplacement within the game world, this will sum up over time ... . Thoughts?

» Thu May 17, 2012 11:22 pm

Well than i call for a full refund than, if they cant fix the problem and want to do the blame game i want my money back. It just shows their not as talented as they seem to be if they cant do a proper port for the ps3. Maybe they should ask Rockstar for some help at-least they know how to make the ps3 version not have such crappy frame-rate issues in their games.

You can't compare a Rockstar game such as Red Dead Redemption to Skyrim. Yeah RDR is a massive world, but it has no where as much stuff in it then Skyrim. RDR world mostly consist of open areas that you use to travel with almost nothing in between except towns, where is Skyrim you have a abundance of Dungeons, people, and other random things in the world. You can't go in most of the buildings in each town in RDR, but in Skyrim you can enter almost every house and each house will have a npc who lives there and has there own schedule constructed for them.

Anyway this is terrible news. I think they should add a dispose corpse option similar to Morrowind, so you can delete and dead npc from an area instead of waiting for them to respawn.

» Thu May 17, 2012 11:18 pm

they should let 4j studios fix it, seriously.

I know people keep using Oblivion as an example..but look at the facts,

They call it creation engine but we all know what it really is...(it even has references to the VATS system in it lol)

Oblivion is very similar to Skyrim in that it has to remember huge amounts of data/user actions/interactions and it does it extremely well with save files usually 2-5mb in size.

I think Skyrim's issue can most definitley be fixed on the PS3 it just requires a dev team that's able to do it.

» Thu May 17, 2012 6:04 pm

Maybe they should ask Rockstar for some help at-least they know how to make the ps3 version not have such crappy frame-rate issues in their games.

Rockstar?

Rockstar is problably the second worst developer for the PS3 out there, right after Bethesda.
GTA4 and Read Dead Redemption both run in a subHD resolution of 1152x640 instead of 720p like the Xbox version with reduced graphics as well. Actually a prime example of a bad port :yucky:

Well at least, they don't have this fps problems Skyrim suffers from...

» Thu May 17, 2012 10:58 pm

CopyCat, I played GTA4/RDR on the 360 and PS3 and can safely say they look pretty much identical. Key thing is they are playable games =P

At least they spent the time to optimize the games for the PS3 rather than completely eff over its users.

» Thu May 17, 2012 10:40 pm

blah....I think they can and will fix it for the ps3. If they don't fix it they are going to lose out on a lot of DLC money and we all know they cant let that happen. I mean if Bethesda can create such a great game then surely they can repair or fix such a great game.

» Thu May 17, 2012 10:57 am

Thers only 3 options for Bethesda since is a bad engine coding and optimization
a) spend time optimizing the engine ( not gonna happen since runs good on PC and X360 so F*** PS3 users) They already got the money now is time to spend time in DLC to score some more cash.

I think it's worth noting - it's not even close to optimised for the PC version either - it's just that PC's more closely resemble Xbox's in their hardware and setup than PS3's do and the PC's have a lot more power to make up for the terrible optimisation, so it runs "better", but it's not optimised. It's an Xbox 360 game. It got ported quite badly to the PS3 (no tweaking to make use of PS3's unique architecture and hardware), and then thrown over to the PC without any attempts at optimisation (knowing that PC hardware being on average 10-20 times more powerful than xbox hardware - which is 7 years old now - would hopefully make up for a lot of the issues).

It's also a crying shame that they went on and on about the game being a "whole new engine designed from scratch" - it's not, it's merely a tweaked engine that's been in use for all their past games.... so we have an old engine (which causes problems for all THREE platforms), lazily ported.

» Thu May 17, 2012 12:32 pm

Yeah, no offense to the hard work you have put into trying to identify and sort out issue - not to mention getting the word out which is huge, but I really think the term memory leak is a big mischaracterization here. And having caused a few, gotta say the solutions are likely very different. When the quote is referring to things like declaring something an int instead of a decimal - that's more in the line of things which can cause a leak. Leaks are a pain in the ass to track down, but once you find your slip - you can generally change a couple of lines of code and the problem is 100% solved.

But this isn't referring to just a mistake of not giving back small amounts of memory that were allocated over time. There might be some memory mismanagement which is specific to the PS3 effectively aggravated by the engine design, but the core issue at the end of the day isn't even how frequently things get reset or purged from specific cells - but what things are getting purged or reset and why. Edit: also, more importantly, what is being tracked persistently. From the sounds of this - there is a lot at stake here which is game design in conflict with engine design.

If a player loads up a save game and sees instant lag like some of the videos being shown, it means the game design is requesting more balls to be juggled in the air than can be actually juggled by the game engine. Perhaps in some cases hardware differences like a fast rate HDD or SSD may allow for more efficient virtual memory, as you've suggested - which may offset the split memory issues, but at the end of the day there might just need to be a call on design things like what companions do while you aren't around. And a change like that would need to factor in ramifications like whether that might cause disappearing companions or whatnot. Maybe Bethesda could reset every non vital object in a cell on return, so that things like plates and whatnot have no delta stored - but do they even have a good way determining what is non vital?

I'd say that any quest-essential item and named npc should be tagged as vital and made permanent and non-recurring. Everything else can reset every week.

More generally, the info in the op makes sense and jibes with how I've been seeing the problem.

» Thu May 17, 2012 4:27 pm

So basically, what this is saying is the ps3 is a $250 piece of junk even though it was supposed to be way more advanced than the xbox 360? :confused:

Great, it seems like I would have learned something about Sony from the SWG fiasco but apparently I have fallen for it twice now. :banghead:

» Thu May 17, 2012 6:25 pm

Wow, i will never buy anything else from Bethesda on the PS3. I sold my ps3 copy and downloaded the game instead. Still wasted money and not happy about it.

» Fri May 18, 2012 2:57 am

So basically, what this is saying is the ps3 is a $250 piece of junk even though it was supposed to be way more advanced than the xbox 360? :confused:

Great, it seems like I would have learned something about Sony from the SWG fiasco but apparently I have fallen for it twice now. :banghead:

How often do you hear of a cross platform game been better on the PS3?

The PS3's supposed superiority has never been seen.

» Thu May 17, 2012 4:07 pm

I don't know if this is right but from what I understand Skyrim's problems are getting more attention than any of the past games? So maybe they will be pressured into actually fixing it this time.

» Thu May 17, 2012 2:43 pm

I don't know if this is right but from what I understand Skyrim's problems are getting more attention than any of the past games? So maybe they will be pressured into actually fixing it this time.

Probably although the way that they'll fix it will probably be to diminish what they've done.

» Thu May 17, 2012 2:11 pm

Well DLCs will push them to do it,if lag and serious problems persist none will buy them.The bad press will also do its job and finally if there will be no solution sales of the upcoming games of Bethesda on ps3 will still carry the bad Skyrim experience

» Thu May 17, 2012 10:54 am

CopyCat, I played GTA4/RDR on the 360 and PS3 and can safely say they look pretty much identical. Key thing is they are playable games =P

At least they spent the time to optimize the games for the PS3 rather than completely eff over its users.

Still great looking, I would agree. Identical certainly not.
There isn't much optimization either. The Rockstar games are two of the worst PS3 ports ever.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-dead-redemption-face-off
But you're right, at least playable which isn't the case with Skyrim for a lot of people

So basically, what this is saying is the ps3 is a $250 piece of junk even though it was supposed to be way more advanced than the xbox 360? :confused:

Great, it seems like I would have learned something about Sony from the SWG fiasco but apparently I have fallen for it twice now. :banghead:

This is saying that Bethesda uses a crappy engine and designed the game not really caring about how the game will run on the PS3 and not that the PS3 is junk. It's not like every other game has the same problems. Most games look and run great on the PS3

» Thu May 17, 2012 6:55 pm

The ps3 is the bastard child of this console generation.

I'm sick of inferior ports on a superior machine.

Lets look at the 360. How does a console using subpar hardware (compared to the ps3) get the most stable and reliable multi-plat games? All of bethesdas games perform better on the 360. New vegas has a lower frame rate and jaggies (lack of anti-aliasing). Fallout 3 had a lower frame rate and jaggies. Skyrim has a lower frame rate and the jaggies are minimal but now we're suffering through blurry textures. I could tolerate the blurry textures if the frame rate was great....ya know.....like the 360 frame rate. A low frame rate for me is a game breaker.

Bethesda are competent developers. Why do they treat the ps3 like they've never seen it before? Its been around for years. Seems to me they should know how the ps3 processes information and how executing certain game data might or might not be a problem. Its not a new machine. They've made games on it before. Why the subpar performance? I really can't think of a good excuse. Do they make games on the 360 then haphazardly cram that same 360 game into the ps3 because creating it for the ps3 would take more time?

Fix the frame rate bethesda. Thats all I ask. Give me a fast stable frame rate. Why is that so difficult?

» Fri May 18, 2012 2:33 am

If you know of any blogs or news sites that have previously covered this story, it may be helpful to tip them off to this thread to see if this can get some press. This may be our best tool to force a response from Bethesda beyond "most users aren't experiencing this".

» Thu May 17, 2012 4:36 pm

Still great looking, I would agree. Identical certainly not.
There isn't much optimization either. The Rockstar games are two of the worst PS3 ports ever.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-dead-redemption-face-of

Wow, how terrible. How do they get away with this?
Seriously though, I had no complaints about the PS3 version. It looked great, and I wouldn't care if the Xbox 360 version had some better shadows here or some better textures there. I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference on my SDTV anyway.
Anyway, compared to Bethesda with Skyrim (and the Fallout games for that matter), Rockstar did a PHENOMENAL job porting RDR to PS3.
Too bad I didn't enjoy the game more. I thought it was kind of boring

» Thu May 17, 2012 8:17 pm

Do you seriously think the PS3 is the superior hardware?
You have fallen for the sony cell hype machine.

Played any of the Uncharted games and show me a game that equals or beats it on the XBox?

Didn't think so....PS3 is by far the technically best console to date...nothing beats it in power.

Sadly, developers STILL haven't managed to harnass its power or figure out how to develop on it to start with...only Naughty Dog and svcker Punch have to date.