Same... that really, really svcks : ( I almost went with the CE but couldn't see spending that much on a statue, but I nearly caved. I'd tie the thing to a string and make it fly backwards and everywhere else ;P

Will the stores be able to refund the game since it's been open?? Ima call my store tomorrow and see what they are saying about it..

I have over 100 hours in this game, and I cannot continue with the Civil War quests because when I go to do The Battle For Fort Amol, the people I am supposed to meet are not there when I get to the quest marker, yet it complete's that step and trigger's the next step. So I'm like ok whatever I can solo these bad boys, except when I get there there isn't a single living soul around and the kill meter is still at 100%. With nobody around to kill, I cannot complete the quest.

Also, I'm fighting a Dragon about every 3rd time I fast travel, sometimes 2 dragons at the same time. Which I'm not really complaining about other than the fact that I doubt it's supposed to do that. And about 10% of the time I cannot absorb the dragon soul.

It's really frustrating cause I absolutely enjoy this game. I don't feel cheated or robbed, but disappointed. And who knows if there will be any kind of reimbursemant at all for forking up the money for such a broken product.

So what you are saying is buying a new ssd is not going to fix my problems??

I just can't see how it would.

This is some pretty bad news and a shame Bethesda didn't take this problem with more concern when they were making the game. I can only hope that Bethesda is at least able to relieve some of the lag issues since apparently it as-is it cant be fixed 100%. Guess I'll have to think twice now about getting DLC when it comes out .

The only reason I'm not terribly pissed at Bethesda and still play this game is because I have so much fun with it and it really is an amazing game when it works (I haven't experience *much* lag anyway and I hope it stays that way). That and I refuse to buy an Xbox just to play a game I already bought. Bethesda makes good games.....too bad they arent too great at ironing out the "finished" product.

maybe will fix it...for a while?and then back to the lagging issue lol

I'm with Seti, i'm calling this theory BS, my 300 hour character on Oblivion his save file is under 5MB, and I have several other 100+ hour characters who's save files are also under 5MB, the game has never crashed once in all my playtime, The only lag that I have gotten from that game was in the Defense of Bruma and it was not noticeable. They should just hand over the patching as well as future DLC and games to 4J, they know how to code correctly.

I didn't notice him saying it couldn't be fixed he just outlined the problems, and the Creation Engine isn't necessarily exactly the same in this area of the coding

Oh and I'm 110 hours in lvl 45 13 MB and my game is fine for 1st hour in alot of areas, some areas laggy straigh away, but most are smooth for an hour

hmmm this too,i dont have problem playing oblivion but that game look **** now compared to skyrim,cant stand the leveling system

I don't quite understand the practicality of "persistent references" since they have virtually no effect on the player or the
gaming world in general- at least in terms of companions. I could see this being used if, for example, you had a companion
go out to do something for you. But if I haven't even met a companion yet, I don't see the point of having memory being
sanctioned off simply to run their daily routine if it means performance inconsistencies while I dive into dungeons.

Likewise, I may be alone on this, but I also don't understand the game's reaction to bodies. If I kill someone in stealth in
Whiterun, everyone will have a horrified reaction (if but a little underplayed) when they come across the body. However,
I can loot the body and no one will get on to me. Also, the body isn't buried or anything- it just lays there until the magical
amount of days pass (I think it's three) until the body fades out of existence. This means that for THREE WHOLE DAYS, the
body is rotting away in the middle of Whiterun's streets and people just walk by- not giving the slightest...well.. you know.

I also personally never understood the purpose of item manipulation in the field. While it's a cool gimmick, it doesn't serve
any direct purpose in the game unless you want to specifically decorate or use it to exploit the NPC's field of vision by
placing a bucket/kettle on someone's head while you rob them blind. Even with manipulation on bodies, there is never a
time when hiding a body is absolutely required of me- since stealth is so easily exploitable and if I make a successful
kill in a city with no witnesses, then no one will accuse me.

I haven't been able to get truly far into the game yet, I think at most I topped around 60-ish hours on a single save- so I may
be wrong a few things here. But so far- this is my experience and interpretation of the game...

It could make things far better as lags are due to access to swap disk when memory is full (and access time in SSD is much faster than HDD)

I bow to you oh masterful thief

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.

I've had bodies that linger for longer than three days, especially dragon skels. Worse, they're constantly moving around. I mean, I offed one in White Run (heh, can't remember if that's one word or two) and it was pretty close to Breezehome. It originally landed right in front of the city gate, but every time I entered the city it inched closer or closer to Breeze. There was actually one point where the thing was on top of the house. 0_o It stayed there for quite awhile, then it poofed behind the weapons seller before finally disappearing.

Along the same lines, I don't understand why merchants need to 'remember' what I've sold for so long, if at all. Chances are if I sold it I didn't want it on the first place. I can't see them remembering for the session or maybe even a day just in case you accidentally sold something, but that's about it.

Also, the fact that some things don't reset has messed up a few quests for me. For example, I have yet to face Yngol in Yngol Barrow. Reason being I did a quest before actually going there and so far the place hasn't reset. It's been WEEKS in the game but still, nothing.

Funny.

It is all pretty convenient that all of a sudden some developer mentions the lag problems with Fallout while thousands of people are complaining about Skyrim's lag.
Where were they when a lot of them mentioned the issues with Fallout? The constant lag. The freezes etc. There wasn't a single sight of them.

It's like they are trying to cover up their fault by basically saying ''we can't fix it, because that could take up to 18 months''
I'll say screw you. Bethesda knew from the start that this problem will happen with Skyrim because they are using the exact same engine.

That is more than 18 months of development time. You can't cover this up and come up with some lazy excuse and basically saying ''well, we didn't have enough time''

This forum is depressing, but SKBlank's posts always give me hope...

So the Gamebryo engine saves data in the most inefficient way you could possibly construct ever, and now everyone who purchased the game is looking at a $60 dollar brick with almost no chance of salvation?

Doesn't disprove anything. Not to mention that this isn't a theory, but a candid response from someone with real familiarity with the engine. I likewise have a ~100 hour Skyrim character with few issues.

But what the OP quote is saying is that it isn't necessarily how long you have played, but the kinds of things you have done along the way. Companions you have found, bodies you have looted, dungeons you have altered, quests you have left unfinished, etc. Not having issues in either game just means you've been lucky enough to avoid doing things which require a large persistent delta of data, both as a save game and in memory.

That said, this probably is not the whole story - any port like this will have other factors related to processing, anything from memory access, to the graphics pipeline, etc.

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 am not tech savvy in the least but I would think the following things would help out the Bathesda games.

A trash and bury system like many mmos have.Gather all the equipment up and trash the stuff you do not want and it disapears for good.Bury corpses so again they are out of the world and do not need to be remembered.

If things are not trashed or buried then have a low reset time before they fade away.Something like 2 days would be good enough.Do the same with vendor's and them keeping track of what you have sold.You can do immediate buy back but by the next two business days everything has reset.This would clear out alot of the resource hogging objects in the game.Have dungeons clear the same after 2 days but stay empty and the repopulate after a month.

I have had bodies building up in Riverwood.In each of 3 dragon attacks one npc has died since I started playing.Sven and both the man and woman who help you if you follow the imperial out of Helgen.They all sadly did not make it to cover though Sven was fighting it.All of there bodies were still there months later.I got tired of looking at them and constantly hearing the trip over comment and the oh no what happened comments.So I dragged them over to the river and dumped them in,letting them float away.I am not sure if that screwed up my game anymore or not but it made me feel better lol.

Also the dungeons act wacky for me.Some after a few months in game are still cleared/empty.Some repoplulated already.One of them really pissed me off though.The place where you rescue the Nord being held captive by the Thalmor.Everyone in Elven or glass gear,yes the good stuff good money etc.I lotted what I could then immediatly returned to do more.I did not even talk to the guys mother to finish the quest just went straight back there.The dungeon had already cleared all the corpses during that short amount time so I lost all that extra high end loot.Maybe I should have moved everything into chests before leaving the dungeon.The chest items where still all there just not the unlooted corpses.Though that may screw up the game as well who knows lol.

Wow lol..I was pretty confident in them patching this and fixing the issue, but after reading this it actually seems like the game engine suffers too many memory constrains on the ps3 due to its architecture. I mean if they’re going to struggle getting it running on a large save file right now imagine what it’s going to be like with DLC...i mean it just seems crazy. I may return my copy and get the 360 version but at the same time I’m looking into getting a high end gaming rig, so maybe I’ll hold off getting it on another console. You know it’s ironic because I told a guy on another post that I thought they could fix this and to sit back and to see what happens... feel a bit daft saying that now. But I'm not sure I can see this happening, I mean I would love it to get fixed but I really don’t know if they can.

With this information, weird as it sounds first, I am able to understand Beth: There is no sense in fixing this issue.

If that is so, the change would be too fundamental and thus an economical failure.
So patching a few changes here and there, to make the ps3 version at least playable on an acceptable level will be the solution.

Where I do not understand Beth: With that information information in mind, they should have

a) be so upright and cancel the PS3 version

delay the release and make a more subtle PS3 Port

Everything else is kind of a rip-off, since they knew where the flaws with their engine and the PS3 are and still decided to release such an instable product.

I agree. Having played New Vegas on ps3 I have no faith that this problem will get better. If you're the type of gamer that likes to have your character explore everything or want DLC in the future, then you would have to expect problems again. Even a good patch now will just be a small band-aid on a sore that will re-open once you get further along in the game or more content is added. They have proven with the still broken New Vegas and blatantly with the PS3 version release of Skyrim that they're aware and don't care enough to truly fix it.

I never finished New Vegas due to it's faults and have no desire to play a skyrim lite on ps3 or get the same frustration when further along in the game or dlc like I did with NV.

Bugs and abnormalities are to be expected, but lag and freezing to the point where it's unplayable is not...
For me I won't purchase anything from them on ps3 again. I may switch to 360 but I'll get a used copy. They don't deserve my money again and the company is a rip off. I'm unsure about a class action but they deserve the negative reviews and perhaps a complaint to Better Business Bureau if that would be applicable.

I just let the 'memory leak' and 'lag' terminology slide as we all know what people are really getting at. Well that and the fact that the PC version of Skyrim does appear to have actual nasty memory leaks resulting in crashes to desktop.

So the only way this will ever be fixed is either:

1). Rebuild the engine's saving structure, then either patch the game (is that possible when it comes to modifying the engine) or do a massive replacement recall.
2). The devs will remove a little bit of stuff in the game world with each patch until we're walking around in a world with no loot and no enemies.

On another note, it's great that someone other than Bethesda designed New Vegas, or we would have never had someone able to tell us this info.