I hope this time that they got their own engine we won't have to go throught the nifscope , nifeditor , nefextractors , nifexporter and all the niff file stuff that was incredibly tedious , messy and buggy ...

NIF is a proprietary format owned by Gamebryo, or whatever it is they go by now.

They don't go by anything. They went under and their resources were sold off to some Korean company, I believe.

Skyrim confirmed to be using NIF. Personally I'm glad because i already have a deep knowledge of it i don't want to start over with something new.

Hmm that is odd. I would have assumed they would go with their own format or FBX, DAE, or something. Oh well....

You really think its a "new" engine? nah nah, the Bright as day glitch thats been around since Morrowind, 2 hander anims being the same as fallout 3/NV? etc etc? nah but thats ok. that means people familiar with it won't have as much issues.

I see. If it is just a re-worked engine then they tricksed me.

I haven't been keeping up with all of the details of this game and the engine. All I knew is that they made it seem to me as if they built their own engine for Skyrim.....

Do you know if they own the copyright for this engine? I want the coders to have the sauce someday.... Wishful thinking perhaps.

They don't. Emergent did and all their assets were liquidated. Their original license most likely enabled them to keep using the foundation. Basically, the engine is built on Gamebyro but is heavily modified. Think of it like when Windows was still built on MSDOS. That's probably a good idea of how it is, but that may make things a bit more confusing.

And just to be clear - the animations are no longer Gamebryo animations. They're using Havok for that now. Trees are no longer Speedtree, they wrote their own tree support. The rest of it is pretty much Gamebryo with a major restructuring though. For all we know, Bethesda bought the engine during the fire sale.

I could've sworn I read somewhere that it went to a Korean company. I'll have to check to see if I can find it again...

Edit:

Found it http://www.1up.com/news/gamebryo-tech-sold-korea-based-company

For all intents and purpose we're talking Rendering right? nothing big or overly RWAR to be about. it works I guess.

Not quite. Gamebryo isn't actually an engine, it's a suite of third party middle-ware that must be assembled into an engine. This is why Bethesda has never referred to it as the Gamebryo engine, it's always been Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 engine. That fact is the majority of the engine's code, from the file structure to the tool set is all Bethesda. The only parts that ever belonged to Emergent Tech(original maker of Gamebryo) is the renderer and the file format. Everything else in the suite such as Havok, Speedtree and FaceGen can be licensed directly from their perspective owners.

Bethesda has rewritten from the ground up most of it's own code as well as replacing the middle-ware renderer with their own as well as ditching SpeedTree for there own 3D LOD tree system. However the engine's file structure remains the same and it must if we are to maintain uber mod-ability.

In summation, it's not Gamebryo that is at fault simply because Bethesda was using it. The engine is mostly Bethesda's doing and what they are doing with it isn't being done anywhere else. It's rough being a pioneer but Beth is getting better at it.

This.

I know how to use NifSkope.

NifSkope is wonderful. It's probably one of the most professional tools i've seen for a game, that isn't made by the developer for that game. People that can't even use a 3D program can use NIFskope to copy/paste and make their "own" stuff.. I animated trees in Morrowind using a waterfall animation, by copy/paste and a little help from one of the NIFskope people.. just an example of how creative you can be with that program alone.
The importers/exporter for Blender works really well too, very impressed with it. I've modded a lot of other games and none has been as easy as this because of NifSkope and their import/export tools.

DAE, like someone mentioned, is not a very good format imo, it doesnt even support vertex colors, something i use a lot on my models..

We should be very thankful they kept this format, hopefully we'll see updated tools soon. It's already possible to extract the .bsa's using BSA browser, btw.. So it's good they kept the old file formats..

they where just an unnecessary annoyance passage , most modern engine support direct import export from 3d programs to simplify and speed up the work , while with the nif tools is a step in between that makes more complicate the work ...

NIFskope is a lot more than an exporter though. And again, the .nif format is very good compared to .3ds or .dae which neither supports vertex coloring, for example. I couldnt care less if i have to save the file as .nif or as .dae, it's the same amount of work, with .dae i wouldnt have a tool like Niskope to tweak my files though..

But Blender, at least for Oblivion's nif format (and for Fallouts) can import/export nif directly. There was little for me to do in Nifskope (changing textures, adding alpha property, attaching kf files) but I like Nifskope as a nif viewer and I think that it's handy for that.
Prometheus, why was it a problem for you? Did you have to switch file to nif format with Nifskope?