DCDeacon Pete Hines
@
@TheVinnst If we could have done that differently, we would have.
1 hour ago

So Someone ask about the clipping with the rain/snow in buildings. Today I just arrived at Windhelm and it's snowing. You go downstairs and under bridges and what seems to be a somewhat of a catacomb area "underneath ground". It is snowing inside. I thought Todd Howard, or someone said that was fixed when it was pointed out on the demo?

The response is pretty much making me feel like there is no fixing it. Your stuck with it. If this get's fixed by the more than respected Moders or I should say the unofficial QA team...then I will be relieved. Do you think mods can fix this?

And watch a modder or mod team fix it... I really do love the games BGS makes as a whole but sometimes it seems like they can be so incompetent.

--While testing the engine--

Dev: "Hey, is the rain and snow supposed to be magically falling from the ceiling? Shouldn't we fix that"
Todd: "Oh... nah, magical things happen in Skyrim all the time, leave it."

Not going to happen. Weather physics are hardcoded in the engine.

Ah ok. It's not a major problem, but imo all those "little things" like Todd Howard focus on, is what makes a difference.

This did get fixed by modders. The trick is to disable the rain or snow while the camera/PC is under something and enable rain/snow "curtains" just outside every visible hole. Switch those when the PC exits the area.

I wasn't surprised..all the leaked streams I could clearly see this happening.

Disappointing. Still a minor thing..but utterly ridiculous. Every game I have played in the past 5 years or more has had rain detection. Even low budget titles. LOTR: War in the North has it...uh...trying to remember the other game I played recently.
I REALLY don't get the excuse "if we could have done it differently we would have" excuse. Is it that they don't know how?

I can't see how it's supposed to work with Skyrim since the weather effects are no more plain textures which you can switch on and off just like they did in Oblivion.

You didn't understand it properly. Not the textures were switched on and off - the rain and snow were. Basically, the current weather was replaced with the same one ... just without precipitation.

It's a hack, but it works. Bethesda have access to the engine's source code - they could have make it work way better.

Sounds like he's saying its a limitation of the engine.

Ok got it but the same hack can't be used anymore with the new weather engine, since precipitations are no more mere animated textures which follow the camera movements, those are now particle effects.

It doesn't matter. As long as you can switch the weather (and from the videos I saw, it looks like you can), you can do that still.

http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/1061/rainnsnowtweet.jpg

Particle effects are dynamic, i.e. the weather can be snowy, lightly snowy, heavily snowy etc. Replacing this kind of weather system with textured "curtains" would involve creating different textures for every kind of "real" weather effects. Also, keep in mind that particle effects are "tangible" objects in the 3D world which move accordingly to their own animation algorithms, not accordingly to the player movements. Hence this kind of hack would be actually way uglier than having precipitations clipping through buildings.

You know you can create such particle effects instead of "curtains" in the engine too, right? Spell effects work like this, for example.

In any case, this isn't about what looks better. It's about what is possible, and what was possible in Oblivion already.

I'm still very skeptical about this but.. well, we'll see. We have plenty of time to come up with a solution.

Anyway in 1 hour I'm going to be svcked in the game and just forget about every weather effect clipping through ceilings and such for a very, very long time

...that's pretty lame.

What a terrible excuse.

If that's "part of the engine", then why didn't they ... I dunno ... write the engine differently? I mean, it's all-new, right?

...

Do Bethesda have a QA team?

If this could be fixed in Morrowind by the "http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Morrowind_Code_Patch" / Added features: Rain/snow collision. Rain and snow now collide with statics. / I cannot understand how on earth Bethesda is/was not capable to fix this with PROFESSIONAL game designers coders among their lines.

I really really hope that however made the fix for Morrowind will pick this up. I know its a minor thing for the majority of players, but for me, it is one of the most immersion killers ever. I was planning to take shelter from a snow/rainstorm, or just sit and watch the beautiful snowfall from the porch of a house.

They even said back then that people and animals now seek refuge from weather effects (just look at witcher 2, where they actually do, in addition even textures get a wet look), turns out it was again bending-the-truth (cough*lie*cough*) in Beth' style. If it was a brand new engine as they claim, they should have addressed this in the first place ( if you still think that its a brand new engine, I have bad news; it-is-not).

Don't get me wrong, i'm truly amazed by Skyrim and I think it's their best and most incredible game ever, I'm just sad and dissapointed that in 2011 a thing like this can be overlooked by one of the biggest names in game industry.

Seriously, no fix for this since 2002? LOL

One of the huge benefits of them coding a whole new engine from the ground up for Skyrim is that we lose all of those crazy errors from that old scrapped engine like weather "indoors", crazy physics jumping around, LOD flickering and things of that nature.

"Oh, wait... oh god, no no no! Guys, we just went gold but we've accidentally put the OLD engine back into Skyrim!"

First I just registrate on that forum.

On that i will say NO, after brink (still unplayable for me), rage (still unplayable for me ) now skyrim (playable, very likeable & time consuming) but with an awfull UI; I will enforce NO.
If they actually got ONE for PC ; just FIRE them ALL because they are hardcoe incompetent.

An unsatisfied consumer.

I was lambasted many threads ago for doubting, but this is very good evidence right here to suggest that their "new" engine was not coded from scratch from the ground-up but instead a revamping of their existing GameBryo codebase. I don't blame them...a completely new engine would have taken a couple years to develop (aside from the game itself) and Skyrim still looks great. It's just misleading to say it's a new engine when it appears that all they've done is taken an existing car, added a few new modifications and updates, threw on a fresh coat of paint, and called it new.

One word to summarize your commentt : Marketing.

That would be US, the community. It has always been that way.

I hate the clipping but its the way it is because of performance and consoles, IMO. Im fine with it, perhaps someone will mod it perhaps not.