I'm all for balanced viewpoints & intelligent discussion


We don't know if they're even errors, it could be a deliberate act. Witness the various problems some people are having RE script events. Not saying it's a definite link, just saying there's currently a small correlation.


True. But given the existence of Skyrim and it's achievements, I should say they're pretty far from incompetent.


Same as fact 2.


True. As well as the clueless. To be fair, they're usually easy to spot, they're the ones announcing accusations based on procedures they don't understand or were not witness to. I note that the real talented & intelligent people, do not. They put forward possibilities that the clueless then ignore.

Exactly. This is ridiculous. Who knows how great this game could run with proper multi-core support and optimization? It's a heavily CPU dependant game, and it's effectively crippled by poor/old/slow code. New engine my butt.
The newest nVidia driver seems to help some, but seeing as this game is CPU limited up and beyond 4Ghz on Intel, my Phenom 2 X4 945 will never be close to reaching it's potential... which it would if this game was properly threaded. Don't get me wrong, it's playable, but ugh.

I quicksaved in Riften and took a screenshot without the mod, then loaded the quicksave with the skse loader and mod and took another screenshot. MSI Afterburners FPS counter says it all. [img]http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n523/TJCallaghan/TESV_2011_12_24_02_11_20_352.jpg[/img][img]http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/n523/TJCallaghan/TESV_2011_12_24_02_12_14_156.jpg[/img]
This is on my laptop, but its even smoothed out framerate on my desktop in cpu heavy places, and thats with a 2500k @4.3ghz... Bethesda would want to integrate these optimizations !!!

I wish a few modders could be allowed to mess with the PS3 version a bit. They might be able to clean up some dirty code there, too.

Yeah I feel bad for you guys. At least on PC we can fix the stuff that is fixable. Of course we called all this months ago for both PS3 and PC versions of the game. Nothing we've seen that has come about is really any surprise to me, but disappointing all the same. /shrug

Too bad i'm seeing this mod after finishing the main storyline. Not really interested in the Elder Scrolls games that much, just play them cos I love stories in RPGs. But to be honest, I think it's total fan boyism when people say that the graphics are amazing. They either haven't seen amazing graphics in their life, or it's just fan boyism like aforementioned.

The engine is totally outdated, and no amount of touches can change that fact. They should make a new engine from scratch which will hopefully have better character models, etc. (Too bad they have planned another game on the Creation engine, hope it's not an AAA title).

As to answering the question on the topic, Bethesda has always been bad with their coding, what with the amount of bugs in every game that they develop, not limited to Elder Scrolls (although this might be more related to testing and QA than their coding)

Gonna try this mod though and see how it improves the performance..

pff... modders doing a better job than Bethesda - I don't think so. For most people the game runs fine, including me; I get 60fps almost everywhere, with an absolute minimum of 35fps, with ultra settings and a couple of texture mods, so I don't see a problem with performance. When the 'modders' create an environment and game, as detailed and content rich, with the quality are artistic direction as Skyrim then you can start make these sweeping statements. Yes the modders add some improvements to the game (though most are crap), but what they are doing is simple compared to the creation of an entire game. I not saying its perfect, or that mistakes have not been made, but the arrogance of some of you lot is beyond belief and is basically a load of guf.

As to this particular 'mod' it gave me a few extra frames in the lowest point, but nothing earth shattering, so I've removed it... but I have a well maintained, stable set-up.

If you're 100% content with the performance and not going to bother with something that shores up the bottom end of challenging to render scenes...what are you doing hanging around the tech support forum in the first place? Surely its not to brag about how your system and this game are meeting your low expectations, is it?

Certain builds can perform well on Ultra, but for MOST people who can play on Ultra, Ultra gives low 20s to even down in the 10s in cities (with playable framerates elsewhere). I have a fairly beefy rig, but because I'm limited by my Core i7 920 @ 3.5 GHz, not my twin GTX 470 in SLI, I have notable improvements using this mod. There's a huge ton of people who are CPU-limited by having more GPU power than CPU for both high-end and low-end rigs. Also important is how this mod frees up resources to allow us to tweak it to look even better. Note that I could get much better framerate with my CPU on Ultra if I decreased Shadow Quality...but I shouldn't have to do that, and this plugin allows me not to.

As for Skyrim not looking great for a modern game, take a look at how Shadows can actually look decent: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/11/23/tweaking_skyrim_image_quality/2 . And that needs CPU time for those tweaks.

Also take a look at this "game photography" which, again, mainly pressures the CPU with what tweaks he used for LOD and Shadows: http://deadendthrills.com/?cat=314

While I can't say I disagree with everything else you wrote - I just don't know the gaming developer industry well enough to have an opinion, though I concede what you've said is possible and perhaps even probable - I do disagree with this part of your post.

Fixing bugs most certainly does increase revenue for several reasons, some immediate, some long-term. Word-of-mouth Marketing, is a buzzword I've heard often enough, as is the phrase, "One happy customer will tell two or three others, while one unhappy customer will tell at least ten others." In this day and age of the Interwebs, it more like one will tell 1000s in forums, blogs, and anywhere else people are given the opportunity to voice their opinions. So while Beth has managed to sell a whole lot of Skyrim units - what was the comment about it being the biggest seller in Steam's history? - they want to continue selling units, which is impacted by the satisfaction levels of current Skyrim customers.

That's the near-term. In the long-term, the TES fanbase will grow or stall based on how Beth does with their current release. It doesn't matter if Skyrim is the biggest game seller of all time, if the reviews say, "Fantastic game, but Beth left its customers hanging with bugs leaving many customers unhappy with their gaming experience or even unable to play the game at all," then that will affect future sales of the next release not only of TES games but all Beth products. Their reputation is on the line with every game they release.

Beth has a vested interest in resolving its customers' complaints. How they do it will make all the difference in the world. So far, they're off to a bit of a rocky start: three not-so-successful patches, and only one (LAA) well-received patch. Basically, Beth has to win with every patch release in the next few months to turn things around.

/end Letter to the Editor

Regards,

-RMWChaos

I call Bull Sh*t.

Normally, I follow a motto of "Trust but Verify" but this time I'm going with "I don't believe a word that's coming out of your mouth."

I'm also going with "Show me the money." I want to see screenshots. Markarth specifically, standing on the bridge looking down over the smithy and the silver mine pit. Plus a sysinfo showing your specs. Maybe a snapshot of that too.

Hell, I'm not sure there is anything you can do to prove to me you're getting "Constant 60fps" with a P4, 256GB vram, and 2GB system RAM. Maybe a video post showing your system board, moving along to the video card, following the VGA cable to your monitor, with Skyrim running, and FRAPS showing 60FPS in Markarth moving around in those hotspots.

Then I'd like a professional anolyst to go over the video and make sure it's in no way modified.

As for the DX2-66 ... no. Just, no.

I don't normally post such a harsh response, but c'mon guys. How stupid do you think we are? Ok, I know I just left myself wide open on that last question, so shutting up now.

Incredulously yours,

-RMWChaos

Sounds like there is a bug in your sarcasm detector.

No it's legit, my friends, brothers, cousins, dogs, sitters, daughters, school friends, uncle sat there and watched it. That's enough proof for me.

(No I'm not sure who's serious anymore I used to be good at telling but you know, the alcohol 'tis the season I suppose)

D'oh! Yeah, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my skull that someone was posting BS just to get a rise (probably the fact that no one had responded after 3 more pages of posts), but, you know, just had to say. And I don't mind being the idiot who "didn't get the joke" sometimes.

Okay, changing my earlier post to read as follows:

I would of played it off as being too dry. But then I'm weak like that (Also I was 50/50 and would of believed you)

Back on topic, as great as the mod is (its improved the game for me no end) the fact that a typo made it's way in and caused problems for some should be an indication of the tight rope Beth has to walk here even though I think they should of made more of an effort.

I have an i7 2600K (not overclocked though) with a 560Ti Nvidia.

Installed MSI Afterburner to look at my FPS.

In Markarth, in that terrible spot, without the plugin, I go 33FPS. With the speed up plugin I now get 43FPS. This is on Ultra settings. That's an increase of 10FPS, or 30% ! (I usually get nothing less than 60FPS everywhere else)

Excellent work.

-niko

Except that this mod is manually doing what compiling from source would do with proper optimization flags. And a compiler wouldn't make typos like this.

Or taken less literally, the slightest little error could cause problems for an awful lot of people. And Beth wouldn't receive the nice "thanks, no biggie" response a modder would get.

Oh, so I should have gone with, "Shhh... this is the part where I'm supposed to pretend that someone posted something completely ridiculous with the intent of convincing us they are serious, and then you pretend that I actually thought they were serious and posted a scathing response, and then we all pretend to get into a ridiculous argument that we all know is a bunch of hooey." I'll remember that next time.


Agree. The mod has done wonders for my performance as well, which was mostly great after some tweaks at Ultra+ settings with only a few dips in FPS and only noticeable in Markarth. Now, while I still get FPS dips, I only notice it if I'm running FRAPS and can see the numbers; otherwise, everthing runs smooth as silk.

I've been playing CRPGs for longer than I care to admit, going back as far as Wizardry on my IBM PC Jr. 8080 system, and even further back if you count text-only Zork. Yeah, I guess that makes me a huge computer gaming dork, and we won't mention my stint with PnP MERP (if you don't get the reference, best just to ignore it).

On the surface, this is by far the biggest gaming f-up I've seen a developer make. Likely there's far more to it underneath that we just aren't (and won't ever be) privy to, but if it's true that Beth just flat out missed it, complete oversight due to release date pressure, lack of in-house PC coding expertise, or whatever, then I would have far more respect if they just owned up to it.

If Beth were to come out and said, "You know what guys, we really screwed the pooch on this one. Sorry. Our bad. We're fixing it and will do much better and pay more attention to the PC versions of our products going forward," then they would have earned back my (recently) lost admiration for their work. More likely, because the head honchos who make the decisions in any company rely heavily on the PR and marketing drones to set policy on what public statements get made, Beth will never admit to any grievous oversights of any kind and will fallback instead on the official drawer statement, "http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1322003-holiday-update/" Accept that this is the way of the world, is unlikely to change any time soon, and move on. Believe it or not, I'm not a cynic either.

Yes, I know, there is a whole lot that goes into making a game of this magnitude, made far more complicated by supporting it on no less than 3 platforms. But as a fledgeling coder myself, struggling to support Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms all at once, what has been explained about what was addressed by this mod and the problems Arisu found with the code using a profiler seems like some very basic stuff that was overlooked.

I'm a huge Beth fan (not fan boy), but I gotta say, Man up, Beth. Admit your mistakes, own up to fixing them, and regain the love and support of those you've alienated.

(I really need to put this soapbox away for a while.)

Happy holidays!

-RMWChaos

The particular optimization employed in that particular patch has been a well known, documented and universally accepted truth in programming forever. Asking the compiler to automatically convert ideal situations over to it would be trivial and no would not introduce problems for anyone but the idiot who's so far forgotten to do it.

I rigged up a USB to Serial Adapter and plugged this game into my TRS-80 Model 1 with 4kb of ram and i don't think it even has video ram... whatever.... 1.77mhz weee

60fps in wireframe mode...

Talk about overkill buddy, the calculator I got from the dollar store does the same, learn how to optimize your system!

OH MAN! I should have hung onto my Trash-80! Hate to admit it, but I used to work at Radio Shack waaaaaay back in the day. (Where's the emoticon with a beard and a cane?)

yeah.. they are beast.. I've got a tandy 1000 that actually produced solid color untextured version of skyrim... it's like playing with a post effect dubbed "toon shading"...

I'm having trouble modding the punch card Computer to run skyrim, and spit out anything useable though.... mostly just have to roll play the results it crunches... but i'm not a fan of dressing up... or waiting to long for it to tell me what happened.

^ This.