Moreover, Skyrim is much more complicated than any of the Crytek games, since it is a RPG not an FPS. Furthermore it is open-world too...

As long as this is an open letter to Bethesda, I'd like to request to make the function for books, 'Can't be taken' be activated or implemented in the next patch or update, since I don't like the way the 18 book bookshelf works (havok related appearance of 18 thin books falling sideways every single time).

The concept is simple, just duplicate every book that can be found in game, make a room or cell that contains a library. Check when player finds books and stock them in the library book shelves (enable disabled fake books replacing real book found). Players can read the books at their leisure. But the books can't be taken by the player or it defeats the purpose, and the library concept would look decent.

The crydev tools started as midding tooleditor and very much like the one used by crytek developers , only recently was upgraded or better made a spin off that is an endependant developers tool...
you clearly don't know what you are talking about ... Crysis 1 is also pretty much open world but with a 1 to 1 scale of environments so a 16 km island is a 16 km island ... In skyrim you have a 4kx4k map in a scale of 1to 1.8 and filled with shrinked environments to represent an approximation of a whole country ... And it beeing a rpg has nothing to do with complexity of engines or the release of a kit to develop extra content!

@Malkion, That sounds more like a Mod concept than a needed feature, if you don't feel like building it, I suggest the excellent, bookshelves unlimited. you can find it here: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=10891

The differene here is that Crytek is trying to sell engine licenses, and provided a free sdk to develop stand alone games which you can release commercial paying a fee like UDK. Bethesda is not trying to sell any engine and they don't want to release the full thing, because of the costs (middleware licenses and deals) and for the fact that they only want to make Skyrim modded and not as platform to build a game from the ground up.

Obiviously that doesn't excuse the broken features.

I also wouldn't underestimate the conceptual depth of the Crytek games when it comes to the reflection about what technology can eventually lead to. The whole Bruckheimer-blockbuster-fassade conceals that a bit.

But let's not talk too much about Crytek (hehe)...

Here here, this crytek discussion is hastily deviating from the original point of this post, if you guys really want to hash it to death, please start another. I would really like to keep this thread on the topic of existing bugs and documentation in CK

Right then, so Bethesda, would you please be so kind to add some "save as master", "add master", "merge masters" functionality to that wundervoll editor of yours, that would be really smashing. To beg for 64bit support is perhaps a little too much to ask for, but I would like to suggest this anyway.
Oh, and talking of the impossible and utopic: would you please develop TES VI as pure PC Game...

no they provide a free sdk AND a free tool kit wich is including all game assets...



But back on topic I hope in some words on the current worldbuilding issues ... Will lod and tools for lanscapes be fixed or any sugested work around ? As for the only pc version of tes 6 I am pretty sure they will work on the next gen consolles that should be considerably more powerfull than avtual pcs....

Oh yeah, they'll be having 4 gb Ram, just like my mummy's laptop. And like the current ones, they will be nothing else than computers with no possibility to upgrade hardware and install third party software. Don't you remember the hype about the current generation? So what, The RAM was already a joke when they came out. We don't need them, the industry does.

Have u read interviews with the udk devs on next gen consolle graphics ? Check the samaritan video ...

Now that's a video. What's that got to do with real time rendered graphics? You see, the whole problem is - and that is considering Skyrim too, so it fits right in this very discussion - that nowadays the game makers think in 5- or 10-year-plans (who ever thought there's any difference between communism and capitalism, HA!), instead of developing games for a dynamic plattform like PC.
Now to get back to the point of this topic: the problems we have right here for example with the Havok bug and general the momentary impossibilty to make a real large worldspace is due to the fact, that this one is a tiny console Spielchen. As it was stated here, the tools are developed to fit the current need. And the current need is a 6 year old hardware, which already was a load of crap 6 years ago.

So hopefully we can soon move on to the next 15-year plan...

Its stated that next gen consolle game will have this kind if graphics in real time ... Chek the interviews...

While I'm thinking of ways to improve the Creation Kit, let me add a few I forgot in my last post:
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Firstly, the TESCS/GECK/CK tools desperately need an accessible dialogue system where:

• Non-voiced dialogue is automatically subtitled at a default display speed of 100 words per minute - which can be adjusted by the modder
  
• Existing dialogue statements automatically offer the option of selecting from the range of available and corresponding voice-overs.
  
• There are modular voice-over sets:
  A.) based on a neutral reading of Ogden's 800 or, if you're daring, Ogden's 2000 word vocabulary.
  B.) With a voiced dialogue assembly window displaying the modulation curve of "volume" (amplitude) & "pitch" (frequency).
  C.) And with the option to set modification limits on a portion of modulation curve which can be modified, within those limits, by dragging up or down with the mouse.

Secondly, it would be better if non-modular objects were tied to the heightmap during heightmap editing. In other words, things like rocks, actors, trees, stand-alone buildings, etc. should have their altitude relative to the terrain mesh (i.e. immediately above or below their coordinate point) preserved during heighmap editing so that most existing objects do not wind up being buried or left hanging in the air by a little topographical tweaking. I can imagine, quite vividly, how not having to individually reposition every tree, rock, shrub, and loose pebble -every time the heightmap is edited- could be quite the time saver.
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Thirdly, I haven't fiddled with Papyrus yet, but I think it a good idea to include some tools for creating books which are editable in-game. This would be particularly handy for in-game challenges involving basic codes and ciphers, because cracking a cipher is very much like filling out a crossword. You start with the obvious and, using this as a basis for elimination, you deduce the imponerables. This usually involves adding your own notes and findings to the document in question. Another aspect of old literature is that of marginal notes. These can be very important, and would ultimately enrich the game. However, implementation would require separate but linked documents to be rendered seemlessly - and always at a somewhat odd angle to oneanother.
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Finally, something I've always wanted to see in these games is some form of automated diary. The advantage of an autodiary, if it is recorded to a text file, is that snippets can be copied to modders and developers to demonstrate issues - in much the same way as screenshots are used to demonstrate graphic issues. For example, there were times in Morrowind and Oblivion when the wandering beasties just wouldn't let up - and the loot collected on the journey returned considerably more gold than the loot yielded by the quest. A snippet from an autodiary record would demonstrate the issue nicely. Also, if well developed, the appearance of autodiary entries on the web would point back to the Elder Scrolls and expand exposure, and possibly sales, considerably.
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In a modular environment, the autodiary is very much easier to produce than it sounds. On any given day, conditions (e.g. weather) and surrounds (e.g. mean topographic variation i.e. in player Z ordinate position, modal near object class, etc.) can be characterised on a watch by watch basis with events and major cell changes recorded sequentially while non-aggressive actions are grouped on an hour by hour basis towards the end of a given watch paragraph. Describing the surroundings automatically may sound challenging, but it's fairly easy as a concept. Initially, no diary is generated until a statistically significant number of non-aggressive action deviations are recorded. By non-aggressive action deviations, I refer to where an object, such as a harvestable plant or container, was positioned in the player's field of view relative to the cross hair just before the player changed direction to harvest the plant or access the container. With enough of these coordinates, a modal map bounded by statistical or modal inflection can be used to estimate where a player is actually looking relative to the cross hair at any given time - based on the players dominant visual attenuation. Once this dominant visual attentuation is established for a given player, the classes of closest object passing through this zone can be counted over a watch period (e.g. forenoon watch) with the dominant two or three classes used to describe the surroundings encountered during that period. This can be repeated, for a given cell, whenever the player transitions into a cell not already described that watch - in much the same sequential order as the events of the watch. Events can be described (e.g. hostiles encountered, estimated force deployment in terms of squad, section, platoon, company or battalion strength; dialogue recording who said what) followed by their intensity (e.g. extended or brief, offensive or defensive) along with their outcomes (e.g. victory or escape; severe, light or no injury; diseases contracted; perhaps even loot taken, etc.). All it would take is for a modder to be able to come up with something like this is if Papyrus has the capacity for large scripts or for scripts to directly invoke oneanother - along with persistent variable arrays and functions which allow the temporary recording of player position and crosshair orientation through time) as well as functions which can list objects within given radius of a selected point - not to mention the ability to record a log file in a sibling directory to the save games directory.
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The advantage of an autodiary in the game for someone using the game's modding environment is that, if set to debugging mode, it could also be used to record AI anomalies which may not be noticed during game testing (e.g. actor path deviations, Actor AI pathing failures, exact scripting fail or termination points by script name and line number, etc.) and it could even act as a receptacle where all lines of script which get run are dumped sequentially and grouped by script. An in-game debugging log based on a system like this would allow testers to identify exactly where less visible problems are occurring (both in the sequence of play and in the mechanics of the game), which could streamline the testing phase of development considerably - especially where more complex situations are being represented within the game.

@ PROMETHEUS_ts

Yeah well, Cevat Yerli also already stated that next gen console games would be looking like films. I must say, I do not believe this. In certain scenes they will perhaps. And I do prophesy, that the ram problem will further be an issue of these machines. Graphics is not everything, it will ever be impossible to have an immersive feel with consoles.

@ RealmEleven

For your second point: I really just couldn't believe it, when I noticed that this is not a part of CK. I guess the Cryengine floats like a sword of Damocles over that discussion...

Personally I think objectplacement etc, most things you do in the render window is working rather fine. And I know that with many options inscripting you get a complicated script. I love the way the whole quest lay-out already helps a lot in quest scripting. So basicly I have no real problems with the CK and I know that my many problems with scripting (I've only done a few simple ones but none I could make out of hand, most needed lots of wiki attention to get the basics and then help from this forum to get it working).

My wish is a better wiki. For someone not into scripting most of the wiki is to vague, the examples to short. I need whole example scripts to see how a line is incorporated in a script and how different scripts are linked.
The tutorials are great btw but - of course - very specific and if I deviate just a little (which always happens) I directly run into a problem.

Hope the wiki can be expanded in this way.

heh, I'll need to write scripts better before I do any contributing to the wiki..

Just seeing this thread makes me think Bethesda>Bioware. Their games may be buggy and hyped, but my god do they respect their consumers

There's one very important issue I would like the devs to consider on the next update perhaps:
when I work on an ESP editing the land height and painting land texture, these changes will seem to have vanished IN GAME, NOT IN THE EDITOR after I convert the ESP to an ESM to work on a new smaller ESP (or just to bring back the disappearing objects).
This bug is just as strange, as it should be easy to fix. And please do not forget my suggestion to add some merging functionality.

@ HarleyVATS

Please do not call me a consumer!

I consume so I am

Here's another bug concerning tree lod this time, look at this picture:

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/757/screenshot7bd.jpg

These tree lods should be at least one km further north in the mountains where the actual trees are standing. There's no workaround for this, so could someone please inform the devs of this. This seems to be due to some area restriction.

@ Aezeal

So much for progress, considering where that quote derives from. Actually Descartes shortened it a bit, the whole version would be "I think, so I am thought" - now complete the modern time version...

I really wonder how they made the game with all those bugs if they used this ck...

http://www.gamesas.com/user/788297-arcedwan/ - I am curious, when you convert to esm, do you get a weird cell titled 0,0 under the worldspace branch?

What's so weird on a cell titled 0,0? Or what exactly do you mean by titled? The editor ID? Now that would be strange in deed...


It has all to do with that version control thing, as discribed by Joel.

If there was a bug that affected them, they fixed it. I'm sure that leaves plenty of bugs that didn't affect them, meaning they never fixed them, and probably never even knew they were there. You must all consider that. We use it under very different circumstances than them, so it's bound to stir up a pot of issues that they never experienced.