Hi All,

I am not sure where exactly to put this question, but this seems to be the most likely place where someone might know.

I have seen comments about how the Gamebryo engine is not so great, and on doing some reading, it seems the Creation Engine is based on it.

I know nothing about how these things work, but I am curious to learn. So my questions are:

• Where can one learn about what these sorts of game engines are all about (in as layman terms as possible), just to get a general understanding of how it all works ( Wiki?)
  
• What would have been a better engine to use in a game like Skyrim, or Oblivion, or any other massive world similar/type game?
  
• Do you need to be a coding adept to be able to meddle with the creation kit?

Many thanks

First, Gamebryo is a middleware, not an engine.

To answer your questions:
1. Not sure about detailed game engine stuff, we still don't even know a lot of this.
2. I think they just need to fix the current one. BGS's games are unique. There is not a single other company in the world that makes the exact same style of game as BGS, so I can't really compare which engine would be better suited for it.
3. No! Most of the CK will be a simple GUI, the only coding knowledge you need is scripting, which is very easy to learn. I start 3 years ago, and within about a year of casually modding, I was VERY fluent in scripting, and could write a 100 line script with my eyes closed. Though it has supposedly changed, and is now called 'Papyrus', it should still be easy to learn.

Welcome to modding. Prepare to have many hours of your life gone as you are svcked into the amazing world of modding a BGS game.

AJV

Thanks so much for the info Alex - not entirely sure what middleware is (lol), but I will do some reading online. And yes, I am rather concerned about losing more of my life, but then, you know the wise words of Bertrand Russell "the time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted time"

hear hear!!

No other (offline, single player) game is anywhere near as complex as TES games are, and to my knowledge no game could provide as much as the engines Bethesda uses. I don't blame them for only updating their old engine as apposed to writing a new one/using another one. The team is very comfortable with the current engine and SDK, and it's much too expensive to actually write an entirely new engine from scratch.

Hmm... I'm not exactly sure how to take that statement

Hehe, feel free to PM me and have a debate

Depends, do you want to still be waiting for Skyrim 2 years from now?

I kid, but seriously, a lot of what went into Skyrim's engine, is just the same engine they've been using. Yes it's *new* because a lot of it has be upgraded (re-written), but it still has it's roots all the way back. A lot of the same code is used - basically all of the stuff used for reading/writing resource files (ESPs, ESMs, BSAs, textures, meshes) is almost the same, with minor changes to it, as would be expected when improving on somthing. So there's no way Skyrim would have been released when it was if they didn't build off of what they aleady had, in fact that would be a really poor decision.

However, like AJV said, they probably should have spent a little more time fixing known bugs from previous iterations of the game.