this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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"remake" is generous of the titling editor. That's a tech demo or a mechanic demo. Still good, though. The seamless transitions are nice.
Yeah - of course games are hard - but all he did was rough out a planet-to-space experience in Unreal Engine with a Starfield aesthetic. If he started trying to build an actual game on it... Well an 8 year timeline doesn't seem crazy.
And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.
Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.
If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn't realistic enough.
Those are solved issues in other engines, meaning not at all insurmountable.
Can you give me an example of a game that solved the above problems? I've never seen a game that has that issue resolved for any ship configuration that could exist.
Kerbal Space Program?
While I had forgetten about Kerbal space program, I would point out two major things about that comparison. KSP is entirely about the ship flight. That is the entire games purpose. And second, when I played it a few years after release, it was hardly stable and wouldn't be a good representation with the atmospheric density discussion. As I remember it that problem was largely ignored.
I'll grant you the first point, the whole game is centered on space travel simulation, but it's also the only game I've seen that handles what you're describing. You definitely need to consider atmospheric density though. Managing your speed, angle of attack, and parachutes to avoid overheating is one of the major skills you learn while playing. Some are Earth like (Kerbin), other are thinner (Moho), and some are surrounded in an atmosphere so thick that it makes any return mission a huge achievement (Eve).
That's not an unsolvable issue, and you can always handwave it away for simplicity with some lore. The ships are already magics, like any star ship, so you can just say that the motors and calibration compensate for different planets and whatnot so the ship is easy to use everywhere.
Not to mention it means solving for all the extra resources consumed by the content on the planet.
A loading screen lets you load different areas of the game discreetly and make the game performative. This is especially important as Starfield is a single player game, it's not hosted on a server or anything so it can't distribute resource load that way, its all happening client side on the player's system. They would have to simulate the entire world on their PC alone or develop a way to stream the content out dynamically and seamlessly.
This demo from the guy is fine up to a point, but once you start adding in real content it gets more complicated. Not impossible but it's not as simple as just copy-pasting some stuff into Unreal the way people are making it out to be.
There's a reason SF took 10 years, and it's not because the devs were lazy or incompetent or hadn't thought of something. I'm sure there were a lot of discussions about seamless flight.
I think the bigger deal with Bethesda's engine is that it's built to be very easy for designers to iterate on, which is why it is also so easy for users to mod. They trade a lot of efficiency for scripting systems and level editors that let them whip up sprawling open spaces in a short amount of time, and fill them with dynamic systems like NPC routines and tracking thousands of physics-enabled props. This is probably also why their games are prone to buggy behavior.
Building all of the systems Starfield has at its disposal into Unreal would probably take years, and I'm not convinced the results would be any better.
I mean, to be fair, Starfield doesn't do it well either. In the 15 hours I played, especially toward the latter end, I ran into plenty of texture pop-in, bad culling, bodies without heads and arms, heads and arms without bodies, bad shading patches, t-posing, stutter, lots of other goofy shit. And granted, my rig's not the best but I'm playing on medium with a 9600K, 3070, 32GB RAM, and the game's installed on a Samsung 870 SATA.
Sure, I was more just responding to the tendency some people have in oversimplifying the development process of any game. There are things that people who aren't devs do not know that they do not know they don't know.
That's not how any of it works.
We have had level streaming in Unreal for like a decade. Sure it's more complex to do things this way, but in general the way it works is that when you approach some area (are some distance from a planet or part of a planet) the next chunk of the world loads in, together with any NPCs and logic and everything else - it's basically a self contained map, just seamlessly integrated with other maps. There is no meaningful performance hit if done correctly. You certainly don't simulate everything all the time.
Additionally, all the other games mentioned (NMS, Elite, Star Citizen) also have basically all of the processing on the client side. The servers don't help the clients in any way; they only store primitive states for gameplay purposes, but all the simulation and whatnot is done on the client. And they still manage to be better optimized.
Guess they must just be lazy and stupid then.
It's more like they really want to use their own engine (for many good reasons) and it'd probably be really hard (if not near impossible without a complete rewrite) to add such a fundamental feature to their existing engine. Even if it wasn't that hard it'd probably still cost a shitton of developer time and they were spending it elsewhere.
This is basically what No Man's Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.
And not to be too hard on No Man's Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it's fun.
I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it's possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.