Starfield us in-house and not unreal engine | Hacker News Reader

Starfield us in-house and not unreal engine

in.ign.com

5 pointsngcc_hk12 comments

This is a dumbass discussion that only non-programmers engage in.

An engine and its facilities are as different as different programming languages. No programmer in their right mind would recommend taking a 1M+ line codebase written in C++ and porting it to Scala or something just for kicks.

Gamebryo has been refined for the production of Bethesda RPGs for literal decades, there is no better engine for producing games in that genre. Porting to a new engine would require rebuilding all those features for almost zero gain.

I'm reminded of the post-mortem stories of all the trouble that Bioware went through trying to get horseback riding into Frostbite for DA: Inquisition.

If Bethesda were to use UE you can’t forget that they wouldn’t be using the Unreal Engine 5 of 2023, they’d be using (at least to begin with) the Unreal Engine 4 of 2015 when they started developing it. Since a game like that is so big they’d be making a ton of changes to the engine itself that means that if they wanted new features they’d have to manually merge them in, which depending on the feature might not be worth it to them.

I have a hard time believing anyone with a brain would honestly suggest using Unreal.

Bethesda has written amazing games in their custom engine that have stood the test of time, why would throw in with Unreal? What benefit would that provide?

Unreal is for when you don’t have your own engine or aren’t capable of writing one (no disrespect to devs using it, I think of it like Electron, would custom be better? Probably but I’d rather have an Unreal game than no game at all).

The article doesn’t make a single point as to why it should use Unreal, not one. It would be as if I just walked into a company and said “you should really rewrite your stack in XYZ language”, major “junior dev vibes”.

The title irks me a lot is it suggested that every game now runs on unreal engine just because it's the only engine people know by name?

But what irks me more is the attitude of the interviewed Redfall dev.

>> Redfall is no different for us. Okay, we didn't get the start we wanted, but it's still a fun game… and we're going to keep working on it. We're going to do 60fps. We're going to get it to be a good game because we know, as a first-party studio, Game Pass lives forever. There will be people ten years from now who are going to join Game Pass, and Redfall will be there.

Going Gold seems to only mean that the game is sort of running nowadays...

MVP is the parasite that killed software quality

I just arrived on Mars and probably triggered over twenty loads Take off, land, take the subway, or even enter the house It gives me the feeling of many scenes stitched together using loading

Actually article title is “Starfield: Bethesda Fans Debate Not Using Unreal Engine, but Analysts Reveal There’s More to the Story, and Other Latest News”

Too long and I try to summer use the key point.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2731-starfield-gpu-benchmark...

Surprise my 1080ti still there. And I wonder is it because it is an in-house engine and hence 4090 is not the top?

The 1080 TI is a classic still trucking GPU.

Conspiracy theorists would say BGS optimized for AMD, but BGS games have always have weird performance characteristics, and they probably optimized for (AMD) consoles.

Performance across the board looks pretty nasty TBH.

I bought a 6800XT because I was due for an upgrade anyways (I've come a long way since playing Skyrim 20 FPS low on intel integrated graphics laptop) and it came with the game. I'm playing it on 1080p high everything. Realizing that isn't exactly dripping in ambition for that tier of card, I haven't run into any serious problems.

The first big city you end up is definitely chewing frames but the rest of the game works fine...mostly. I will say I walked into a coniferous forest for the first time, and while it was maintaing 60 FPS, the card was sounding and heating up like it was going to explode more than it had at any other point in 30ish hours of play. The forest had this thick layer of fog over it too so you couldn't see too far ahead of you (and therefore the game didn't have to render too much), so I think some areas are more problematic than others.

This craziness leads a sane person to conclude: we are going to start measuring things in terms of Number of Potatoes, soon enough.

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