So in theory, what would would need to be done for ESO to change engines?

abzdeman

Maybe ESO isn't worth investing in anymore. They may not see anymore profit.

therift

Krayl wrote: »

the engine for a 5 year old game is not gonna get updated. lol.

They really should have an intro to gave development and intro to business video play before you're allowed to sign up to these forums. That would erradicate like 90% of the posts by people who have no concept of what's involved.

One of the purposes of player forums is to seek answers to questions. If you are annoyed that a player who knows little about game design is seeking answers from players who do, perhaps you should just ignore such threads.

I, for one, couldn't give a rat's ass about coding. I pay experts to do that for me. I'm not going to watch your damn 'Intro to what-I-hire-people-to-do-for-me' video before asking a question. My time is too valuable.

I appreciate the responders who took time to provide their insight to OP's question. I found several of the posts to be informative.

zaria

abzdeman wrote: »

Maybe ESO isn't worth investing in anymore. They may not see anymore profit.

Well it was one of the 20 games who brought in most revenue on steam and steam is just one of the channels for ESO.
You also has the standalone pc version and the two console versions.

As other say changing engine is in practice impossible, improving it is.
Also stuff like dungeon finder is not part on engine but added on top and can be replaced.
it interfaces with engine on creating group instances, however entering group instances manually does not have the issues the finder has.
Overhead is only keeping track of instances so you can ask for replacements and giving reward for random dungeons.

nafensoriel

A good many questions here!

@Casowen
In regardes to engine hate:
If you look at fallout3/4/76 you will see many many youtube personalities speaking about how the "engine is terrible and old". The reality is it isn't. I've mentioned many times that CE is only 1 year younger than UE. The perception of "old" is because people really just don't understand what an engine is or does. When players demand constantly to "upgrade the engine" its actually a very bad thing to games as a whole and I will go into that in a bit. The main takeaway first off is when you demand engines people who invest money get biased. That bias can exist even in the face of mountains of facts and can cause less money to flow to projects that use "poorly perceived" engines or technologies even if, in reality, those engines and technologies are actually superior for the task at hand. It means less choice for YOU the gamer and less innovation in games a whole.

As a quick primer again on engines themselves let me first start off by saying everything 99.9% of people think an engine is is wrong. It has nothing to do with art. It has nothing to do with animation... atleast not in the way you think. This is where much of the misinformation comes from.
I mentioned earlier that an engine is like a highway system. Cars can drive down many roads and in many directions. The highway doesn't care how fast they drive or what kind of vehicle it is as long as it meets the very broad parameters of its roads.
In practice, this means when you have an art asset you can use the engine to translate that asset into something. You still have to write scripts for those actions and you still have to animate the models. All the engine does is provide a very basic framework so everything you create works together in a seamless fashion in the end with predictable results. It links multiple technologies like audio, animation, and physics into that framework to reduce workload and homogenize how things interact.

In any engine there are limitations. All engines are great at some things and terrible at others. All engines make sacrifices to do certain things better than their competitors. You cannot make an engine do everything well because hardware performance is always finite.

If you make a 5 million polygon model and a 100 polygon model no current engine on the market will care which you use. The only consideration is how much performance cost overhead those polygons might cost. IE one engine might be better at pushing polygons at the cost of something else so if your vision is a high polygon ultrarealistic visual game(final fantasy types) would benefit from the engines which are more efficient at pushing polygons. It's ALWAYS a trade-off. You want pretty.. you lose world detail or size. Computers have finite processing power remember and EVERYTHING in the game fights for those resources.
Additionally just because a model has 5 million polygons doesn't mean its a GOOD model. I've seen art with high polygon counts that was just awful.. like bleach in my eyes please awful. As much as a coder can work magic so can a good art team. Your animators are also super critical today as well because they can take an ok model and make it move so fluidly with various tricks that it transitions to fantastic.

Any modern engine can produce a facsimile of any modern game. You could make Red Alert on UE4. It would be a very bad idea and the end games would be so drastically different as to be unrecognizable as the same concept but you COULD make it. In fact, someone did. Red Alert 2 On Vive UE4 You can roughly see some of the challenges such a conversion has to overcome.

Even things like Fallout 4 and Creation Engine vs UE4. Could you make FO4 in UE4 or frostbite? Yes... at the cost of much of the world density. An engine like Hero or CE isn't meant to be "the prettiest" because their focus is on other elements. They are "pretty enough" with more world detail. There is nothing in Creation Engine to stop it from looking exactly as good as UE4 except overhead costs. Remember the key word is "Tradeoffs". Always remember that when looking at a video game.

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@the idea of wow having an upgraded engine...
It really didn't get upgraded. They polished parts of it so it wasn't so much a turd. They bumped the minimum performance specs to compensate from the art upgrades and gave a once over to the render systems. Is it a "technical" upgrade? Yes. Was it an actual upgrade? No.
and before you ask ESO has already had similar upgrades and I expect will receive more such updates in the future. It's the nature of the beast with long term support to polish your turds. (and yes all games have things we wish we did differently during development. MMOs just have more of a chance to occasionally quasi fix them)

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@ improving post processing and Textures
Trust me this is always in the brain of developers. The question is money+time+logic.
Upgrading shaders or textures isn't really difficult. Heck, you can download your own injected shaders like reshade! The issue is that dastardly thing called "minimum performance specifications".
Why is that a bottleneck? Well once you've established them it's actually an issue to move them once the product is released. Sure you COULD upgrade the easy elements of your engine and textures to double the visual fidelity... and eliminate entire swaths of your players from being able to play the game suddenly. I know the argument is just "make it an option!" but...
1] Textures are not cheap size wise. Having more than one is a bad idea for a game the size of ESO. Sound and textures make up the majority of a games file size and even with streaming the majority of gamers would protest(loudly) if they had to download 200+ gigs for one game.
2] Making an option takes time. Time is money. It's back to the old argument of MMOs are a business and any action which is not directly going to make money falls under the "bad idea" category. HighRes Texture packs generally don't make money btw. They usually favour a very small part of the market since most customers just use their 5-10+ year old PC to play games or use hardware that just isn't remotely on the same level as a "2080/VII" class of hardware.
3] Increasing textures only works to a point. I highly doubt even 30% of people who play ESO have a monitor capable of displaying a marked difference between 1k and 4k textures. I highly doubt the people playing them would notice a difference even if they did. Fidelity is the sum total of parts rather than one single element and you really have to take in what the average user is using to decide if an upgrade to your textures is worth it.
4] The games development roadmap might need any extra performance room hardware has for other things. Maybe they want to add more lighting effects? Maybe some more detailed NPC scripting? Things that improve the game but not the visuals. These cost performance.

So at the end of the day it's great when games let you mod because if you have that i9 9900k and quad 2080s in sli you have the option to download some player generated 8k textures and use all of an injected shaders glory to make your game look better. The developer doesn't have that option when they MUST maintain their lowest performance spec. With an MMO major mods cant really happen unfortunately so you end up limited as a player once your hardware exceeds its performance needs. It sucks... because letting modders go nuts on ESO textures and clutter models would make for some FANTASTIC things...but its also required by the nature of the title.

nafensoriel

Leaving this as a second post just because it's not really on the same topic...

One thing about textures and the future. I've personally had multiple talks about the future possibility of streaming and how we can support textures in the newer gen titles. One thing I keep hearing repeated is that there is exactly ZERO reason to keep the same textures on the clients' systems. In the future(5+years) you might see games where during install you are given your graphics options BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD THE GAME. The ideas being tossed around so far have been to keep multiple solutions. The end user only downloads what they use and only one master file needs to be an absurd size.

Is that future possible? Eh. Maybe? It's being toyed with. Depends on if development costs continue to bloody skyrocket honestly.

Casowen

nafensoriel wrote: »

Leaving this as a second post just because it's not really on the same topic...

One thing about textures and the future. I've personally had multiple talks about the future possibility of streaming and how we can support textures in the newer gen titles. One thing I keep hearing repeated is that there is exactly ZERO reason to keep the same textures on the clients' systems. In the future(5+years) you might see games where during install you are given your graphics options BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD THE GAME. The ideas being tossed around so far have been to keep multiple solutions. The end user only downloads what they use and only one master file needs to be an absurd size.

Is that future possible? Eh. Maybe? It's being toyed with. Depends on if development costs continue to bloody skyrocket honestly.

I appreciate your posts, and in the future I am hopeful for enhancement and optimizations, perhaps even a relaunch? The textures a great in this game for sure, as wandering around looking at all the artistry is my favorite thing to do in ESO.

zyk

mocap wrote: »

You can clearly see overal graphics difference between, let's say, Cyrodiil and Summerset.

It's beside the point, but this isn't Applies to Apples because Cyrodiil is the most optimized zone in the game in terms of frame time because that's important for PVP.

But I agree with your point, each content update has improved fidelity.

Casowen wrote: »

You can tell they go out of their way to add that, so im not sure why its not better incorporated in game. In short, I do think if they wanted to they could enhance this all to get a sort of unity/unreal engine feel.

Because there are always trade offs. There is no engine that is all things to all players. Personally, I don't like what BDO looks like. It's full of cheap rendering tricks and has bad uncanny valley. I like ESO's engine because I largely agree with the compromises they made.

If there's a takeaway from this thread, it's that ZOS is not stuck with the engine or are limited by it. They can adapt it in any way they choose. ZOS has never stopped developing it.

ZOS_JesC

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