Oblivion

[Caduceus]

I'm sure some of you are like me, played Morrowind to death, and have been eagerly awaiting TES Oblivion. I am going to get it today, hopefully.

I built my machine with the plan of playing the next Elder Scrolls game, hopefully it won't disappoint me.

Most of what I am seeing posted in other places is that
1.) the grass (or what have you) is in a visible radius around your character.

2.) the textures of some objects, most notably the emperor's face, could have been done better

3.) the text print is too large

4.) the inventory is hard to navigate

None of these are show-stoppers for me, especially after plowing through half of Morrowind prior to the patch that let you know if you were damaging your opponent at all. Several of these problems will likely be fixed in a week or two.

Any thoughts?

[NullAshton]

Grass around you in a visible radius, that's a feature. It's so that your graphics card doesn't go wild rendering ALL of the grass around you ALL of the time. Grass is very graphics intensive.

[Fyron]

It's a bad feature. Grass should _never_ be so complicated that it is a major strain on resources... its grass!

[Suicide Junkie]

Unless, perhaps, you're playing "SimMower"

[NullAshton]

No, it's not really outrageous. Grass is usually done by the simple method of a double-sided quad, with transparency. Newer games use stuff such as multiple polygons so that the grass can use the physics engine to move as the player walks through it.

[Suicide Junkie]

But its grass! Unless it has a major impact on gameplay, why should it take up a major chunk of your resources?

[NullAshton]

Because it looks pretty. That's why.

It's the same reason why games aren't just stick-people made out of blocks with triangular ground, and blocky models. That may be efficient, and gets the job done, but it doesn't look nice.

[Suicide Junkie]

*A major chunk of resources* is the key.
If its not going to impact the playability, fluff is fine, and some is good.

But if you're spending a multidigit percentage of the system resources on a particular bit of fluff, rather than on important things, that's a bit crazy.

[NullAshton]

Grass around a little bit of the character isn't very intensive. But as you render more and more grass, then the requirements to render that grass rise exponentially, as it's more of a job to use the transparency.

[Will]

NullAshton said:
Grass around a little bit of the character isn't very intensive. But as you render more and more grass, then the requirements to render that grass rise exponentially, as it's more of a job to use the transparency.

Actually, it would be proportional to the square of the radius. If a circle of radius 1 has N blades of grass to render, then a circle of radius 2 has 4*N blades of grass to render. As long as you're not doing something silly like keeping the camera *inside* the grass, there should be no problem with computing overlapping transparencies.

And something like rendering grass should take up very little system resources. Nearly all the memory and computation used would be in the graphics card, not the system itself.