Look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. They have completely seamless transitions between entire dimensions. They use Direct Storage, which is a Microsoft API. It’s not a good look when a Sony studio is able to achieve seamless transitions on a Windows game but a Microsoft game can’t.
Comment on [MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences!
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months agoIt is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
rDrDr@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months ago
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
beefcat@lemmy.world 10 months ago
TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously. This means you can only switch between any number of maps you can actually fit in memory, and the more you want to switch between the smaller they have to be.
Being able to instantly load level data from an SSD means each map can use the full memory budget and there are no limits on how many you can switch between.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months ago
At the end of the day: it is all the same “trick” Morrowind used. You load N cells ahead of where the player is so that they don’t notice the load times because they have been done by the time they get there.
In this case a “cell” could be a room or it could be DM-Deck 16 or it could be all of The Imperial City. It is the same trick. Hell, I think some streaming services even do this at different quality tiers so that you have no delay between one episode and another.
Size of levels is entirely a function of available memory. PS5 had more memory than PS4 and TF2 was targeting PS4 specs (… actually, was that PS3? Let’s say PS4 so I don’t feel too old). Faster load from disk helps a lot but NVMEs alone already get you there, as anyone who has experienced zero load times while playing a game can attest.
Like I said below where I already addressed this exact same point: It is great to applaud accomplishments. But by buying into this “only with the power of direct storage is this possible” nonsense you are not only parroting marketing: you are ignoring the legacy of all the devs who already did this years (really decades) ago.
rDrDr@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Even on systems with significant memory, a slow drive will create lag in RC. Moreover, RC is doing this while also having very high graphical fidelity overall, including ray tracing, which is quite memory intensive. It’s not possible without Direct storage and reasonably fast SSDs.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah…
Keep in mind that the PS4 pro and the Xbox One X both had spinning disc hard drives. Going from an HDD to an SSD, let alone a pretty good NVME, is already an insane speed-up. There is a reason most PC outlets have said over the years that getting an NVME was a more noticeable improvement than a new GPU.
Similarly, most games and visuals that people were used to fit in 8 GB. This is twice as much RAM at a higher speed.
The “direct storage” argument is almost entirely marketing. And it is fundamentally no different than learning you can Boots of Blinding Speed across the map without loading if you installed Morrowind to an SSD.
arudesalad@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
If you ignore the server performance issues and bugs, star citizen is completely playable on my system and I have below reccomended specs (for starfield & star citizen). If star citizen can have no loading screens with most planets as populated (or more populated) then starfield’s planets while also having to manage server resources, then starfield has almost no excuse to have loading screens.
dojan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Oblivion has towns behind loading screens too. Even Kvatch. There are mods that break them out into the world but they’re instanced by default.
Particularly annoying with the Imperial City.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
marlowe221@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Any town with a wall around it in Oblivion is instanced.
Also, you have correctly recognized Morrowind’s superiority. I highly recommend the Tamriel Rebuilt mod that adds a lot of the land mass of the rest of the province outside of the island of Vvardenfell!
CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
A lot of the towns are still a part of the open world, but some of them are separated by loading screens.