A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
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.