I got back into it recently and loaded up a tale of two wastelands.
Yeah, dammit, that is fun.
I’m gonna add to my comment below and say that it would be cool to see a full re-release of everything from Fallout 3 on with the Starfield engine. Starfield runs buttery-smooth at 165 Hz on my machine, while Fallout 76 drops frames while loading content. On Starfield, controllers work fine, I’ve got solid stability, etc.
For a lot of that, it has to be possible for Bethesda to do a straight, automated translation.
The models aren’t high-res, but there are new versions of some of the content done for later releases, at least to Fallout 4/Fallout 76 level, and Bethesda’s literally been just having modelers sell models in Fallout 76’s store. The one thing that I’m pretty sure that they have available is modeling bandwidth, so I’m pretty confident that if I insert money, they can emit models. I don’t care in the least about the cosmetic stuff you can buy to decorate a player camp in Fallout 76, which is what they’re currently selling, but I’d happily pay for higher-resolution models for the single-player games.
I’d also be willing to bet that at least some texture upscaling can be semi-automated using LLM upscaling, which is pretty darn impressive. I don’t know if a studio has tried that yet, but it’d be nice to see.
They already did one major game re-release with a newer engine, Skyrim LE to Skyrim SE. And mods were generally forward-ported there. If there were one engine for all of the 3D Fallout series, it’d be easier to make mods that apply to the whole series.
Hell, if that’s even too much risk for them, that’s even the kind of thing that I’d pay for a Kickstarter for, take on risk of something going wrong myself. They’ve got an established track record as a studio. They have to have a pretty good picture of what it would take to translate maps and models. They have a roughly-known amount of work, have to have a pretty good picture as to what it would cost. That work is pretty low-risk. Their only unknown is how many sales would come out the other end, and I’d be okay committing to a sale in advance of seeing it if it’d get it moving.
If I could get a handful of engine improvements from Bethesda – and maybe they’ve already done this somewhere on the path to Starfield – one ask would be improvements in mod loading time. Like, do whatever computation or sanity-checking or index-building the engine needs to do, and then cache it on disk and only regenerate it if the list of active mods changes or the version of the game has changed since last launch. Just check whether file size/modification types have changed; that should be pretty fast.
Maybe provide some hook for content that has to run immediately for mods that modify game mechanics, maybe provide time-profiling on that to mod creators.
Ok, you’ve clearly given this a lot of thought, and I don’t wanna trip you up…
…but haven’t they? A decade ago? Like, when I load up, it only seems to reindex after I update or re-order the load order of mods or install a new one. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem to reload. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The load time definitely increases dramatically in both Skyrim and Fallout 4 with my active mod count, and I can’t believe that it’s necessary to do per-load work to that degree just to show the initial scene. I don’t know what causes the hit, but it is real.
I do believe it, since I got back into it recently and loaded up a tale of two wastelands. I’ll have to check out London, though.
I just wanted to plug my favorite mods.
Yeah, dammit, that is fun.
I’m gonna add to my comment below and say that it would be cool to see a full re-release of everything from Fallout 3 on with the Starfield engine. Starfield runs buttery-smooth at 165 Hz on my machine, while Fallout 76 drops frames while loading content. On Starfield, controllers work fine, I’ve got solid stability, etc.
For a lot of that, it has to be possible for Bethesda to do a straight, automated translation.
The models aren’t high-res, but there are new versions of some of the content done for later releases, at least to Fallout 4/Fallout 76 level, and Bethesda’s literally been just having modelers sell models in Fallout 76’s store. The one thing that I’m pretty sure that they have available is modeling bandwidth, so I’m pretty confident that if I insert money, they can emit models. I don’t care in the least about the cosmetic stuff you can buy to decorate a player camp in Fallout 76, which is what they’re currently selling, but I’d happily pay for higher-resolution models for the single-player games.
I’d also be willing to bet that at least some texture upscaling can be semi-automated using LLM upscaling, which is pretty darn impressive. I don’t know if a studio has tried that yet, but it’d be nice to see.
They already did one major game re-release with a newer engine, Skyrim LE to Skyrim SE. And mods were generally forward-ported there. If there were one engine for all of the 3D Fallout series, it’d be easier to make mods that apply to the whole series.
Hell, if that’s even too much risk for them, that’s even the kind of thing that I’d pay for a Kickstarter for, take on risk of something going wrong myself. They’ve got an established track record as a studio. They have to have a pretty good picture of what it would take to translate maps and models. They have a roughly-known amount of work, have to have a pretty good picture as to what it would cost. That work is pretty low-risk. Their only unknown is how many sales would come out the other end, and I’d be okay committing to a sale in advance of seeing it if it’d get it moving.
Hard to say which is my favorite, since i usually load up hundreds of mods.
i love FO4 and its mods so much, lol
If I could get a handful of engine improvements from Bethesda – and maybe they’ve already done this somewhere on the path to Starfield – one ask would be improvements in mod loading time. Like, do whatever computation or sanity-checking or index-building the engine needs to do, and then cache it on disk and only regenerate it if the list of active mods changes or the version of the game has changed since last launch. Just check whether file size/modification types have changed; that should be pretty fast.
Maybe provide some hook for content that has to run immediately for mods that modify game mechanics, maybe provide time-profiling on that to mod creators.
Ok, you’ve clearly given this a lot of thought, and I don’t wanna trip you up…
…but haven’t they? A decade ago? Like, when I load up, it only seems to reindex after I update or re-order the load order of mods or install a new one. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem to reload. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The load time definitely increases dramatically in both Skyrim and Fallout 4 with my active mod count, and I can’t believe that it’s necessary to do per-load work to that degree just to show the initial scene. I don’t know what causes the hit, but it is real.