Pemalite said:
Oh... I beg to differ. I have them all on PC.
It was great tech for the time, but the sprite based distant trees just hasn't aged well, it's a pretty blurry mess.
It needs allot more than that, PC has been pushing higher AA, AF, Framerates and Resolution for over a decade, it's not a magic bullet, I also have it on the Xbox One X, I wouldn't say it "looks okay". - It looks better than the 360 version obviously... But nothing to write home about.
To me even the rocks look like a blurry mess. And the abuse of Bloom doesn't help things. |
I meant the billboards used for the leaf plains. Oblivion's trees are just trunks and branches. Billboards are strategically placed hanging off of those to give the illusion of leaf planes. It keeps the polycount down and back in the day when devs were really struggling to figure out working with these massive polygon counts (funny to think about now with polycounts being way higher) it was an easy way to massively improve vs 6th gen foliage. But it just looks...off and featureless due to how light plays off of them. Oblivion utterly lacking true environment shadows helped mask that but in the Creation Engine it would look really bad. Also, Speedtree is still used but it's changed. Speedtree is used mostly for simply creating trees through a sort of procedural generation/construction. A team I work with has and is using it to create trees, far easier than by hand. But the LOD is quite simplistic. The biggest issue is the lack of geometric detail in the distance. Problem is, you can't fix this by simply flagging more meshes to be visible when distant and giving them LOD meshes because the game was not crafted with this in mind. I've done this with mods before and it IS a big improvement, no doubt, but it doesn't even compare to Skyrim which benefits massively from cliff meshes and the like which help immensely with landscape definition. Basically, Skyrim's environments are designed to VWD, Oblivion's are not. As for what holds up, mostly just the architecture and rock meshes. Those are actually pretty ok. And the heightmap is pretty good. Oh and the grass meshes, those actually featured a very healthy number of planes. Which is why they absolutely *destroyed* performance.
As for porting it to the Creation Engine...well, the problem there is the Creation Engine scrapped Oblivion's scripting language/system *entirely* in favor of the new system, Papyrus. A lot of Oblivion would need to be completely recreated in the Creation Engine. Now I totally believe it would be worth it, the more vibrant setting of Oblivion would look FANTASTIC with the enhanced lighting, proper shadows, more robust post-processing pipeline, and the substantial geometric and textural improvements that new tech plus developer experience would bring. But it's not cake walk.