| curl-6 said: Not everything can be time sliced and still work well though. Things like tracking a massive number of dynamic objects doesn't have a fixed cost either, comparing it to Morrowind would be like saying reflections can't be demanding in modern games because some N64 games had them. These things scale. PS5/Xbox Series are not infinitely powerful, their CPU/GPUs are not made of magic pixie dust, they offer a limited amount of power and some devs will want to do more with their games than current consoles can handle at 60fps. |
My point was that simulations usually are updated by the precision required, not necessarily the frames rendered, and at times they could scale constantly with frame-rate while other times they could scale super-linearly with frame-rate.
As to the second point,
Sure, these things scale. That's not in dispute. What has also scaled since Morrowind are memory capacity, memory bandwidth, storage space, CPU speed, etc. Even if the number of objects (and their storage size) scaled by 1000 times Morrowind (for a game-world that is 8 times larger than Morrowind ) all of this hardware has also scaled by at least that much, if not more than that and Bethesda has likely learned many more tricks since then (i.e using more efficient data structures, putting a time-limit of 30 days on object permanence, etc.)
Object-permanence mostly is a storage/memory management problem. The CPU does have a role in it (writing from memory to the disk/pulling to the memory from the disk) but it isn't some magic workload that is especially taxing.
Most developers don't implement it in their games because it is a system that is developmentally costly to pull off correctly, not necessarily runtime costly (if it is pulled off correctly.)
Last edited by sc94597 - on 17 June 2023
