| sc94597 said: Sure it gives you double as much time to finish a calculation, my point is that it doesn't necessarily mean double the available processing power. Here is how item locations are implemented in Skyrim. Do you think Starfield will work fundamentally differently? I doubt it and nothing shown so far tells us otherwise. I suppose the location space itself is fungible because of the procedural generation, that might be a difference that affects calculations once (as the world is procedurally generated.) https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim_Mod:Save_File_Format
You might also have longer object permanence (in Skyrim if the tile wasn't touched in 30 in-game days, then the object is removed from the table.) Or you might have more variety of items remain permanent. But that will mostly affect the save file size. Nothing that has been shown so far hints, for example, that if you are located on planet X there are some physics going on - on planet Y's objects while you are gone and the objects' locations might change due to that. "Permanence" in Elder Scrolls/Fallout/etc. is mostly permanence of the object's location and form, which are stored in a table and pulled when you load a save file. This is contrastingly different from say a game like Tears of the Kingdom where there are interactions going on when you leave an object (which is why there is a 20 object and maximum distance limit, overall producing very little permanence in that game.) |
In case of TotK it's also a memory limit I guess. The fact items animate / interact doesn't make it more complex for permanence either. Just like AI it will only be active in a bubble around you. Minecraft (at least on console) doesn't keep animating Red stone either when you move out of range. Once you're out of range the game can simple store the object and its state for when you come back in range again.
TotK has plenty permanence as it remembers every single thing you picked up / mined / killed. Of course that's just simple bit flags, delete what has already been done while everything else resets. (Which leads to weird situations where crates return yet the loot inside them remains gone). But it does not remember stuff you dropped or build. I guess the time limit of animated items is to not make the game too easy, and everything else resets so you can build stuff again. There's little reason for the game to have a problem with rendering items in a different spot then where they are when streaming that segment in. Yet maybe applying the change log when streaming in the next cell took too much time or memory. The game at release had severe frame rate drops already. (Better after the patches)
As long as you store your changes by cell in a quad tree it doesn't have to take much more time than applying the 'removal' process with the bit flag table. Instead of delete item, move item / change type. And this only has to be done when streaming in the next data segment, completely independent of frame rate or physics calculations.
In case of complex machines that you leave behind to keep going, abstractions work. If it produces a certain ore / money all you need to do is determine the production rate. Then come back to it later and it can update with a simple time passed equation.
Anyway object permanence doesn't affect frame rate, but does affect streaming rate and memory needed. If you already max that out for the best possible screenshots, then yeah it's hard to hit 60fps without introducing stutter / pop in.
Since it's also a PC title, I suspect it won't be using all the cpu cores and multi-threading to the best of the Series' abilities. It's much easier to make an engine that works on more hardware configurations by taking a more generic approach. Interestingly the minimum requirements are 6 core processors. Question is will they make full use of them. For example FS2020 is bottle necked by one core doing most of the heavy lifting while the rest are doing far less resulting in overall 50% CPU utilization on a 6 core CPU. Plus Series has a 7th core available for games, but it's hard to offload stuff to another core. Hence it's still often the max speed of a single core that determines how fast an engine can go, not how many cores you have available to do work :/
It's a good sign 6 core CPUs are a minimum requirement now. Will it also use them all is the question. Will it still run on an 4 core i5 or simply refuse to start at all. Or will it combine threads of lower used cores to the same core to still work (defeating the purpose of using 6 cores)
