New Screenshots, These aren't on W4O yet... Options

[Curly_G_]

GameStar.de New Screenshots (or copy "http://www.gamestar.de/aktuell/screenshots/PlayerPicList.jsp?galleryId=954P" in your browser)

They look awesome.

If they are already on W4O... Sorry. lol.

[Curly_G_]

Sorry for posting again... but it shows the skills, some new armours, and the water effects really well in these shots. Check 'em out.




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[ShogunSniper]

i actually think the water looks kinda crapy looking....
but i havent seen it in motion plus the water has prolly been polished since then

[Soulseeker3.0]

well I think the water is fine. I hope not all of the faces are like the one in the 5th one. I think it looks a bit chubby or something.

[Megil Tel-Zeke]

Actually I have seen all these screenshots elsewhere before, and I do not believe they are endorsed by bethesda. Most of the images echo those of the russian website....so I have a feeing they were skimmed of to another site and hosted again.

[Curly_G_]

I guess if Bethesda Endorsed they can't be used on W4O.
The water looks good to me. I think I read somewhere a Dev was explaining the reflections and transparency of water changes depending on your angle to it and the Sun's angle.

I could be wrong! lol.

[RobRendell]

I love that water shot of Cheydinhal. I've had it as my backdrop for a few weeks now. Arkay rocks!

I'm going to go there first after getting out of prison, to try to get Benirus Manor for my very own. I'm hoping that that's Benirus Manor that you can see in that shot over the water...

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Nov 29 2005, 02:35 AM

[King Death]

I've seen these before. I think the water looks good, but looks a little too plastic if you ask me.

[Gomez']

Yeah ive seen almost all of these before too.....

anyway can anybody identify the respective town for This variation of town guard armor?

Im a bit curious

This post has been edited by Gomez': Nov 29 2005, 07:29 AM

[Curly_G_]

I wondered what the Armour was too. The shield isn't exactly my style of armour but I was just curious.

Is it sad to already planned my skills and appearance for Oblivion?

[RobRendell]

He's from Cheydinhal, too. Don't you recognise Arkay's symbol in the right hand of the statue in the background?

Actually, I'd have no idea about where most of the screenshots come from, if it wasn't for the very useful Unofficial FAQ on the Bethesda forums. I know about Cheydinhal because of the cities section of the so-called "Encyclopaedia Oblivionicus".

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Nov 30 2005, 03:52 AM

[Gomez']

Oh i can see now.

thanks alot rob

and thanks alllot for that link

*after a bit of reading*

NO FACIAL HAIR>~!

Man that bit me hard.


This post has been edited by Gomez': Nov 30 2005, 04:12 AM

[RobRendell]

Yeah, that one is a bit poor. You can apply shader-based facial hair, apparently, so you can have a light beard. No big bushy beards for your male Nords, though.

Maybe there's a province-wide law in Cryodil that all adult males must shave at least once a week

[Gomez']

a Goatee will do me fine, im just worried for those of us who want that hardcore Billy F. Gibbons Wizard beard to accent their magic menajatwa

[ShogunSniper]

a mod will probably change that within a week of release.

[RobRendell]

I'm not so sure... with procedurally-generated faces, how easy will it be to add beards? It's not like Morrowind, where each head is just another model, and modders can add new ones at will. The face models are generated in-game by the (tweaked) facegen middleware, so to change them you'll need to change the binary code (unless they've cleverly got it driven by user-modifyable data).

Also, you've also got to wonder: if it's easy to add full beards, why hasn't Bethesda done it themselves...

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Nov 30 2005, 09:37 PM

[ShogunSniper]

I'm not so sure... with procedurally-generated faces, how easy will it be to add beards?  It's not like Morrowind, where each head is just another model, and modders can add new ones at will.  The face models are generated in-game by the (tweaked) facegen middleware, so to change them you'll need to change the binary code (unless they've cleverly got it driven by user-modifyable data).

Also, you've also got to wonder: if it's easy to add full beards, why hasn't Bethesda done it themselves...

ok no clue what you just said, i'm no modder, that last opinion of mine was from the viewpoint of a strict TES player.

perhaps i should reword it, there will be a mod for beards at some point in time.

[Gomez']

But no doubt it will be Really choppy and bad looking.

hey if they're gonna shave a nords great beard they must have a reason.

This post has been edited by Gomez': Dec 1 2005, 03:12 AM

[Megil Tel-Zeke]

Probably. if they ever make a mod it will mor ehtan likely involve using an additional model as the beard, and as a result it will probably involve a lot of clipping and what not.

[RobRendell]

ok no clue what you just said, i'm no modder, that last opinion of mine was from the viewpoint of a strict TES player.

By "procedurally generated faces", what I mean is the the model for each head/face is generated by code, rather than loaded from a model file.

In Morrowind, a 3d artist would go into their modelling software and create each face manually, creating polygons, moving verticies around and playing with the texture that is wrapped around the face to try to get a pleasing effect, and when they were done, they'd save it and put it where Morrowind can find it. MW is set up to have lots of hand-created face models to choose from, so dropping in new ones (or modifying/replacing the existing ones) is simple.

In Oblivion, the face is ultimately a texture wrapped around a bunch of polygons, the same as in Morrowind. However, the vertex positions and texture image isn't loaded from a model file. Instead, there's some code in the engine, based on "facegen", which the game can "load" a model from. It says "give me the 3d model for a face with parameters A,B,C..." and it gets back a 3d model.

Once it gets to the rendering scenes, there's no difference between the loaded-from-model-files models and the generated-by-code models. However, there's (probably) no opportunity for a modder to get at the face model to tweak it (or add a beard) between when it's generated by the facegen software and where it starts getting rendered, since that's all internal.

And when I said "unless they've cleverly got it driven by user-modifyable data", what I meant was speculation about how the facegen software (or Bethesda's changes to it) is driven. It might be all hard-coded... a face for a given race has X verticies, there are Y sliders, a given slider changes the position of this vertex from this position to that position as it goes from 0 to 100%, etc. Or, it could be all data-driven, with all those factors loaded from a data file, even the number of slider controls etc, allowing dedicated modders to get in and play with the inputs to try to achieve particular outcomes. Or it could be some combination of hard-coded and data-driven (the most likely), with certain things locked and other things nominated in data files.

So, really, I don't know anything concrete It might be possible to add full beards after the game is released as a mod, it might not. Just speculating wildly. And trying despearately not to scratch these red itchy spots that are all over my body, which is why I'm home from work today

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Dec 2 2005, 12:32 AM