A prominent open-source dev publishes their findings as to what's going on with Starfield's performance, and it's pretty darn strange.

According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.

  • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    People really have no idea about anything in game development. I agree it should have seemless planet travel, but it is not something that an engine “can just do.” It takes so many complicated systems to make that function. There’s no engine that does it out of the box.

    Basically any engine can do it, but it requires it to be built. The land must be deterministic at all points, it must be able to create chunks accurately for all points (which gets really weird at the poles, but any latitude above 0 because your chunks shouldn’t be square anymore), and they must be able to be streamed in to their correct position seemlessly.

    It is quite complicated, and there’s no reason the engine developed for an arena shooter (Unreal) would be able to handle it any better than any other engine. It just has to be built.

    • colonial@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      There’s a reason Hello Games wrote their own engine for NMS. We all know that it was pretty bad gameplay-wise at launch, but under the hood NMS was (and still is) something of a technical marvel. No loading screens except for a disguised one when jumping between systems is quite impressive.