PC vs Console (featuring Fallout: New Vegas)

[Alyeska]

JSF's trolling has been removed.

[Wing Commander MAD]

How exactly is that horseshit? You're going from streaming from the disc to reading from the harddisk which is at least an order of magnitude faster. I'm guessing that Fallout 3/New Vegas operate similar to Oblivion in that they keep track of which cells you've modified, ie dumped an item from your inventory or removed a static item from the environment. I'm fairly certain they however only store what was actually added/removed from the cell, so each time you load the particular cell into memory it first reads the default from disk/hdd and then modifies it based on what was changed, thus removing the need to store the entire cell in memory permanently.

I should also point out that cells probably contain more than just level geometry as Xon said. In Oblivion, each cell holds not only the geometry, but also references to any objects placed in the cell (including information pertinent to that particular incarnation of the object ie scale, position, etc.) and teleport points (allow transition from one cell to another). Also included is information about ownership and lighting/fog information for the cell as well.

[General Zod]

How exactly is that horseshit? You're going from streaming from the disc to reading from the harddisk which is at least an order of magnitude faster. I'm guessing that Fallout 3/New Vegas operate similar to Oblivion in that they keep track of which cells you've modified, ie dumped an item from your inventory or removed a static item from the environment. I'm fairly certain they however only store what was actually added/removed from the cell, so each time you load the particular cell into memory it first reads the default from disk/hdd and then modifies it based on what was changed, thus removing the need to store the entire cell in memory permanently.

I should also point out that cells probably contain more than just level geometry as Xon said. In Oblivion, each cell holds not only the geometry, but also references to any objects placed in the cell (including information pertinent to that particular incarnation of the object ie scale, position, etc.) and teleport points (allow transition from one cell to another). Also included is information about ownership and lighting/fog information for the cell as well.

It's horseshit because virtually every other graphics intensive RPG on the 360 does not require installation in order to keep the loading times reasonable. FF13, Mass Effect 2, Fable 3, Star Ocean and even Alpha Protocol have snappier loading times without any need to install it.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Do any of those games have the level of interactivity with objects in the environment as Fallout: New Vegas?

[Chardok]

Do any of those games have the level of interactivity with objects in the environment as Fallout: New Vegas?

Not even close - and that's actually a good point. I mean, it's still a symptom of shitty engine-ness. but the fact that the physics engine itself must be able to interact with a bajillion different assets in any given zone lends creedence to your (unstated) argument.

[General Zod]

Do any of those games have the level of interactivity with objects in the environment as Fallout: New Vegas?

One of the biggest complaints about the first Mass Effect was the load times, so what was one of the things they did to fix it for the sequel? They simplified the menus drastically. The fact that they didn't for NV when this issue was already known is simple incompetence.

[Stark]

Not even close - and that's actually a good point. I mean, it's still a symptom of shitty engine-ness. but the fact that the physics engine itself must be able to interact with a bajillion different assets in any given zone lends creedence to your (unstated) argument.

The engine has also never handled this properly; look at Oblivion and the hovering goblets and totally borked things that happen whenever anything is on anything else or is thrown. Its actually stunning how poor it is, really, but I guess that was back in the day before middleware did object physics easily.

[Xon]

Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas all use the Havok physics engine, just different iterations of it. Saddly, earlier versions of Havok sucked for object physics.