Oblivion Physics suck...

[fanklok]

So so many hours spent tastefully arranging my Skingrad manor. I got lucky with most of it staying in place but a few misteps while training my acrobatics in the bedroom resulting in me having to spend 4 hours trying to get my Akaviri katanas back in place in their display cases.

 

[crudus]

I never had a problem with it in Morrowind. I never could play Oblivion for more than 20 minutes, but I can't imagine them being worse. Oblivion is also like a 6 year old game isn't it? *To wikipedia!* Ok, five. I think we can cut an old game some slack. It isn't like people are yelling at Wolfenstein for terrible graphics and sound.

Granted it was done with the construction set, but still.

As long as it used Oblivion's physics engine to do it, it doesn't matter how the books got there.

 

[redisforever]

As much fun as it is to laugh at Oblivion's physics, you can't ***** at Bethesda for it. It's Havok, plain and simple. Havok was NEVER that good, which is why it always baffled me so many developers used it. It's also why so many people were shocked by HL2 because the Source engine's physics are grossly superior, if only because it actually factors INERTIA. Seriously, pick up a body in Oblivion and put it on a hill, it will roll down any degree slope, no matter how shallow, and at a constant rate. Now do the same in HL2. Either it won't roll because it's not steep enough, or it will roll and actually GAIN MOMENTUM. (Which has made for some funny abuse)

But this is just one of the million items that "Creation" engine needs to resolve. Assuming it's not a renamed Gamebryo. And if Creation is a renamed Gamebryo, we as gamers need to unite and execute the people at Bethesda.

[edit] Forgot to mention. You want to ***** about anything in Oblivion, ***** about optimization. The fact I have a $2000 top of the line PC that runs Dirt 2 at max settings and looks phenomenal, but Oblivion still brings it to it's knees at top settings is WRONG.

Ummm...correct me if I'm wrong, but the Source engine uses Havok. I think it's heavily modified though.

 

[Zer_]

As much fun as it is to laugh at Oblivion's physics, you can't ***** at Bethesda for it. It's Havok, plain and simple. Havok was NEVER that good, which is why it always baffled me so many developers used it. It's also why so many people were shocked by HL2 because the Source engine's physics are grossly superior, if only because it actually factors INERTIA. Seriously, pick up a body in Oblivion and put it on a hill, it will roll down any degree slope, no matter how shallow, and at a constant rate. Now do the same in HL2. Either it won't roll because it's not steep enough, or it will roll and actually GAIN MOMENTUM. (Which has made for some funny abuse)

But this is just one of the million items that "Creation" engine needs to resolve. Assuming it's not a renamed Gamebryo. And if Creation is a renamed Gamebryo, we as gamers need to unite and execute the people at Bethesda.

[edit] Forgot to mention. You want to ***** about anything in Oblivion, ***** about optimization. The fact I have a $2000 top of the line PC that runs Dirt 2 at max settings and looks phenomenal, but Oblivion still brings it to it's knees at top settings is WRONG.

Ummm...correct me if I'm wrong, but the Source engine uses Havok. I think it's heavily modified though.

Yes, Source uses a heavily modified HAVOK physics engine.

The reason you're having trouble with these items is because their collision boxes aren't all that detailed. Basically, you effectively have a larger rectangle surrounding a dagger. Putting something like that in a confined space is difficult to handle on older physics engines.

With updated physics engines (including newer versions of Havok), you get more detailed physics coming from more detailed collision boxes. What Skyrim will actually use, who knows?

Oblivion indeed used Gamebryo, uuugh. Terrible engine.

 

[icame]

You realise how old this game is? There wasn't a whole lot of games out at the time that had full on physics engines, in a way, it was the start of a trend.

It was hardly game braking anyway, I tended to just enjoy the gameplay.

Half life 2 had a fantastic physics engine 2 years earlier.

 

[PlasmaFrog]

Firstly, the engine that Oblivion ran on was complete crap. Secondly, the new engine that they've built for Skyrim is much more improved and up to date.

But why should the physics of a game be it's selling point? This isn't exactly Portal where it is necessary.

 

[Rad Party God]

C'mon, it's a 5 year old game(!), even for it's time it had a horrible physics engine, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 and even Halo 2 had much better physics than Oblivion, but I don't mind them, in fact, I always found them quite funny, instead of game breaking. Yes, it has its quirks and it's (very) buggy, but it's not that of a big deal.

Also, how can you not fall in love with this?

 

[Trolldor]

While I know a physics engine is hard to code and a game like Oblivion is very massive I still think they should have done a little something to address the horrid physics engine in the game.

For example, today I was placeing an hour glass, three quills, three ink wells, six different weights and a scale on one of those large rich people desks. I come to the cell after a while and I see the quills and inkwells disapered (sunk into desk) with the weights, scales, and hourglass only half submerged. When I go to pull them out, everything on my master-placed desk goes flying across the room. Now I am contemplating if I still want to play the game for the 80 billiont playthrough.

It may sound silly but after going thru the game so many times, you start to notice every little unimersive thing in the game from the neckseams to the horrible physics. Hell, I would have rather instead of making Chydenhall (a rather useless town) gettting rid of all those immersive breaking bugs.

Its like Yahtzee says Immersion can make or break a game". Here is to a better Skyrim.
P.S.: If you knnow of any mods that make placeing easier and more consistant plz leave it in the comments.

It's not just the physics, the gameplay the quest journal, the characters, the supposed plot, the enemy level scaling. I honestly could go on. there really aren't enough bad things I can say about Oblivion.
Even people who rave about the game say it's only good when you mod it.
No-one likes vanilla.
-Tabs<3-

Except for all those people who played it for hours on end, like myself, on consoles.
Must have racked up hundreds on vanilla because there was so much to do.

 

[Retronana]

Haha, I have vivid memories of tables humping the floor from oblivion

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

For example, today I was placeing an hour glass, three quills, three ink wells, six different weights and a scale on one of those large rich people desks. I come to the cell after a while and I see the quills and inkwells disapered (sunk into desk) with the weights, scales, and hourglass only half submerged. When I go to pull them out, everything on my master-placed desk goes flying across the room. Now I am contemplating if I still want to play the game for the 80 billiont playthrough.

Explanation: The physics engine is OK. It does not properly take into account gravitational acceleration, but that is the only problem I have with it. This exact thing happens to me (stuff gets stuck in other stuff), but it is not a physics engine issue, it is an enviromental state and engine optimization issue (that sounds wrong, so let me explain...). When you place an ojbect on the desk, its collision mesh falls until it hits the desk collision mesh and then the object stops. All this is happening in real time and the object has zillions of x, y, z coordinates to exist in. Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit of memory to record the positions of every collision mesh in that much detail, so when you leave the room, the game approximates where everything is by rounding the collision mesh coordinates. When you enter the room, it load up this smaller amount of data and quickly positions everything. It also disables the physics for those objects (because if you walk past without interacting, why bother processing the physics if you are not going to use them?), which is why they sometimes end up inside of things. When you pick an object up, it reactivates the physics for nearby objects, but they are inside of another collision mesh, so the game ejects them with surprising speed.

So you are asking them to be running phsyics for everything all the time and have super detailed (and super large) savegame enviromental states. Computers have gotten better over the years, so this might be possible in the future. Right now, they can only optimize the physics better and tweak it to run properly. Which you (or other modders) can do yourself if you feel like messing with the game engine. Or you can deal with it because it is an old game, well worth playing, even if the physics are not ultra-realistic. Cough it up to "Oblivion is coming, so the Higgs Boson is misbehaving."

Ohhh, so that's why sometimes when I walk in a room, all the items will simultaneously drop as if all the food, kitchenware, and books were having a party while I was out and didn't want me to know.

lol this is absolutely true, i just got used to it and labeled it in my head as "oblivion newtons laws" and went about enjoying the game.

OT: honestly..i see your point, entirely. but that still didn't stop me from enjoying the hell out of the massive single player game that it was at its time, and now. i'm actually going to roll another character soon hopefully before summer hits.

 

[Vault101]

Its not that bad and I harly noticed it

what killed the game for me were the zomibe NPC's and over all dullness at least in comparison with fallout 3

 

[Jennacide]

As much fun as it is to laugh at Oblivion's physics, you can't ***** at Bethesda for it. It's Havok, plain and simple. Havok was NEVER that good, which is why it always baffled me so many developers used it. It's also why so many people were shocked by HL2 because the Source engine's physics are grossly superior, if only because it actually factors INERTIA. Seriously, pick up a body in Oblivion and put it on a hill, it will roll down any degree slope, no matter how shallow, and at a constant rate. Now do the same in HL2. Either it won't roll because it's not steep enough, or it will roll and actually GAIN MOMENTUM. (Which has made for some funny abuse)

But this is just one of the million items that "Creation" engine needs to resolve. Assuming it's not a renamed Gamebryo. And if Creation is a renamed Gamebryo, we as gamers need to unite and execute the people at Bethesda.

[edit] Forgot to mention. You want to ***** about anything in Oblivion, ***** about optimization. The fact I have a $2000 top of the line PC that runs Dirt 2 at max settings and looks phenomenal, but Oblivion still brings it to it's knees at top settings is WRONG.

Ummm...correct me if I'm wrong, but the Source engine uses Havok. I think it's heavily modified though.

You aren't wrong, and I should of addressed that, my mistake. When HL2 started, Valve picked up Havok to use and started with it. Unhappy with all the issues it had, the rewrote the crap out of it. But since it started with Havok, they are still legally required to give it credit. In actuality though, at this point in time the only part that remains close to the original coding is the ragdoll physics section, which recieved very little change.

 

[Irriduccibilli]

Ah yes. I remember back in the day when I was playing Oblivion on consoles, it was fun, but so un-imersive. Some time later I bought Oblivion on Steam when it was on sale and then I experienced the magic of mods. Mods make Oblivion at least 10 times better. I too had the same problem as you experienced, and I found a mod on tesnexus.com that fixed my problem. I cant remember the name of the mod, but I can guide you to this site
http://tesnexus.com/
If you cant find it there it doesnt exist. If you have any problems with installing mods, feel free to send a message sometime, I may be able to help with those tricky ones