It's the Little Things

Hi again,

This is probably considered a rant, but it might interest some :P

I was playing Skyrim today after a few hours of programming and remembered something that had gone through my mind a lot. Since I have become proficient in computer game programming I've started to notice these tiny little bits and pieces in games where so little thought had gone into them. Its pretty amazing how destructive these small problems can be for immersion and yet need only a few lines of code or less to fix, small issues that can completely pull you out of the immersive feel. I get this itch to open up the game's source code and fix the problem myself, only to remember that the game isn't open source and already compiled into assembly :(

Not surprisingly I feel this way about the computer's operating system too.

I'm very familiar with Bethesda's games having a common set of random crashes and bugs so I'm actually quite comfortable with it; funnelly enough it would probably worry me if the game become stable which seems to be the case after a recent patch and yet the game still has these issues that I would have thought had been fixed by now. Oblivion had the same problem where if you minimize the game it wouldn't re-synchronize the context for the engine when you tried to open the game again, causing it to appear frozen which wasn't the case; I discovered that windows seems a bit more proficient at it for when you open the task manager and force the program to focus, it would re-sync and stabilize again. This solution also fixes a new bug; when the game suddenly begins to choke and lag terribly after a load screen even though it was running smoothly in the last area: just minimize, focus and all is good but sadly there's like a 1 in 5 chance this will crash the game. This bug indicates that there's a missing event in the game's event management not calling the re-focus function.

The save system does make up for that though as it seems really decent when and where it decides to auto save but I do have an OCD for saving once every minute or less. I love the quick save systems that many games have begun to support now days.

/endrant

Many of the things that make games great is the amount of depth that comes from those little subtle details you notice from time to time. Even after hours and hours of game play you still notice the attention to detail and makes you appreciate the game so much more, Skyrim is no stranger to this and overall I love the game and here's hoping the game get better and better once the DLC comes out :)

Ashton.