They don’t work well anymore though, that’s the whole point. Bethesda’s codebase is past “mature”, it’s just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it’s super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that’s completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they’d finally switch to something that made sense but no.
i mean, a 23 year old codebase is bound to have some tech debt.
They rebuild the engine to be 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) for Fallout 4, and that version is what Skyrim Special Edition is running on
that’s not a complete rewrite. hell, depending on how it was architected it may just be a recompile
Very probably yes, but it will also have an extensive feature set and stable, mature functions that work well after 20+ years of development.
A mature codebase is often a double edged sword I agree. But it’s not always a good idea to just throw away all that progress.
They don’t work well anymore though, that’s the whole point. Bethesda’s codebase is past “mature”, it’s just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.
in bethesdas case though?
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it’s super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that’s completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they’d finally switch to something that made sense but no.