The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a single player role playing game released in 2006 for PC, XBox 360 and later PS3, and was developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published Bethesa Softworks. The game, also named ‘Oblivion’ in short, is the fourth part of the video game series ‘The Elder Scrolls’.
Game Technology
As most computer games, Oblivion was written in C++ and makes heavy use of third party developed video game middleware. It uses Gamebryo as 3D Engine, which also has been used for the predecessor of Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Fallout 3, which has also been developed by Bethesa. To be able to render realistic outdoor worlds, Oblivion also utilizes SpeedTree, a middleware solution by Interactive Data Visualization. It uses Havok Physics as Physics Engine which provides ragdoll physics and realistic interaction with rigid bodies in the game world. The Oblivion game engine is further known for the following features:
- Huge terrain renderer with animated vegatation system including grass
- Loading screens are only displayed when switching from outdoor to indoor locations
- Facial animation system with lip sync speech playback
- HDR effects, Oblivion was one of the first PC games to make extensive use of them
Oblivion uses Shadow Maps? which also support self shadowing, and are faded after a set distance. The game does normal and parallax mapping and avoids texture warping by calculating the eye vector per-pixel instead of per-vertex. To reduce the amount of polygons to be drawn, Oblivion uses LOD? models. The articicial intelligence for the non-player characters in the game is calculated based on the distance from the player: Characters far away from the player won’t do all the complex behavior which near characters will do.