It is... By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it's literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.

In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. ... This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an "engine change" and can't judge whether that will yield the results they want.

Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.

You've seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right...? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don't plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) -- but hey "Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!" /s.

I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn't have "Global illumination", maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.

This is Half-Life 2 with global illumination: https://youtu.be/WWYpKRETv8k?si=9eTDmx10m3l9nwdR

Here's an old forum from 2005 talking about how "real global illumination isn't yet possible" https://gamedev.net/forums/topic/348797-half-life-2-global-illumination/3282572/

[–] MeanEYE 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Points out it does change.

In case you haven't figured it out, it's a joke that their engine doesn't change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don't see much progress in quality.

By a lot, ask any web developer.

I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.

You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right

Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there's an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.

And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard's mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don't believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn't matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.

Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.

In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn't and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump.

Really? So Chakra was just a fever dream I had? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-edge-gets-better-against-chrome-and-other-browsers-javascript-benchmarks)

The initial release of EdgeHTML on Windows 10 included more than 4000 interoperability fixes. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML#cite_note-13)

Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.

"Minor bump" that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.

I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just "minor bumps."

I didn't even buy the game, it didn't seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an "engine" is and the fact that they're almost always being iterated on in different ways.

Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn't be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc