The Creation Engine is an engine created by Bethesda Game Studios. After using Gamebryo to create ', ', and Fallout 3, Bethesda decided that Gamebryo's capabilities were becoming too outdated and began work on Creation Engine for their next game, ', by forking the codebase used for Fallout 3. Following the completion of Skyrim, Bethesda set out to enhance the graphical core of the Creation engine by first adding a physically baseddeferred renderer to allow for more dynamic lighting and to paint materials object surfaces with realistic materials. Bethesda worked with technology companyNvidia to implement volumetric lighting through a technique that makes use of hardware tesselation. Additionally the updated version of the Creation Engine powering Bethesda's Fallout 4 offers more advanced character generation. Shortly before the release of Fallout 4, while Bethesda Game Studios began development of Starfield and downloadable content for Fallout 4, what is currently Bethesda Game Studios Austin was tasked with modifying the Creation Engine to support multiplayer content in preparation for the development of Fallout 76. In conjunction with id Software, BattleCry attempted to integrate id's Quakenetcode into Fallout 4s engine. This was considered a challenge by experts in the online game industry. A primary issue facing the developers was that components of the core engine such as quests or world loading were designed centering on a single player, a paradigm that would need to fundamentally change to allow multiple players spanning multiple worlds. In addition to the network changes to the engine used in Fallout 4, the Fallout 76'' implementation of the engine was described at the game's E3 reveal as having "all new rendering, lighting, and landscape technology". Bethesda Game Studios claims the improvements also allow for a 16× increase in detail and the ability to view unique weather systems occurring at a distance.
Features
Havok Behavior is a flexible animation tool that allows the developers to blend animations together in a few clicks. This means that animations such as walking and running can be blended together seamlessly to make the animations look much more realistic. This important addition enabled Bethesda to improve character animations in their games.
An upgraded version of Radiant AI allows non-player characters to dynamically react and interact with the world around them. The player can observe an NPC eat breakfast, go to work, go to the pub, and then go to sleep. The improved AI allows NPCs to react to the player's actions and they can become friendly or hostile to the player because of their actions.
Radiant Story allows for NPCs to dynamically create new quests for the player in unexplored places.
In previous games, Bethesda licensed SpeedTree for trees and foliage, but when making Skyrim with Creation Engine, the Bethesda team made their own foliage rendering system. The new system is capable of rendering larger amounts of foliage at one time and allows for more freedom with animations.
Creation Kit
The Creation Kit is a modding tool for Creation Engine games. The Creation Kit takes advantage of the Creation Engine's modular nature. It was created by Bethesda Game Studios for the modding community of The Elder Scrolls series. The tool can be used to create worlds, races, NPCs, weapons, update textures, and fix bugs. Mods created using this tool are hosted on the Steam Workshop, Nexus Mods, Bethesda.net and various other sites. A Fallout 4–compatible Creation Kit was released in April 2016.
