Fallout 3 time-lapse video special

By Richard Leadbetter Published 16 August, 2009

DF mucks around in the Wasteland.

Part of the remit I set out for the Digital Foundry channel would be to showcase games, performance and technology in a way that isn't covered anywhere else. Sometimes it's controversial, sometimes it's intriguing and sometimes it's just... cool.

File this blog entry under the latter category. I'm a sucker for open-world games and time-lapse photography and together they combine to create unique videos that put a new perspective on the engines that power our most advanced games.

For this effort, I decided that I'd attempt to show the blasted, barren Fallout 3 landscape in as much detail as possible - far beyond what either the Xbox 360 or PS3 are capable of. That meant running the PC version at 1080p, with every single setting at the max and backed with a megaton of processing power: in short, in full bullshot mode. The game has many tweakables dedicated to the LOD settings and those, along with the anti-aliasing and shadow detail, are where the lion's share of the CPU and GPU cycles went.

I expected the game to be reduced to a slideshow, even with the in-house Digital Foundry overclocked i7/GTX295 combo. However, the idea was that since so many frames are lost in the capturing process, it wouldn't make any difference to the final video. However, surprisingly, the game remained fairly playable and the game's command mode console "set timescale to" feature and god mode were put to good use.

The original captures ran at a 5,000x time-scale, and these are run at double speed in the final video, right up until the final boom.

The videos here are obviously downscaled from the full HD original, so for those with a spare 250MB of bandwidth you can get a supremely high quality 1080p h264 version that'll play on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 here with almost all of the quality of the original captures.

Thanks to the Fallout 3 Nexus whose archive of save positions was very useful for putting this video together, in particular the "Twopenny Tower Megaton Boom" save by Ryulien, used to add a mushroom cloud-shaped conclusion to the montage.

Other games in the Digital Foundry timelapse collection, both available in high definition: Crackdown and Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island. Coming Soon: Crysis.

Picture of Richard.

About Richard Leadbetter

Rich has been a games journalist since the days of 16-bit and specialises in technical analysis. Commonly known around Eurogamer as the Blacksmith of the Future.

Read more articles from Richard by visiting the Richard Leadbetter archive page.

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Comments (16) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • flanker22 #1 3 years ago

    F3 uses the same day and night assets right? i hear some games have separate assets like pgr4 they have a set of textures for day, dusk, and night

  • ACCH #2 3 years ago

    I'd kill for a video like this of Stalker

  • Bloodhunter #3 3 years ago

    stalker would be interesting i agree ACCH

    other than seeing how well it runs and how good it looks, were there any other purposes to this?

    It would be interesting to post a comparison video of this and some of the early gameplay trailers/videos that were released

    also the mp4 video you posted on megaupload, is that meant for playing on 360/PS3 only? or is it too high res for my laptop to handle, it seems to lag out realplayer, vlc, quicktime whenever i try to play it, only vlc can play it and even then its badly synced
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/09 @ 12:15

  • Sharzam #4 3 years ago

    Got to hand it to them, fallout 3 engine handles well under so many circumstances. There are alot of pretty looking pc games but alot of them either need a beast of a machine to run well or just dont scale well (then there are the bad looking games that run poor on beasts ofc)

    Fallout 3 on the other hand looks pretty on loads pcs and i run at 1920X1080 with high settings yet my machine is no where near the one used in the video.

  • Demiath #5 3 years ago

    Fallout 3 can be beautiful, but much like Oblivion, it's far too sterile for its own good. I know the former is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic game and all, but would it kill Bethesda to include some actual, you know, life into their game worlds? I would gladly sacrifice texture quality and other aspects of visual "fidelity" (after "immersion" that's got to be the most non-sensical industry buzz word ever) just to get some sense of a living, breathing world and not just a glorified tech demo.
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/09 @ 13:16

  • Adi-C #6 3 years ago

    Great movie, though it's a pity that fallout's engine doesn't support shadows for terrain, trees and such.

    And for those of you wanting to watch time lapse of stalker- well... just type "stalker time lapse" on youtbe:)
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/09 @ 14:01

  • Sharzam #7 3 years ago

    @Demiath

    Good point althourgh a technically sound engiene, art direction can lack at times. Thats why games like WoW are liked for there style not because amount polygons but for there amount imagination and art direction.

  • UberFrog #8 3 years ago

    @Sharzam + Demiath: Yea agree, Fallout3 is a fantastic great game and I really really enjoy it but there's a reason why a jewel like Baldurs Gate 2 is so much better: it has better gameplay overall.

  • AphoticCosmos #9 3 years ago

    The Oblivion/Fallout engine is pretty dang good, IMHO. It does a better job at most at building a world and not just a tech demo.

    The only one off-hand that I think trumps it is CryEngine 2.

  • Skurmedel #10 3 years ago

    I think the Fallout 3 world had plenty of life and I didn't feel it was sterile either. Some areas were perhaps somewhat empty or "same everywhere", but overall I felt it very living. I think it would take them ages to make every room meaningful, and to be honest, there are truck loads of stuff laying about that isn't really relevant to the main storyline.

    A very pretty game and a very well realized "universe". No Baldur's Gate, but comes close.
    Edited by 1 at 16/08/09 @ 23:05

  • smelly #11 3 years ago

    I liked fallout 3 .. best game i've played all year. But the art direction sucked balls. Endless subways looking so similar that it's too easy to get lost? Blurgh.

    Games can look great without tech IF the art direction is great (look at mario galaxy - crap hardware, stunning looking game).

    Alternatively you can have GREAT tech (like in fallout 3) and with bad art direction the visuals suffer.

    But visuals arent what makes games FUN anyhow. When I was playing fallout 3 - at no point did i really even notice the graphics.. I was too busy enjoying the game (well apart from the awful carbon copy subway tunnels)

  • Simplex #12 3 years ago

    http://ww w.eurogamer.net/tv_video.php?pl... - 404

  • gorf #13 3 years ago

    @smelly
    partly agree with what you are saying. Mario Glaxy was gorgeous with its sparkly landscapes and varied worlds. On THE Fallout side tho' I thought the art direction was very original and effective in evoking a post apocalitic landscape circa 1950. The main problem was the assets were reused too many times throughout the game. This is understandable given the huge scale of the game. creating unique scenery for every location would have been prohibitevely expensive and time consuming to achieve. Agree with the sewer levels tho' these were a trudge. Im just waiting for the plethora of fallout wanabees that will follow using a 50s inspired wasteland.....ID SOFTWARES Rage comes to mind?

  • Kaminari #14 3 years ago

    Your "bullshot" mode is not different from Oblivion. I could crank it up even on my Celeron D330 + Radeon 9550. The only reason why you can't tweak the PS360 versions to the max while optimizing the parameters in the process is because there's no console mode at your disposal. And I bet your bank account that the Cell of my PS3 literally trumps the shit out of my old P4.

  • SL33PY #15 3 years ago

    I'd kill for a pc that runs so smooth as yours... priorities (wife) hold me back to get one :D

  • OAKside24 #16 3 years ago

    Wow. What a video! I'm sure quite a bit of planning, working, editing, etc. went into this awesome video, so... Thank You guys and gals. (You even uploaded the full HD video to the awesome Megaupload!)

    @smelly: Stay out of the tunnels for a bit? It's just reality that there's lots of subway tunnels near the area Fallout 3 replicates. There's a whole world of awesome up top, though, as this video showcases. Amazing graphics engine, fine art direction.