This counts as loading. When the game loads these extra cells, there needs to be loading. Ever used the scrolls of Icarian flight in Morrowind? I load a lot when that happens. I load while running around in both Morrowind and Oblivion's wilderness. I don't know where you got that from.

He's talking about having the game do "silent" loads, rather than having the screen change with a loading bar. Also, his method would have no Interior/Exterior I believe too.

At least thats what I think he was saying.

He was explaining how you could walk around Oblivion with no load screens. I assume it's something to do with that method.

I'm confused. :bonk:

Currently, Oblivion loads a 5x5 block of cells while outdoors: 2 rows in each direction (N, W, E, S) of your location. It does this silently, with no load screen, no progress bar, and (ideally) no interruption of the game at all. This includes load doors. My idea is to just extend on that capability, in that when it finds a load door, it loads the interior when it gets within the 3x3 grid around you: 1 cell in each direction. It already knows the door is there; it picked it up 2 cells away. So as it's loading the three exterior cells, it throws in a 4th cell that's an interior (and potentially a 5th, 6th, whatever, however many interiors came into range). In a city this could potentially degrade performance, so that's why it's important to design the game engine with that in mind, rather than trying to tack it on later in development. If the PC running the game is capable of a 15x15 grid (7 cells in all directions) then it should be able to handle a lot of interior cells in a 3x3 grid, such as you'd find in a city.

Simple enough with a decent PC and Oblivion Stutter Remover, even with a ton of graphic overhaul mods.


Combined with Umbra to make it even easier on the engine, it could be possible I imagine. But then, I don't develop games for a living so I have no idea about the intricacies. If anyone can pull it off though, it's Bethesda. The consoles leave me wondering if we'll have to wait until TES:VI to see this happen though...

You don't even need Umbra. Just mark doors, windows and other see-through surfaces as "portals" (as in the Valve game of the same name ...) into the interior cell. The portal isn't visible from the outside (this needs to include near-perfect mirrors, but for performance's sake not necessarily "disturbed mirrors" like water surfaces), nothing in the interior cell needs to be loaded. The portal isn't visible from the inside, the outside doesn't need to be rendered at all. Entities which have their physical boundaries crossing the portal need a few special cases, but that's all. Works for world boundaries (Tamriel to Oblivion, for example) as well, and stuff like rain and snow doesn't cross either.

This even allows for the interiors to be bigger than the exteriors (as is the case with Oblivion's castles, which have an interior layout not having anything at all to do with the exterior layout ...).

:thumbsup:
You can see the portal tech after 1:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdeoMeSiL-A

It is an engine rewrite for Morrowind.

A console, like PS3 only has 256 MB RAM. They achieve it with streaming. You can program a good stream engine in PC too.

Just Cause 2
Test Drive Unlimited
FSX

Very massive games and they are detailed too. I think it is a design decision, they wanted separate engines for indoor and outdoor, as one user stated "they don't have http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1106159-shelter-from-magnus-blaze/page__view__findpost__p__16194319".

Loading screens in Oblivion were actually interesting. Only problem was that my computer loaded too quick and i didn't have the time to read them. It is possible to not have any loading screens. But saving and loading will take ages like in G3.

It is quite possible.

Dungeon Siege 1 had seamless land. Titan Quest is like that, too (though there are loading screens if you teleport).

Gothic 1 and 2 (maybe 3?) had only one or two loading screens for specific areas (a large underground mine, and one large underground realm). Otherwise, EVERYTHING was load-screen free. We're talking about hundreds of creatures and NPCs (with schedules) and props and lighting and other stuff. And there's no fps hit. Even the initial loading time for your save game is about as long as it takes to load your save game in Morrowind.

I don't know how Piranha Bytes did it, but Gothic 1 and 2 have (with a few exceptions) no loading screens at all. That's the advantage of making your own game engine. Anything Gamebryo can do, the Gothic Engine does better. NPC schedules and positions, keeping track of items on the ground and in containers, etc. Weather effects, oceans with water that actually moves up and down like waves. NPC and creature AI and faction interactions.

Anyway, all that aside, it is certainly possible to make a game that requires but a few loading screens - while leaving the wilderness, caves, interiors, and cities as load-screen free areas.

Can Gamebryo do it? I don't know. It doesn't seem like it is built to do that sort of thing.

The opposite to X360 loading screens, there are moments (mostly when you exit from a city to the world) that theyre so slow you could read the text two or three times...or four. Thank god they made them faster in Fallout 3.

I wouldn't exactly say I was posing an argument. I don't for a moment expect Beth to implement this in the next game, I was just wondering if it was possible.

The best thing about the no-loading-screens was, in my opinion, the windows. Ok, forget the seamless transitions into an interior - but once inside, having had a loading screen to load the cell, what would everyone think of an area outside the windows identical to the area in the exterior cells outside those windows? These "imitation" cells would have with the same weather and appearance as their exterior counterparts, but would be inaccessible, giving the illusion of looking out into the outside world while not requiring the interior and exterior cells to be seamlessly linked.

It All depends on the engine and how the game runs example (Mass effects 1 there is not every much loading mass effects 2 there is one for every where you go just like red dead

The game already lagged BADLY on xbox360 if you do that you will kill your console and even computers will have a hard time runing it

ITT: Everyone forgets about the CryEngine 2. (or 3)

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/9/2010/05/ubwcz.jpg

I played
Just Cause 2
Test Drive Unlimited.

No loading screens. They are also very detailed games with lots of vehicles, modern buildings and such. It is possible with good programming.

PS. Just Cause 2's map is like Morrowind's.

No its not possible because TES if filled with objects. unlike in Just cause and stuff like that, in just cause enemies and cars are generated around you (you dont see them appear but they appear like some distance from you) in TES things are where they are and they stay there. if you drop a sword you can go at the end of the world and come back and it will be there in those games if you leave a car and walk 40 meters away the car disapear

i don't actually mind the loading screen i like the concept art and through my first play through when the loading screen gave tips it helped a lot

That's just not true, you think that the sword is lying there all the time? Of course it's not! If you enter a house in Oblivion, does every item in the exterior world gets deleted because it isn't visible anymore? Do you think that when you walk around just outside Leyawiin all the bandits near Bruma and all the items you dropped there are are being visible, or else they get deleted? They are loaded when you come near that area, so the engine only has to remember that it is there in case you come close to it. The same can be done with cities, if you are not near it it won't be loaded so it wouldn't slow it down. Right now it also has to remember the NPC's and the items that are in that city, even if you're in another city.

You can drop thousands of swords all around the wilderness in Oblivion and have many NPC's (bandits, villagers), creatures and a huge amount of trees in the wilderniss of Oblivion (as in, everywhere out door out side a city) and yet you can walk around in it without loading screens or huge lag (unless all these creatures, NPC's and items are all at the same place) so why would including towns in this world become to much?

Maybe in Oblivion it would become to much, but in that case Bethesda just has to start using Umbra and we won't have problem with it. Since Umbra will make sure that only the things that are visible to you (everything on your screen which isn't blocked away from your view by another object, and some more so you can turn your head without it having to load while you watch) you could have a loadingscreen free world with probably a better framerate than with Oblivion (in theory of course, sicne TES V will probably have better graphics, better AI and other stuff that will slow it down, which only makes this way of increasing framerate an even better choice!)

^^ This, also, remember Crysis as well. The villages (though not as complex as the cities in oblivion, though still fairly detailed) were able to be rendered excellently and even if you put 100 objects in a building (and I can vouch for this, having spent many hours in the Editor for the game) it will still not cause major performance issues, up close or far away. The only real issue with the CryEngine 2 is whether or not you would be able to generate a loading free world the size of Oblivion without a large performance impact. Personally, from my expeirience with the engine, as well as looking at how the new CryEngine 3 is supposed to run, I would say that this would largely not be a big issue (and honestly, a loading screen every now and again, especially between two different regions, isn't that big of a deal) due both to the amazing capability of the engine, as well as the fact that the uses of Umbra are already largely present more or less in the Cryengine anyway so a large detailed world would not be hard to create nor run on your average computer. (based on performance compared to an Xbox 360, anyway)

Even if this was true (it isn't, there are many factors on which the performance depends on), Bethesda could just do a stripped-down version for the consoles. The PC users can upgrade their hardware after all (or simply play the stripped-down version as well).

That aspect you are describing was available in Morrowind, a 2002 game. So that's not a problem at all.

Just Cause 2 is 20+ times bigger. It is an action game with bullet physics, vehicle simulations including boats, planes, cars, advanced physics, volumetric clouds and AI. Some of things which need resources but not exist in previous TES games(not saying entirely but not saying it shouldn't be either). So a little resource management programming skills can give us everything needed.

Bethesda doesn't have to release a game full of bugs, stutters and bad animations you know. Those things can be solved with programming. Have some faith in them.

+1

Gothic 3 may have had its bugs but with the CP1.74 patch with Alt.Balancing and Alt.AI on, it is a great game.
You actuallly have the liberty of choice unlike in any TES game and a huge hand crafted and immersive world with lots of content without any loading screens.

Great game, you guys should try it while waiting for the next TES.

I can deal with loading screens for most buildings, but going in or out of a city should NOT involve a load door, or require the removal of Levitation from the game.

lol

You realize game engines are programmed by people, right? Game engines aren't magical entities bestowed upon the human race by the universe, with constant and unchanging sets of rules, features and limitations. An even cursory understanding of programming would preclude any conclusions that such a thing is "not possible". Finally, both games employ "objects" - my brain hurts trying to comprehend what you were possibly trying to say about Just Cause and how the contrasts with TES imply that a single world devoid of segmented cells/regions is unattainable.

The difference is that MW saves any changes to the Cell when you get more than a certain distance away, and reloads first the original Cell and then those saved changes as you approach. In most games, the areas that get beyond a certain range are regenerated or reloaded fresh, so any previous info gets lost. Oblivion only loads changes that are less than 3 game days old, so everything respawns in 3 days unless you remain in or adjacent to the Cell where they're located. MW's saved games can get pretty big over time, where OB keeps the file size down by constant "pruning" of older data. The down side is that the TES IV world is ultimately unaffected by your presence, aside from a few specific allowed exceptions, whereas you change many things permanently as you go in MW, with items lying in the street where you dropped them 6 months ago. Could we have some sort of compromise, please?