[CYCO JO-NATE]

Forgot to mention, but for those who were waiting on a patch for Azura's Coffee Shop, it's up on the Nexus page now.

[Amy Cooper]

As a result of this: http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1047735

I am giving serious thought to removing the city walls around the following cities in a future release:

Anvil, Bravil, Bruma, Chorrol, Cheydinhal, and the vanilla layout for Leyawiin. Skingrad, Leyawiin Reborn, and New Sheoth would retain their walls. Though some thought has been given on my part about removing the walls on the western part of Leyawiin Reborn.

I've made this a poll. When/if you vote, keep this in mind. This will be either/or. Either the walls get pulled out, or they don't. I'm not going to add to the modular complexity issues and patch compatibility issues by throwing 6 more versions of things into the mix.

I'd also appreciate any thoughts in general on the subject that people might have, and any insights from those familiar with lore as to whether or not removing the walls would present any problems with that.

[Guinevere Wood]

I've votes yoes to the walls going, with some reservations.

Reservations first. I know that the current open cities has little or no FPS impact compared to vanilla, but I thought this was in part due to the walls screening much of the outside world. Is this correct? If so, is there a danger that removal of the walls may damage FPS?

Second reservation. I like my NPCs, there's few enough people in the cities as it is, I don't want them dying because of a random monster incursion. If you go wall-less I hope you will think about protecting NPCs. Perhaps make more of them essential, or allow them to respawn (if this is possible), use more guards? maybe use low walls and fences to unobstrusively stop too much wild life wandering into the cities.

Now why I voted to tear down the walls-

-The pics on the other thread look awesome. I had no idea what a difference to the feel of the cities there would be without walls.

-Variety is good. I suspect that for many people, simply having the cities in the main worldspace is not all that important so they don't bother with the mod. Especially when they take on board that they will need to install a raft of compatability patches. Tearing down the walls would enhance Open Cities Unique Selling Point.

-Variety is good 2. Many of us have played this game for years and love it. It's nice to try and experiment with different things, refreshing the game.

I agree with your choices about the cities to retain their walls by the way. I think I would prefer Leyawiin Reborn to keep all of its walls. The area round the mouth on the Niben allways strikes me as a particuarly dangerous area, and I would expect the place to be heavily fortified. Also it seems a little unbalanced to have just one completely walled town (Skingrad)

P.S. Please please please don't let the OOO added Frost Titan get into Bruma. The place would end up a ghost town in seconds. It once killed half of Cloudruler Temple in one of my games.

[renee Duhamel]

No. The lack of an FPS impact is because there never was an FPS impact. Bethesda was mistaken in thinking there would be. The game engine is also still rendering everything behind the walls - you can see this by turning on twf in the console. All the stuff is back there, you just can't see it. So removing the walls actually should help since there'll be less to render.

If there were a wall resource that had more sane wall types and heights like there were in Morrowind I'd use those instead, but so far I haven't found any, and sinking the ones we have now usually looks pretty unnatural. With what exists in the CS, it's either massively large high walls, or pathetic little stone garden type walls. And those stone garden walls are so small it hurts to use them in numbers large enough to surround a city.

Being worried about the NPCs is a concern, but even with the walls in place they've been in danger the whole time. They just need to come through the gates first. The AI makes them psychic and they'll "chase" each other along the walls until the NPC opens the city gate and lets the monster in that way. That tends to attract the guards as well, and I've seen NPCs die anyway despite the help.

I don't use OOO, so I'm not aware of exactly what it places near enough to cities to be a bother. If they stuck a Frost Titan close enough to Bruma to kill the NPCs, I would have expected this to have happened by now anyway with folks using the mod alongside OOO. As I said before, nothing is stopping them from getting in now other than the inconvenience of a large wall.

[Jeffrey Lawson]

I've encountered the Frost titan several times outside Bruma - usually he is far enough away not to spawn in or right outside the city. It is when he fighting rangers, bandits, adventurers is he drawn close enough to the city to be a risk.

I'd vote yes if there were shorter walls, guard towers (or stations or houses), and more general protection. A lot can be said for using bottlenecks to control combat and the walls at the very least did that. No walls sounds like a massacre with FCOM and any kind of increased spawns.

Protection makes sense in a world of goblins, ogres, daedra, and errr balrogs and dragons. Of course I've found it easy to take down large critters of FCOM because they get stuck on the landscape more.

Never played morrowind enough to know if mod added monsters were a risk to the towns that were so open. How did that work?

[Floor Punch]

While we're on the topic of protecting the cities, is the idea of implementing archers patrolling the ramparts dead?

[Phoenix Draven]

Am I allowed to vote yes?

[Scotties Hottie]

Never played morrowind enough to know if mod added monsters were a risk to the towns that were so open. How did that work?

All of the major cities in Morrowind had walls, but in some cases the walls weren't a perfect solution. In all cases though the walls were never tall enough to obscure your view of the sides of buildings and things as you approached. I can't comment on how mod added monsters affected things because I never added any mods that put dangerous stuff that close to a city. I don't think it's wise to do that in Oblivion either.

Honestly, it sounds like that Frost Titan was placed too close to the city to be safe. In a vanilla game, NPCs that go outside the cities can easily be killed and won't have the benefit of protection from other guards. So I suppose in that sense OC Bruma is actually more useful since the guards inside will gang rush anything coming near. But, that titan is likely to kill most of them off anyway, and if the player isn't paying particular attention the entire town could still conceivably be wiped out.

While we're on the topic of protecting the cities, is the idea of implementing archers patrolling the ramparts dead?

No, it's not, I've just been working on other stuff and allowing the current body of OC work to stabilize itself and work out remaining bugs.

Am I allowed to vote yes?

Sure, I voted yes too

What this revamp idea really needs is a new type of city wall meshes. Not too high, but not so small as to be easily jumped over on the run. Frankly, something like the wall heights in Morrowind. If they fit the general shapes of the existing wall meshes, that would be even better.

[Kieren Thomson]

I'm not using Open Cities atm due to my already existing bottleneck with my CPU but if I were to use it I'd enjoy having walls. Mostly because that is just more immersive than a complete walk-in-city. Having said that, if the walls were to be significantly lower then that would be even better. Like in Balmora or Ald'ruhn. I'm not a moddeler so no idea how complicated it would be to make new walls, maybe as simple as a bit of resizing or maybe as difficult as creating them from scratch.

But if I had to chose between walls or no walls I think I'd go for walls. Yes it might make more sense for Open Cities to remove them but it also retains the feeling of being inside a city (which I find important). :shrug:

[edit]Oh wait, people already brought that up. That's what I get for copy-pasting a reply I ment to post last night. [/edit]

-kyoma

[~Amy~]

I voted no. IMHO it just looks weird without any walls. I agree with everyone above in saying that I'd vote for smaller walls, if they existed, but walls is better than no walls for me.

[Blaine]

I voted No for the same reason as wrinklyninja. Has anyone made any screenshots of what it looks like when the walls are lowered further into the ground?

[JLG]

Keep the walls!!!

But as many has said, lower walls would be nice. To me a city without walls feels like a village. I like the sense of walking into a borough.

Maybe the city gates should be open during day time and close at night or when an oblivion door is open nearby. bliviongate:

[Kortknee Bell]

For Bruma, you could always replace the massive stone walls with one of the smaller wood stockade walls available as resources. I believe MEO and mr_siika have both releases wooden stockade resources.

[Samantha hulme]

Yes, I've run across a nice Nordic palisades resource I was considering using for something else at first but it would make a good replacement for Bruma's own walls.

[Agnieszka Bak]

Just a speculative question-

What if instead of worrying about creating patches for both a walled OC and a non-walled OC everything was made as if it were compatible for a non-walled and then the walls were an optional add on?

[Tiffany Holmes]

I'd like to at least try a walless open cities, it looks pretty cool, but such a radical change could feel very right or very wrong. I don't know enough about the mod to know how close the current version is to a final, but it seems pretty bug-free, so what's the harm in leaving the current version up and creating a new one without walls?

[Barbequtie]

Just a speculative question-

What if instead of worrying about creating patches for both a walled OC and a non-walled OC everything was made as if it were compatible for a non-walled and then the walls were an optional add on?

That wouldn't be practical, or necessarily even possible. Wall-less cities would have different path grids than walled cities. That alone creates issues. Landscape patches based on wall-less cities would look funny with walled cities since the fake shadowing would be missing.

[Laura Cartwright]

Damn.......I just don't know. I'm a big fan of your work and would like to cast a vote if for no other reason than to show my interest in the question. However, I find myself torn. I agree with some of the points on both sides. The ideal from my perspective would be to try before I buy. Play the option before I vote. I can understand your reasons for not wanting to take on the added work of providing walled and walless versions of multiple cities. But what about this as a possibility. You pick one city, tear down the walls, and no longer support the OC walled version. Then step back and find out from actual experience what the pros and cons will be from your perspective. Big plus for players like myself, in that we will now be able to "vote" based on our experience in our specific individually modded game.

Probably not a good idea or Brumbek would have mentioned it by now.

[Naomi Lastname]

Damn.......I just don't know. I'm a big fan of your work and would like to cast a vote if for no other reason than to show my interest in the question. However, I find myself torn. I agree with some of the points on both sides. The ideal from my perspective would be to try before I buy. Play the option before I vote. I can understand your reasons for not wanting to take on the added work of providing walled and walless versions of multiple cities. But what about this as a possibility. You pick one city, tear down the walls, and no longer support the OC walled version. Then step back and find out from actual experience what the pros and cons will be from your perspective. Big plus for players like myself, in that we will now be able to "vote" based on our experience in our specific individually modded game.

Probably not a good idea or Brumbek would have mentioned it by now.

To try before you buy, go http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27663.

[Jimmie Allen]

A quick (and probably stupid) question on using this together with RAEVWD, which I already have installed: should I uninstall RAEVWD Cities.esp and the City Architecture resources? :unsure:

EDIT: OK, I assumed they should be left as they were. I've installed OC and everything seems to work out fine so far. In fact, I haven't noticed any performance hit whatsoever. And it's awesome - not just to have the gates open, but the general feel of being in the same world whether inside or outside cities.

[Breautiful]

... In fact, I haven't noticed any performance hit whatsoever. And it's awesome - not just to have the gates open, but the general feel being in the same world whether inside or outside cities.

Told ya

[Dewayne Quattlebaum]

Told ya

Yeah, now I can see Frostcrag from Cheydinhal. :clap:

[Baby K(:]

Version 3.3.2 is out

* Bravil: Fixed script calls on the animation for the Lucky Old Lady statue so it will properly open near the end of the Dark Brotherhood quests.
* Cheydinhal: AI for the two guards stationed outside the east city gate has been changed to keep them posted there rather than inside the city.
* Leyawiin Reborn: The LOD texture for the bridge columns was not included.
* New Sheoth: The southern city gate to Crucible was somehow thrown out of position and has been rotated back into place.
* New Sheoth: Hopefully restored the weather transition between Crucible and Bliss. I never even noticed it did that before.
* Outer Districts: The doors into and out of the districts have been removed. NPCs have been observed having difficulties getting through them and a few people have complained of similar problems trying to use them while playing.

[Lance Vannortwick]

Thanks the the update, Arthmoor :tops:

Quick BAIN questions. Should I have animated windows lighting systems overwriting OCC or under?

[Connor Wing]

I shall see if I can support this mod when I upgrade my computer. At the moment Oblivion lags enough as it is. :shrug: