THIS IS DEFINATLY NOT CONFIRMATION.

What has one thing to do with the other? Or do you think that by existing city walls it does implies neccesarely a loading screen (and viceversa)?



Ah, thanks. Time to register, I guess...

Beat me to it

Great news!

I'd become too used to the Open Cities mod in Oblivion. Reverting back to Cities in a separate worldspace would be hard for me.

Hopefully there won't be any loading INSIDE a building. What's you enter a building, house, shop, etc all doors can be entered without load. In oblivion in some of the mages guilds I remember loading into the building and then having to load going into some rooms too.

How so?

Oh the joy! :celebration:

Cities will still likely have walls like Oblivion. In Morrowind the cities were so little enforced because things were generally quiet there. However, this is Skyrim, and there's a war going on.

No, but cities in oblivion were walled so you couldn't see the inside . . . because there was nothing there. When you click on the gate you go to a different worldspace which only loads the city. With no walls you would be able to see there isn't anything there.

I predicted this, but I'm having trouble tracking down my post. I've made several posts on topics pertaining to this.

In Oblivion, they had little to no object/cell occlusion culling. They had backface culling (hiding triangles on the other side of a model) and frustum culling (hiding stuff off the edges of your monitor) ... BUT without proper culling, Oblivion had serious issues even with cities in their own worldspaces. Take this for example:

- You are standing staring at a wall
- The entire city is on the other side of the wall
- Oblivion renders the entire city (within the frustum) even though you can't see it yourself.

This is because many people don't realize it but GPUs can render hidden geometry. It's just that after everything is layered up, it ends up getting covered, and this happens every frame. The reason I predicted this was that in FO3 they started to implement basic occlusion culling. A huge reason FO3 performed better. So not only does proper culling allow them to put everything into one worldspace, it also allow them to up the detail of meshes and textures because less stuff is continuously being loaded onto the GPU.

Other than GPU issues, they've probably considerably improved general scene management, streaming, and LOD-type stuff. Even FO3 was a big improvement. It may have looked a lot different than a TES game but the performance improvements were sizable.

The way that Oblivion did things is the reason a lot the mods were very intensive too. Better Cities, texture replacers, even RAEVWD has an impact (and that's why the higher detailed versions are impossible to use). I can't wait for mods to be released like high res textures and Better Cities, because they will actually be able to be run on current hardware.

I hope the same. But if they've optimized exteriors to the level that open cities can exist, I see no reason why they couldn't optimize interiors, too.

Awesome for gameplay, hopefully this also means that they engine is way more efficient.

A bit worrisome for modding though, since it could mean that there are no more separate world-spaces. Tweeted the question, I wonder if I'll get an answer.

I think this pretty much confirms they are using Umbra. Can't see them pulling this off without it, especially considering that 5 of the cities are massive.

So you would rather have to load into every building in a city than just load into the city itself? Why? There would be way less loading.

I think there will be 1 or 2 un-walled cities though. In my mind, it just goes with the Nordic theme for some reason.

Indeed. Probably the major cities (or most of them) will be walled and the lesser cities and settlements un-walled.

It wasn't too bad with the open cities mods, there is hardly a performance hit, so the consoles must have been the cause of this.



Oh snap, you're right. In the oblivion.esm there were lot's of unused world spaces like Toddland and such, and if there are daedric shrines then you will probably go to a different worldspace. So it's probably all cool. You can continue planning your province mods

I've explained to people before, namely the guy with "USE UMBRA" in his sig that Umbra is nothing special. It's just middleware to save people time. As I explained in my post above, they were already implementing culling in FO3, it was just more basic.

If you were a programmer, you could eventually right an occlusion culling system yourself.

Excellent

not necessarily. The strip in New Vegas is all one world, yet it still has loading screens. Just because they say it is all one open space doesn't mean we won't still have to deal with loading screens. If this turns out to be the case, console users will not be able to do anything about it, but pc modders will be able to open the cities up.

No doubt there will be walls, but doesn't mean the gates are closed.

Because I understand how the interiors are done in oblivion and I have explained in other posts why this wouldn't work. Besides, I'd rather monsters and could follow me into the city. I'd also like to ride my horse through cities . I don't mind loading screens that much.

Nice explanation, worth of quoting.

I hope the improved z-culling of my future GTX 580 is also put on serious work in order to improve even more the frame rates

Well, I personally had framerate dips even in closed cities at certain angles. Turn on the debug text, and stare at a wall and see how high the geometry is.

We're also on much more modern GPUs than the consoles. But try Open BETTER Cities, and it'll bring the computer to its knees because of all the extra geometry.


If I went into an interior and then right back out, I'd still only get one loading screen. It would normally instantaneously take me back out into the city worldspace. I don't mind screens at all for entering interiors.

wait wut...how in the world wuld that confirm umbra? they ha open cities in morrowind. its not the first time. plus i take it u dont mean the sword but umbriel the town since we r talking about towns and umbra is just a weapon. anyway. morrowind also had open cities and umbriel takes place in morrowind doesnt it?