@DCDeacon Are the cities in their own Worldspaces or open?

@Scharesoft Everything outside is one open space. Interiors are separate spaces.

The plot thickens!

@DCDeacon You made the forums pretty happy with the tweet about the outside world being one open space. I love the news! Thank you!

@The_Impaler22 Uh, why? It's been like that in every ES game we've made for the last decade +?

And most recently...

@SamuelBacklin Yup. Had a brain fart. They were talking about loads. I don't know the answer for the cities. Sry for confusion. I svck


And now:

@DCDeacon Can you at least tell us how "major" the 5 main cities will be? In Oblivion they felt like villages rather than cities.

@Silvade14 Check the first screen GI released and decide for yourself.


Confusion set to maximum.

I just pictured Pete in one of them suits in Crysis.

link?

You know, you could just look at Pete's twitter feed, it's pretty close to the top.

I'm a nice guy though, so http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon/status/28963471538262016.

The last tweet really doesn't belong in here. The question he is answering is "how big are the cities?". This forum seems to be falling for that... but if Hines doesn't have a "brain fart", then he never confirms anything via twitter. If someone asks one question and implies another, then Hines will always only give a vague reply to the former that has no relation to the latter.

Also pretty sure the cities won't be open, I mean the city in the screenshot just doesn't look like it. I guess it's a valley that is closed with a wall, and you can't get to the top of the cliffs from outside.

Ah, I see now.
I just quickly got the picture from my browsing history. Thought it was the normal one.
Couldn't really care less, but edited it for ya.

It was used in a debate about dynamic shadows.

I hope they're open, the screenshot makes it look like its closed off like others have stated.

This is true. The dragon can be spawned in the empty part of the worldspace and he can just fly in over the walls. Wouldn't even need multiple instances either, cause the dragon could just teleport at the same time you do just like a companion does.

Really? :huh:

To me, the screenshot makes it look open (and climbable).

You can even see a tree trunk at the top.

I don't mind a load screen when going into cities. If it were real you'd have to wait for them to open the gates anyway and that would take a few minutes. What I hate is that if the whole country is one big open space, why can't each city be? Like you need a load screen to get into the city, but once you're there there shouldn't be any load screens to get into each house and building. The cities in oblivion were so small compaired to the whole map, how can they not pull off a seamless city the way they did with everything else. Caves, cities, dungens and maybe castles should have a load time...but not every home in Skyrom!

Me too.

Incidentally, *pokes* make the Morag Tong appear in Skyrim.

Climbable... or fallable (from the top).

I also think it looks open.

Markarth Side is going to be a more epic version of Helm's Deep
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4VuFmi3n6a4/SOwrFKXP7rI/AAAAAAAABh4/UKd7L0YKeF4/s400/HelmsDeep.jpg

The worldspace is stream loaded, so the "load screens" are hidden in the background as you move. That can't be done completely in the city, since they don't know which building you are going into.

More importantly, the buildings in the cities in Oblivion are compressed in size. The interiors are almost always larger than the exteriors, and sometimes don't even match the shape of the outside. Making the buildings big enough to contain their own insides would require making the cities take up more landscape and leave less room for wilderness. It would also require the interior and exterior designers to work much more closely together instead of creating their sections separately based on concept designs.

I hope so, Helm's Deep was the first picture that popped into my mind when I first saw that screen. I just didn't know the name of it, but I knew I had seen something like it before.

What screenshot are you guys talking about? Is it up on the GI webpage?

http://static.zenimax.com/bethblog/upload/2011/01/Markarth021.jpg

Looks open to me. Certainly an improvement over Oblivion.

Ok he comfirmed that the TOWNS are open world.. he has to check if the cities are... makes sense as in fonv and fallout 3 small settlements were open larger ones closed.

It seems pretty impossible to believe that they won't be open this time around, given the fact the even in Oblivion, it was possible, but just not done for performance reasons. They'd be crazy not to do it all these years later in Skyrim, given the advances in technology, and the clear demand for it.

Well the reason they closed them off in Oblivion is because the game would keep rendering objects even though they couldn't be seen by the character. Now they have occlusion culling so it will be fine to have open cities this time around.

I like this explanation. Makes sense.

Sure they do. There aren't many secret entrances are there? You only need to load the interiors starting within a certain range of the entrance. Think of a large semicircle on the ground outside your door. Divide that circle up into levels, and as you approach the door, you step on a strip of the semicircle that triggers more and more detail to be loaded into memory. There are also probably common objects in all buildings that could stay stored in a small cache. Combine that with culling which they first introduced in a basic manner in FO3, and it's not like the GPU is going to be rendering all the objects in all the houses at once. You don't need to stream the content of the house down the road if you're standing right next to the door of another house.

The problem I think is keeping the exterior entirely in cache while you remain indoors. Or, they could do the opposite of what I described above. As you get further inside the house, start unloading the city from memory. I know when I play though, I usually don't even *get* a load screen after leaving an interior.

I imagine though that the above is hard to accomplish with the memory constraints on consoles.

With that said, I'm fine with interior load screens, and as you said this is probably a good explanation as to why they don't bother:



Edit:

It's like in Oblivion, I imagine when you were riding on a horse in a certain direction, they weren't focusing on loading the cells behind you, they were probably predictively loading the content ahead of you, to fade in as naturally as possible. Of course that engine did poorly enough that there was always stutter and pop-in.

I'd worry a little about constant disk accessing if you were stream loading that many interiors, but I'd bet on a PC only release with a 64-bit executable you could achieve it with little problem.

Next-gen, I guess.

I'd like to see Beth do an installment series with the first game having one complete province on a height map that encompasses all of Tamriel. Then every year release a new completed province that is added to the original game. 1 game with 8 expansions. I don't ever see them doing that but it would be sweet and entirely possible on 64bit.

Never the less we are going to see some amazing sht when 64bit drops.