load screen......... peak threw keyhole "damnit" turn back/ load screen.....

I say no, only because this is just furthering unrealistic expectations people have about the game, and quite frankly I don't see this ever happening on today's consoles or even the majority of today's PCs. In an ideal world, there are no exterior/interior cells, they are all in the same worldspace, but this is not an ideal world and the capabilities of games are still very limited by today's hardware.

If you want to know when someone is home, you just need to check the time and whether or not the door is locked. If it is midday and the door is unlocked, then someone is home. If it is evening and the door is locked, then someone may be home eating dinner. You should play it safe and wait until nightfall. Or they may be out at the tavern, but will return home quickly regardless. If it is daytime and the door is locked, then no one is home. If it is late at night/early AM, then they are sleeping.

Checking to see whether people are home or not through the windows doesn't change the fact that the ideal time to be a thief is after midnight. Everyone is sleeping by then, and won't notice when someone picks open their front door. Any other time is risky because anyone could come walking in on you.

OR...*Open Door/Load Screen* *Sees owner of house standing right there, guards are called* "DAMMIT" *Load Screen* 20 guards after you.

Which is better?

love this idea

One issue for me, if werewolves come into the game wouldn't it svck if you just HAPPEN to be near a window of your home, you transform then people see you?

Great idea!!!

And for all you nay sayers. It doesn't hurt to list ideas. You never know and if not this game maybe the next.

There is an easier way around this. Houses have windows, so maybe if someone was home and awake the windows would glow slightly, like when you look across the street at your neighbor's house you can see the light is on, even if you can't see inside. If there is no glow, you know the NPCs are either not home or asleep.

This would work well too. The light being the persons candles. :goodjob:

Exactly and it would take a minimal amount of scripting to do, just some kind of check to see if someone is home and if they are a check to see if they are sleeping. Having to load an entire cell in another cell, making sure that it is aligned properly would be a scripting nightmare. Also, some items like merchant inventory chests and the like are in the same interior, but if the entire interior was loaded, it would appear outside the house for easy pickings lol.

Now, I don't make video games, so I wouldn't know all the technical ins and outs, but it seems to me, that since you would be loading the interior of one building at a time, even allowing a normal load to do so, you then have a building, with windows, doors, and contents that is "realtime" with the player. There is a load in all previous games as it dumps the city and loads the much smaller interior. This would just load the single extra interior into the existing loaded city. And, as the player walks away from the single loaded interior, I don't know if a load would be required to "dump" those assets. I know a long time ago they would always have to use right angle hallways in video games, because they could not let the player have both adjoining rooms all loaded at the same time. But if the interior can be dumped on the fly, as you walk away from the building, the windows just re-opaque at a certain distance.

And, of course, they can't simply have every interior load as you near it; running along the street storefronts would load interior after interior, which would be a lot different then loading "one" interior.

BUT, if the player is initiating entering a building, load that one building to the existing surroundings, meaning after the load, the player is standing outside the unopened door of a now live interior; the door could be opened as any interior door normally opens, and windows could potentially be spied through, or even entered!

Is there some technical reason this couldn't happen, for instance, if there is an issue with "dumping" the assets as the player leaves the building? Remember that an interior would only load to the existing exterior as a player was near enough to enter it, so no more then one interior would ever need be loaded at a time. Just thinking out loud.

Although I give props to the OP for a nifty idea, I'm going to go with this. It just isn't that necessary in practice.