I started work a while ago on a large scale, open city type of thing. The intention was to make a standalone city surrounded by sea and dense forest. It was intended to be a short story where you start in the city as one class, and follow a quest with numerous options and outcomes, subtly interwoven type of thing. But whilst building the city I came across a problem with FPS. It is fine at the moment, but would become too low adding NPCs and clutter etc. Also, the city looks terrible without running REAVWD, which then halves the frame rate, before NPCs etc. So I have sort of put it on hold for the moment, but may come back to it at a later date if I ever build myself a supercomputer, or fancy some cityscaping. If anyone has some suggestions about how to make it less FPS intensive/ a way around around the lame looking disappearances of the houses when they get far away short of RAEVWD.

Here are some screens (in the CS as my DVD drive is broken):

http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/3.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/2.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/1.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/4.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/5.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/6.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/7.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/8.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/9.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/10.jpg
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l117/ashen-shugar_2006/11.jpg

Comments and suggestions welcome

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31511

Too many buildings packed too close together. Also too many ships - ships are fps killers. They have insane poly counts.

There's a reason vanilla cities have only so many buildings and are so spread out.

Yeah, is a shame though.

I still wouldn't imagine such a huge FPS hit. Its dense but not outrageous. Whats the polycount into the CS?

At the moment roughly 60-80k, and the FPS is very smooth, but it looks awful without RAEVWD and that makes the fps in the low 20s. Baring in mind this is completely uncluttered though. The problem will be in the future when NPCs start wandering about methinks.

80K is nothing. I've made scenes 1M+ without a serious hit. RAEVWD and AI may kill FPS but not your density.

Wow. Looking at this in the CS now, this thing is bloody huge. Your screenshots mask the true vastness of the area you're covering. This is ginormous by city standards, filling up more than an entire 5x5 cell grid, and densely packed doesn't even begin to cover it.

LOD is going to be a killer no matter what at sizes like this. There's nothing that can be done about it. With as much as you have here, it dwarfs the density of the Imperial City LOD that causes folks so much grief. Architecture meshes have the highest poly counts of anything in RAEVWD.

I'm working on a relatively large port as well and noticed a drop is FPS when looking at the ships. So I removed a few as I really need the FPS to be tolerable when I start adding AI routines on the NPC's and creatures.

Good luck on your city! :foodndrink:

Yeah I tried to make it big so that you could have a few stand alone quests in it. Perhaps I'll make it more flat so you'll never need to be able to see from one end to another. Will the LOD be a problem without REAVWD?? Because it runs really smooth with just normal LOD, and you wouldn't ever be able to see into the distance so wouldn't need RAEVWD. Would either have to rename the meshes of the houses I use or some such so if people use RAEVWD and run TES4LODgen it won't generate the RAEVWD far meshes??

How would the frame rate be if I made it like this, do you suppose? (Would probably make there be no port if the ships are that high poly)

Your city is large enough that LOD would be almost necessary. Standing at the chapel and looking east for instance, you'd be into LOD before getting to the city wall, which is 5 cells away. In an unaltered game, LOD starts after being 2 cells out, or roughly 15,000 units. Without architecture LOD, you'll have large patches of empty space visible.

Unless I make it so that there really isn't much chance to get high enough to see any LOD; if you are just walking through narrow streets then you can only see things within 2 cells of you. As in start over and build it somewhere mostly flat. I know it's not prefect, but it's less limiting than the FPS drop caused by RAEVWD LOD. Would have to try and make it so there is no way to get on high roofs though, which won't be as fun to play. Any thoughts?

Wait til we have a better LOD/culling system? Honestly I don't know what to tell you. I set 'visible when distant' on my stuff (no LOD models) and I could see everthing fine from a long ways away and I use much higher poly stuff than vanilla resources. And my custom buildings were designed for roof play.