I agree. I actually found a mod the allow this in Skyrim and it improved things for me.

Wouldn't that fit under the "Other" umbrella?

the 1st paragraph in skyrim's guards' rulebook seems to be: "never ever help a dragonborn, no matter if he's getting robbed, ambushed, eaten - just ignore, tell him to stop lollygagging and move on."

in many places in skyrim, you'll still get that. pretty rarely from interiors to exteriors, but rather frequently between cells in the same interior

And as you will fill it with 10-100 ton of crap its an major issue, playing Skyrim now, only place who has an annoying loading time is Lekeview manor.

Multiple time longer loading times than blackreach and other major locations

You can limit rendering problems with limiting view distance in cities.

Now major locations like vault or large building are probably their own cell. it helps with keeping the AI load down.

In Morrowind enemies would rarely follow trough load doors, its was a bit more common in skyrim but still rate, in both games you could pop in, shoot a few arrows pop out and heal up.

in Oblivion load doors was not an barrier at all.

Again the issue in Skyrim was probably memory limits, if you managed to sneak into the mine in the back of an bandit base, pull most of them and run out you would also run out of memory on PS3.

Its pretty much confirmed they went for single body armor to save memory. During the large fights in the civil war you see maximum number of NPC at once if they limit number of outfits.

with the current system, what's hard to impossible to do is take over any views on movables, like npc's, clutter etc, but you can easily, like, have a 1st store window that lets you see the opposite building but not down to the street, or views to the sky or a couple tree tops are dead easy to do.

npc's, clutter etc _could_ be done with some effort (spawn copies or move originals in your ext-remake), but not in an "unbreakable" way (or none i knew of anyway), meaning, if a player really means to place an item ... in a way that proves it's just make believe, he'll be able to do so.

and for lod, basically this IS just a copy of the actual worldspace, but with lower detail in all aspects and constantly loaded with the original space. you'd of course not do your interior in this space (since it'd completely get loaded into lod view when you view that place from a distance in the original worldspace), but technically (on an engine-level), i think it should be possible to load the (or an) ext. space's lod _with_the_interior_worldspace_ too

(like it is now, you could place your interior right in that lod worldspace for a similar effect, but it'd technically be an exterior, which does make a couple of technical differences that loading ext lod with int world would fix)

blackreach technically is an exterior.

the main difference in aspects of loading time that comes with this is, in an exterior, only the cell the player is in and the ones surrounding it are loaded, everything farther than that won't until you go there.

in an interior though, _everything_ will be loaded, no matter how big it is (to give you an idea, an exterior cell is 4096*4096 units, 5 are loaded. for interior cells, iirc coordinates can go to 32000 +/-, makes 64000*64000 units (i might be wrong a little something about the 32000, but you'll get the basic idea anyway)

r.i.p., oh memory limit in hardware shape

Should they have loading cells? No, but there's a reason behind it, on the console end and the PC end. Of course, high-end PCs nowadays could easily handle an open-world game with no loading cells, but lower-end PCs will not, so there's no way to optimize it. Consoles would have a problem also, the processing power and RAM just isn't there to support it.

Another five years, possibly. I can wait lol.

It depends on how the game works. There are times when you want to keep certain buildings in its own cell for quest purposes. In other cases, I'm worried about NPCs looting my crap even when it's not physically in their reach. I'm sure we've all seen NPCs get into places that they physically shouldn't be able to.

However, in general, I like the world being all part of the same cell.

Oooh, I hadn't even thought of that part - the people who love to decorate their houses with unique weapons & other stuff stacked on all the shelves/open surfaces/etc. That's gonna svck in an open-cell "crafted" home. Raiders attack your settlement, NPCs go "ooh, nice weapon just sitting in the open! Grab it!"

(I generally stick all my stuff in boxes, so the actual "house" cell isn't usually overflowing with items. Not always, of course - my FO3 playthroughs with DC Interiors tend to have things on display, because that mod adds tons of interesting clutter items to collect.)

That's my feeling as well. That's why I'm going to try and build my house on stilts and figure out a way to keep NPC pathing from routing them anywhere near my home.

you could look for a big tree and build a beehive type hanging house

I think I can only build on existing house foundations?

Well there was that cool looking swampy tree house settlement they showed during that part of the E3 showcase!

Hopefully they finally killed that since new consoles finally have 8GB RAM, it's archaic by this time. I could understand it in 2000, 2005 and even 2010 but it's no longer excusable.

Hmm, good point! Honestly, I hope to make my settlement almost entirely above ground. The maximum settlement size makes me a little worried.

right.

sorry for making stupid jokes.

*making dead serious face*

:-)

edit: the foundation thing's just a community assumption for all i know anyhow. or at least i haven't heard this actually confirmed.

Ignoring the part where we've laid out some valid concerns about it, and advantages to still doing it, in earlier posts in this thread. It's not a purely black-and-white "this is the right way" issue.

Ignored simply because they were speculations based on "they cannot do it right" assumption. I'm assuming it being done right.

I hope that certain areas are their own cells. Helps the sense of scale. As small as our home in Megaton was, it was much bigger than it would have been if it had to fit the design of its exterior.

I just hope that buildings are no longer made of several separate cells. I hope that you enter a building, there's a loading screen, and then you can explore the rest of the building with no loading screens breaking it up.

Ah, didn't realize it was a joke.

Nope because im not interested enough to try to invent some magi-crap system that would be another system

I will gladly watch a few more loading screens if it means crazy NPC's aren't running off to arm themselves with any and all nearby weapons everytime they feel threatened. I find it highly annoying.