Since this game is next-gen, should buildings and settlements still have their own loading cells and enclosed or not?

Actually if the E3 videos is to go by, we already seen clues that there are no loading cells, so the definite answer so far looks to be no.

I voted other. Because while it would be awesome if none did at all, I think that certain locations, big buildings, walled settlements, etc. may have to have their own cells. I wouldn't really mind if they did.

I'm sure there will be for some parts of the maps but not every room or building like in the past.

I think there is some simple and basic optimization purposes behind placing towns in different cells that will always be valid no matter the gen.

But we have seen smaller areas, like the Sole Survivor's house, that are not their own cell, which is a marked improvement.

It's not all that important, but seeing the scene with the dog running around the house, I expect them to be separated.

Of course, having no visible loading would be ideal, but I just don't see that happening.

I've never had any problem with loading screens, so I'm hoping that some buildings/ruins/towns/etc are separate cells. If only to keep the bugs down, & keep things better organized.

(Like, it just occurred to me - I've never had a problem with NPCs taking my stuff in previous games where my house was it's own cell. With the new build-it-yourself settlement thing, obviously those houses will be in the world cell (since they're built out of parts.... which means my storage might not be as secure. That's a concern.)

Also, having everything in an the same "outside" world cells could limit the amount of clutter & crap that they put in buildings. Or screw up "decorative"/narrative clutter arrangements, if a wandering firefight/expoding car/errant mini-nuke caused stuff to bounce around. That would be bad. I'd much rather put up with the non-issue of loading screens, if it meant that ruins/buildings/dungeons would be more interesting & less likely to bug out.

Good point, items often get thrown around the room without being in the same instance as the exterior... come to think of it, it's the reason why I never use explosives indoors.

We always have to think of the consoles,if they can't handle it it won't be in. I would rather have no seperate cells,but this is Bethesda we are talking about and they do love their cells and the consoles are always the weakest link on the chain.

i chose other.

yes sure, seamless might be cool to a certain point (beyond which it just wouldn't matter much, since it just doesn't make much difference what worldspace that ghoul i'm fighting in that dark basemant actually is in (see below))

but i know from modding that, comparing any exterior to any interior space of the same size, the interior one will always hold _multiple_ times the amount of _everything_ than the exterior one. that's of course for visible stuff like objects, items, actors etc, but also for invisible stuff like markers, triggers and what not, also interior navmeshes are far more precise (more triangles) than ext ones etc etc etc -

in short: interiors just are MUCH MUCH more

like it is now (skyrim), for all i know 5 cells will always be loaded (a + of cells with the one you're in always in the middle), might also be 9 though (3*3 cells), not entirely sure actually - anyway:

this would equal about all of whiterun in memory. now add all of it's interiors to this - however next your gens might be, performance would be _very_ prone to suffer (and if not on next gen consoles, it's on weaker pc's).

for that, i can definitely see why separate worldspaces are a good idea, basically (and that's not even counting how awfully bad and easy mods could screw up an all-in-one-world like this)

and like i said above, for me as a player, it just totally doesn't matter what worldspace i technically am in, the crucial part is how it's integrated:

like, say if you went through a load door, and it loaded the target cells so quickly it'd just black out for an instant instead of keeping us on a loading screen for ages, this would be perfectly acceptable for me. what breaks immersion isn't that much the blacking out, it's the waiting. (i even could think of theoretical ways to totally avoid this blackening out, but that'd get too long for now)

and, what imo is the worst thing about separate worldspaces, isn't the doors anyway, it's the absence of windows. so what i REALLY hope for (instead of everything in one worldspace) would be they'd tackled that. and it's, to some degree, perfectly doable as is with skyrim, by having windows into LOD worldspaces or such. (with the limitation that, like, npc's would be missing in that view, but there's quite a lot that can be done to work around this with windows placement.

so, that's what my "other" actually would be: pls keep separate worldspaces, but reduce loading screen time to as zero as ever possible, and give us windows. finally. please. we've been pleading for windows ever since morrowind, hear us! hehe..

Eh I'm easy. If I have to sit through the odd load screen between rooms and what, it's no big deal.

I guess you could say I'm an easy cell.

If technically possible, I am for contiguous world spaces. One of the most jarring things to me from Skyrim was running outside from an interior space and nobody followed me. I could heal, roast some marshmallows or dance a jig with Lydia before going back into the interior cell to finish the fight. With contiguous world spaces, I would not have that luxury.

Oh, and windows. Never thought of that before but now that it's been mentioned, I want windows.

likely, but not necessarily. as soon as it's closed (walls, roof, door), you could make it it's own worldspace. (items dropped in there before that etc being something needing to be worked around though)

container safety is no matter of what worldspace they're in but of how they're set up. (in exteriors, it just needs to be done a bit different, maybe that's where the impressions that ext containers were less safe comes from)

edit:

with skyrim, a so called "complex scene" functionality was added to basically handle stuff like this: when things really get cooking in some very cluttered areas, like in heavy combat with many actors, or such a nuke exploding etc, the engine can be ordered into some type of "panic mode", where unimportant stuff (like clutter havoc, ambient fx etc) gets lower to no processing priority to keep frame rate up. as it was though, this had to be setup and was scarcely used in skyrim (for civil war scene areas mostly)

Yeah we definitely need to be able to lock our containers against the Paladin Hoss'es of the world.

While the dream of no loading screens is lovely and all, I think they serve a pretty big purpose in games like Fallout or TES.

I would prefer if Bethesda kept separate cells, but increased the size of the cells.

Higgs Village and the six houses in OWB should have been one cell. The hardware has been improved, but I have my doubts about how far the technology of these "next gen" consoles has come.

I'm not very well informed when it comes to how the games are run, but I would assume the cells are because of RAM and the objects being their own independent things that can be interacted with. If that's the case, then I would prefer they improve the quality and quantity of materials (as well as optimizing the cells) within the cells instead of removing them entirely.

http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/interviews/a654353/fallout-4-interview-todd-howard-talks-mods-in-game-building-and-map-size.html#~pjzDJx36AblMCU

Most people have probably already seen this, but if you skip down to the part of the interview where map size is discussed you'll get some info.

that's another thing that isn't primarily a matter of what worldspace stuff is in, but how it's set up.

disabling combat boundaries for enemies (or enabling them to open doors, many just can't) is pretty easy to do, but i actually think it's pretty much on purpose like it is, since it leaves the player with the option to easily get away. or would you like to, like buy a potion at the hag's cure and suddenly have that high hrothgar troll, that was after you all the time, enter?

...although, ok, might be funny

would be great if everything was like such, but probably won't be. Seems like it's been improved some so that's pretty good.

That would be amazing and take away and smug sense of security you might have. Mind you, by the time it got to the Hag's Cure, it might well have been welcomed by a bunch of guards. That is, unless they all shout "Ooh a fight" like a bunch of schoolboys.

Voted 'other' also. If the cost of contiguous worldspace is stuttering framerates or seriously reduced fidelity of models, quality of textures or reduced clutter and NPCs, then separate cells for big interiors are needed.

It's a bit like the trade-off between polygon count or number of shadow casting lights and framerates, or between size of textures and amount of gameworld data in memory. Developers should go for the highest quality experience they can until they hit hardware limits, then start making compromises. I'd prefer the compromise be a loading screen into a richly detailed interior than a smooth transition into a bereft one.

back in beth's older games like oblivion and morrowind they use to allow them to chase you through the doors. Made the game much more interesting.

Certain locations might be tough to fit in. Like sewers, or metros.

The DC Interiors mod does this in a few of the buildings, it's quite interesting. Of course, I think most of them are places where the view out the window is pretty contained (like, just the buildings on the other side of the street, plus a couple vehicles & piles of debris in the street). And I'm pretty sure that each of those was built by hand (i.e, it's not looking out into the real worldspace or LOD view, the mod authors just copy/pasted/rebuilt the outside area within the "interior" cell of the building.)

Yeah, the amount of pre war buildings (that were not sort of single object cells I guess like the houses and shops) without windows, especially the hotels and office buildings really bugged me, it was unnecessary claustrophobic, and did not matched the exterior, where the building is covered in windows. I don't care if the windows are opaque, a 2D backdrop, a generic exterior model, or hand crafted exteriors, just so as long as they are there (though the houses from 3 really bugged me by having a double storey living room, and a separate set of windows for upstairs, it looked odd).

With interior cells, I do hope with larger buildings, they put more storeys in a single cell, rather than have a separate cell for each storey - or did the engine have issues with objects/characters below and above each other?

You forgot the I honestly don't give a crap either way option....