Hey all. Something that bothered me a little in Oblivion was that when indoors the windows were always lit up with sunshine even if it was dark outside. Anyone know if the new engine is going to fix this highly critical issue upon which the success of the game depends?

I have a plan for this! 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!

And of course, this also means you could see out from any house you are in!

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.

Well, in Fallout New Vegas for certain ( I know Bethesda didn't make the thing but they were surely keeping an eye on it), and I think Fallout 3, the windows and holes in buildings would change light based on what time it was outside. Rays of dusty light during the day and shadowed nothing at night, it was very cool. I hope this is something brought over to Skyrim.

All you need is a small script that checks the ingame clock and adjusts the lighting accordingly

Not on my wish list tbh...

May be nice, but I don't need it to enjoy the game... ensuing I actually do.. =/

If it adds realism, by all means! This definetly has to be in the game. I hated sleeping in a bed in Oblivion as a vampire when lights were shining in through the window.

In all seriousness, being able to see in and out of whatever building you are in, or about to enter does sound fairly important, doesn't it? I mean, the fact that all previous TES games had interiors existing in some other worldly dimension was a limitation of the software, not a feature.

Never noticed it since I can't see my reflection in the glass or can't look trough windows. >.>
Still, would be nice if it gets fixed.

yup. another feature modded into OB that shouldve been there in the first place

No joke! Damn light gave me nightmares!! :cold:

I have to agree on this. It felt really weird, as if in Cyrodiil, each city had street lamps outside, that shun brightly as the sun, but were invisible from the outside.

Fallout 3 did implement this though, Megaton has good examples.

Well, the video showed we are getting lit windows at night, so it is safe to assume they went all the way and fixed the interior windows as well. But be warned, even though they added the concept of Imagespaces (lighting for interior cells so they can reflect the time of day), there were still cells in game that didn't match their lighting to the outdoors. Apparently a link must be made, and in some cells that link was never made. It would be like daylight inside a building when it was nighttime outside.

It would be nice, but I don't see it as gamebreaking if it's not there. I'm all for immersion, but in the end, it's a game and even Bethesda can't do everything!

I'm with you.

That's true, and it worked pretty well there, I think. Also, some mods for Morrowind and Oblivion have had something to this affect too. While it may seem pretty minor, I think having both exterior and enterior windows glow when they should and be dark when they shouldn't would be a nice, if small, detail to enhance the atmosphere of the game.

I think it's likely we'll see this in Skyrim, though. If you watch the gameplay trailer, there's a shot of a city at night, and you can see one of the windows on a building glowing, so it seems like they at least have windows light up when appropriate in exteriors, and if they're doing that, I can't see it being too hard to apply the same affect to interior windows as well. you'd just need to have them be glowing at opposite times, really.

I think it would be cool to add, for night time windows, some kind of a small animation for a few different body types silhouetted in black. Just have a few animations:

1. a walk by
2. laughter
3. pointing
4. writing something
5. putting something away above the window.
6. stretching....

and every so often you'd see the shadow in the window like real people moving about behind back-lit through the window by their fireplaces. That would be pretty cool.