Too bad consoles lack the memory, or else I'd bet they use some type of "streaming" method of rendering the world in one cell.

This is merely a programming issue. Dynamic loading anyone? Games have had this for years. There's not problem loading "what is needed" using occlusion culling. Even iPhone engines have this.
Edit: Consoles are not a limitation for dynamic loading. Games on consoles rely heavily on this in order to have the large view distance seen in a lot of games.

E.g. exactly like how Oblivion works when you're outside. I definitely expect this, and also hope they could manage to have a bit larger area loaded at the same time and vastly improve the distant lod rendering too.

Not sure, but since this is how Oblivion already works for exterior cells (except closed cities), I fully expect it to work that way in Skyrim too.

As for interior cells, it could be possible to start loading an interior cell (but not start rendering it) when you get close to a door. That way, the loading screen could be minimized and maybe even skipped in many cases (but maybe not in a city when there's lot of doors if you move to fast).

Dunno. I was under the impression that cities would be open in Skyrim. Personally, having a loading screen to enter/exit a city doesn't bother me or break my immersion - I just imagine that it actually takes some time for the city guards to let me through.

Seeing consoles only have 256MB of system memory, cell loading is the least expensive method of loading the world.

Cell Loading = Models occasionally switch LODs
Dynamic Loading = Models constantly switch LODs
Tessellation = Models gradually gain polys. No LODs

Maybe in 20 years. It's not just the consoles fault. Loading all the interiors at the same time as everything else around you would cause so much slowdown, even on the best computers, it would be ridiculous.

There is strong evidence to say that is probably false. Firstly, how do you expect they are going to stop the player from climbing down the canyon wall into unloaded Markarth, or at very least seeing th ehorrible basic texture from above? And what a bout that big area on the open water for the Riften concept art?

Not really, at Oblivion's level of detail the RAM seriously isn't an issue. Certainly rendering them and calculating full physics could take its toll, but why on earth would you render something you can't see, and why does something nobody's going to interact with need full physics?

All of this would be moot if Bethesda released a SSD version of Skyrim, hahaha. If we PC users got a SSD (Solid-State-Flash) drive and installed nothing but Skyrim on it, and then also configured your PC's Virtual Memory to be located on the SSD drive, then I assure you there would be no load times between cells.

As soon as you clicked on a door you'd be through and viewing the other side instantly. The Xbox360 and PS3 may not have such upgrades but if they did, then there's everyone's answer. It wouldn't matter what is loaded or not load, because there would be like NO wait times anyway.

However, there still wouldn't be Levitation unless Bethesda put an invisible door above the entire city and if you were to descend down through it, then have it load the city and place you floating above it automatically, then that would work, I guess. That's a side issue though, best saved for another more relevant post.

I hadn't thought of that, but you make a good point. So you'd only load the physics usage when you went in the door or close enough.

Why that?

Listen to this (wo)man. He is actually using his brain.

Cells are NOT world spaces. Cells are basically the engines way of saying "hey the player is at X coordinates therefore these cells (chunks of the world) behind him that he can't see don't need to be loaded".

EDIT: Also, I would like to see the quote where this is mentioned if possible.

BSW would be out of business. Sad but true.

Console limitations? Then how did Red Dead Redemption (RDR) do it, you say?
Only reasons I see is:

- Too bad for performance. Then it leads to the question again: How did RDR (and Just Cause 2 I think, and don't forget Fable) do it? Perhaps Bethesda hasn't optimized the engine or something like that as good as they should have.
- Too little time/money to optimize the engine further (Doubtful but sitll unsure... Bethesda's previous games must have given them a lot of money)
- Bethesda doesn't care about it, see it pointless (I would wonder why... loading screens kill a "fluid" seamless "immersion" to me)

I'm going for the reason that Bethesda hasn't optimized the engine as good as they should have, together with the reason that they don't care about it.

Load up the CS and check.

Having seperate cells for interior cells allows you set the cell title (which is used in the menu and when you look at the linking door in game). It allows you to set a unique lighting level for that cell. It allows you to seperate out two seperate groups of enemies that would otheriwse fight and put them in the same dungeon (e.g cave level 1 full of bandits and cave level 2 full of undead). It allows you to make interiors that are not limited by the exterior of the building (placing all the rooms within an outside structure would limit the amount of rooms that you can place in one cell). Similarly it allows you add a massive dungeon in an area that would otherwise not be able to hold it (e.g by chucking a rock entrance and a door into some cliffs it allows you to create a cave structure that in terms of actual distance of the rendered items is far larger than the space behind/under the cliffs that is available). It allows you to control game balance. It of course allows you to add in extra detail without causing significant slowdowns in your system from rendering the objects.

Those are plenty of reasons in my book for choosing to keep individual cells over a 'wouldn't it be cool if we could just walk straight in!' suggestion.

Plenty of technical reasons. But in the end the only reason we wouldn't have a "Walk straight in" feel is if the developers did it wrong. RDR had walk in.

I am going to be pissed if we don't have open cities honestly, that will be a MAJOR dealbreaker for me. Morrowind did it semi-well in that it had open cities but the houses inside the cities weren't, that at least was acceptable. But really there is no reason you can give me with current technology that Skyrim couldn't have open cities and open houses unless the engine that bethesda made was sub-par.

The shoebox you use for gaming can t cope with it.
Its easyer for modder which your shoe box can t hold (afaik)
Its easy for programers.

In the end its better for everyone and you can get some beer while the screen load

I had to stop playing Risen because it scared the living [censored] out of me!

One of the first things that happened to me in that game was insanely terrifying, I was walking through a beaten jungle path at night, and I came across these ruins - suddenly I heard this awful shrieking sound. Unlike anything I've heard, and this huge buglike creature appeared out of nowhere and owned me.

I still have it installed, I might play it again sometime, but damn. Scary game.

Cities being contained within their own worldspace is different to interior cells being seperate to the wilderness worldspace. 1/2 of Fallout 3 and 3/4 of New Vegas' cities were 'open' by being in the wilderness. Skyrim is likely to have all but the largest cities accessible from the wilderness space. However, having the city and having the houses interiors both accessible from the wilderness worldspace is unrealistic and not going to happen for the reasons I illustrated in my post above.

There’s a great Todd Howard quote, from a presentation he gave at GDC in ’09. “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.”

Risen also consist of lower polygon models, and doesn't have huge amounts of objects everywhere that you can move around. In Oblivion (and most likely Skyrim), if you see a bookshelf you can move each book around and move lots of vases and so on and on. While in Risen everything is stuck.

You couldn't levitate in Morrowind?

Why do you think that?
In fact its a lot more difficult. They have to program a way, where people can go in and out of those cells.
Then you want to hear weather effects and see proper daylight lightning at the inside.

Then don't forget the design aspect. Every window at the inside must be at the same exact location at the outside.

So I would guess its a lot easier for the programmers to make only one cell.
For the level designers it could be easier, because they can work on several homes seperately.
But as they also had to make an outside version, it gets complex again.

On Topic:
Its just because of detail.

I would hardly call Fallout cities open. Yes many of the small villages were, but the cities were not. My definition of open cities simply means no loading screens and most cities I can think of in fallout 3 and NV are closed by that definition..

All in all this engine being brand new tech I really hope they took the time to make all the cities open, if they did not I will be quite displeased.

There's this special technique, known and used since before Morrowind actually (I can easily find articles dating back from 1999 about the basics, and they were a key component to the Duke Nukem 3D engine from 1996), which even gave a nice little game its name. It's called "Portals". Look them up.

The trick about it: If applied correctly, you still get all the benefits of having interiors in separate cells. On the negative side, you still have some of its limitations (you can't break through walls, for example, unless the designers allowed for a specific wall to be broken at a specific place ...).

I know what portals are. But what's your point in terms of performance and how other games have succeded without any seperation of cells (and thus allowing you to seamlessly walk to interior > exterior)?