I don't get your question. Using portals, cells are still separated the same way they are in Daggerfall, Morrowind or Oblivion. The one difference is that you should stop rendering a fake texture of the inside and load up the cell a few seconds in advance when the player approaches a door or window - but you should be doing this background loading anyway if you care for smooth gameplay (Morrowind and Oblivion didn't, by the way, which led to the infamous long loading screens).

Because none of the games you’ve mentioned do all of the same things that Bethesda’s games do. If they did, you’d be playing them instead. Fact of the matter is that most of this comes down to the fact that no one else really makes the same games as Bethesda, and most of the people commenting in this discussion have (being gracious here) little idea of the actual issues entailed in getting that stuff on screen and working, because most of the people commenting in here have never made a game. There is no “easy” button.

The idea that people on Bethesda’s own forum say Bethesda doesn’t do stuff because they’re “lazy” is just unbelievable to me. Yes, obviously they’re just sitting in their offices, slacking off because they don’t feel like implementing Pet Forum Feature X, Y or Z. :rolleyes: Hey, maybe they’re not doing it because doing all the things they’re already doing is really hard already, and they don’t have the infinite amounts of time or money it would take to do everything.

“We can do anything, we just can’t do everything.” —Todd Howard

The use of interior / exterior cells has nothing to do with the ability to levitate between them - that could be coded even by us modders with what I understand about the CS/GECK now (though we might need the OBSE/FOSE extensions). That argument doesn't hold water, and is not a limitation for using separate cells.

Several have explained it well - using separate cells allows for a great leap forward in the amount of "content" that level designers can put into spaces in the game. Without this, it would be impossible for the consoles to contain that many objects and Still have a smoothly running game. Those little load screens between the cells is really all about loading hundreds and thousands of models AND textures, sounds and effects into place - setting all of the content for you to see. If they did not do this, the content would have to be continually loaded into the game as the player moved through the world, which would cause constant little delays or pauses as the drives access the content you need. In an open-world RPG, the computer can't anticipate which direction the player might walk in, especially outside, so there isn't any way to pre-load content from a cell with reliability.

Bethesda's solution is pretty good, as outside you do get the instant loading of content from the adjacent cell as you walk over a cell boundary, and this is done because the world is separated into a huge grid of cells. Walk from Cell A into Cell B, and the cells around it load-up so that you can see their content - everything beyond them is LOD. From what I have read, the new engine will be able to load content from cells further away without resorting to the LOD (lower detail) versions, and then gray it out and make it look further away (much like the beautiful screenshot of the tower inside the casm they show us - its a great example of this new depth perception). It's also fair to assume that we will be able to load more content per-cell in this engine than in the past, as those numbers came up from Oblivion to Fallout 3 (Fo3 can take about 1,500-2,000 objects per cell before you start getting warnings and red boarders in the render window telling you that you have put too much into the cell).

Cities present a problem because their level of detail is So Much Higher than in the country side, that forced them to split the worldspaces up and place higher-detail areas in their own cells. The New Vegas strip suffered from this in big ways because the casino models were so huge and detailed, and the entire strip couldn't be put in one cell without over-taxing console performance - so they split it up with walls. In Oblivion we saw that as the separate cells of the cities, with the Imperial city taking half a dozen or more cells all by itself.

What I would caution folks against is pre-judging the new engine on this - as I took Todd's comments about LOD in a more positive way. If they greatly improve the LOD system for handling distance objects (he said things about loading huge numbers of models), then this may address alot of the problems people didn't like about cells in Oblivion. If the engine's new features allow it to handle thousands and thousands of models/textures from adjacent cells much better, then open-world cities are not only possible, but we may seem them in Skyrim. Or at the very least, much fewer cell loads than we are used to and potentially much more content possible per-cell.

I'm frankly excited about the possibilities, and don't think its wise for peeps to sell Bethesda short on how cell boundaries will work in Skyrim.

Keep the faith.

Can you please explain Morrowind please. I don't recall any city in Morrowind being interior cells. So how can it be a console limitation? Just another excuse to blame the console, which is false.

I dont mind as long as it is seamless as you travel between different cells.

While yes you could move things around in Oblivion, it was pretty hard to do so, do "move" that vase, that most people I believe just didn't bother, so in other words, it was a waste to do so.
Hopefully Skyrim will have a better system in moving and grabbing objects. If this is the case, then I can forgive not having levitation. If it's the same as Oblivion, I will be greatly disapointed agian.

No, it wouldn't. Having everything in the same cell and the whole cell loaded at once would consume enormous amounts of RAM that no home computer to date have.


Vivec was redesigned so large chunks are in interior parts, instead of being open like the initial plan as the concept art shows. Also, in the Bloodmoon expansion Raven Rock is more expanded upon on the PC version while the Xbox version lack some buildings.

I know a lot of people commenting here are in the same boat as me; I don't make video games. And it's rather silly of people to speculate on the limitations of consoles, the limitations of computers, and especially the limitations of this new game engine. What I would like to voice, is an interest. Maybe the town sorceress and the guy on the brute squad are fine with knocking on doors, and barging in, but thieves wouldn't. The crux of thievery is cut-burglary. And if you can't stake out a house or store, and must just walk in the door and hope no one is standing there looking at you, much of the immersion possible in playing a thief is diminished. So, consider this at least one person who determinately has an interest in this area of development.

That being said, I have a suggestion as well. I suggest that the interior of a building is loaded to the existing city exterior as the player attempts to enter, or attempts to "peek", such as through a keyhole or window. So you are not trying to load an entire city of interiors and pots and books and rugs and beds; just one building. And even have a load screen if need be. But the important part is after said load, the character would be standing outside a "live" building, with doors that open like interior doors, and windows/ shutter slats could be both seen through, and even opened. And as the player leaves the building, and walks say ten feet away, you dump the cells of that building, the windows go back to opaque, and the thief skulks away into the city.

Remember there was always a load for anyone entering any building in all previous elder scroll games, so why not load all interiors in this fashion; one at a time, as requested, to the existing surroundings. I am no video game designer, but would loading one interior really "break the bank" from a RAM and fps standpoint?

Of course, all this muttering and postulating could be irrelevant; we have no idea at this point in time that something along these lines isn't already in the works. But one shouldn't assume that because technical capabilities created limitations in the past, that these issues can't be or aren't going to be addressed in the present. New day. New era. New engine.

They could do like with Morrowind, on Xbox : when we approche a world's section, there's a small loading... If are travelling to fast... Jumping(if jumping is faster than running) or using boots of blinding speed.

Personnaly, loading don't bothers me.

One interesting way to solve this might to use gatehouses for cities, like outside Bruma or Corrol, but rotated 90 degree so you can not look directly into the city, then you arrive the city cell loads, if long loading time is estimate the gate is closed and you have to wait for it to open. Gate would also close for enemies.
The same system could probably be used for houses, with the difference that you could peek inside once the door started to open. So keep it dark and show walls/ floor then loaded.

Downside with this is that doors would open in different speed depending on that is in memory. You would also have a minimum time to open doors, probably longer than load time on a fast computer.

Instead of, why not invisible walls foe ennemies?
But good idea, for city images, when we are away... But low def 3D models and textures are preferable...

The only thing that I could possibly see working is putting several of the interiors into 1 cell. In Bruma you have maybe 15 houses. If all of those were in the same cell it would make one longer load screen and then until the cell buffer is purged (I think you have to enter into 3 cells you haven't been before to clear the old info) those 15 houses would load quickly. However, all of the AI packages would need to be redone because if a person was supposed to go to Cell X and eat and everything in Cell X was moved to Cell Y his package would send him running into a wall endlessly or not moving at all, as he is trying to find a way to the Cell.

Interior making would be hell without separate cells. You'd have to try to cram everything into the building, the walls would obstruct your view (unless you had some sort of "hide walls" button in the CS), there'd be no way to split up the work between other members in your project (so only one person could be making ints at a time, unless two different people were working on completely different exterior cells).

Not to mention that scripting would be much harder as well. No more using GetInCell commands to specify an interior as a place to trigger SetStage. You'd have to rely on activators/ other references and use GetDistance scripts instead .

I would like to know if interiors will not be seperated by loading screens.

And no I mean seperate rooms you have to load in a house you have just loaded. I hope interiors will have less loading screens as apparently we have open cities so I would love open interiors.

That's a good question - I would guess that Yes, we will still have loading screens of some kind. We had them in Oblivion and the Fallouts - it's still an effective way of diverting attention while the game loads data from disc.

I just started fooling around with this idea in Oblivion's CS. I merged the basemants for 2 houses in Bruma into the cells of the main buildings (i.e. everything in Bradon Lirrian's Basemant is now in the cell that the main part of his house is in). I did that one to do some quest testing, and then merged Baenlin's basemant into his house. So far it works flawlessly but I specifically chose those two because there were no packages or quest related things in the parts I moved.

So having 1 cell for all the interiors of a specific city IS highly possible, but it would have to be built from the ground up to avoid massive amounts of gamebreaking bugs.

Edit: My next step was to try and merge something big, this time the Bruma Barracks into the Great Hall. Moving it was easy enough, as was adding pathing but several problems sprang up:

Unique Guards such as Burd merely stand in one place all day
The Countess and her staff (Bodyguard, steward, etc.) Now choose to eat in the Barracks area instead of the Great Hall
Guards never go to the barracks to sleep
Minor graphical glitches such as NPCs bouncing several feet into the air when getting out of chairs, chain lanterns bouncing.

Can people please stop with the worldspace=cell nonsense? :facepalm: You're barking up the wrong tree.

Anyway... Personally, I don't really like Open interiors, preferring buildings to be slightly larger on the inside than outside due to physics limitations in games. The lack of overhead room makes 3rd-person cameras incapable of really depicting realistically small interiors, and the lack of peripheral vision in 1st-person makes small confines equally difficult to portray. Also, if animations don't react to the scenery and space restrictions properly (The reason every character's a klutz in Oblivion), you need a bit more space to let the animations play without sending the fine china all the way to China when you run/walk past.

But, Portal technology could still be implemented at doors and windows (even if two windows 10' apart from the outside are 12' 6" apart inside), since I doubt destroyable environment's an option.

Well the cells could be quite large if the game was optimized around 6gb's of ram and 64bit systems, which is pretty basic setup versus 256mb's of ram.