So Skyrim once again will have separate cells for interiors and exteriors, but why does Bethesda choose this path? It's never bothered me too much but recently I played a game called Risen ( admittedly mediocre game but had some pretty good aspects ) and noticed how every area in the game, excluding the town of Harbour Town, was part of the same world, and had Caves, houses, huts, tunnels and such that the PC can enter without a loading screen/separate cell.

So my question is simply why the choice of individual cells?

Beyond the obvious "it's a whole lot easier on the engine/programmers"?

512mb's of ram, also oblivion hadz more details; also make's it easer for modding/creating DLC.

Also Risen has separate cells they just load differently.

Do you want to melt your platform?

:shrug: easier to assign people to certain projects while developing?

Different cells=no levitate, which I'm displeased about.

Hmmmm touche. I guess I would just love to actually be able to open doors to a house and not have a loading screen but that would be too much to ask for :sadvaultboy: Oh well, doesnt mean the game wont be any less great as the others.

because unlike with animations, AI, character models and level scaling, not enough people yelled WHY ARE INTERIORS AND EXTERIORS DIFFERENT YOU'RE KILLING MY IMMERSION for Bethesda to bother with making [censored] workarounds.

so keep complaining and i'm sure they'll do it next time.



except it doesn't at all because open settlements have been semi-confirmed and considering it's been just about ten years since Bethesda started production on Oblivion and realized "hey we can't have levitation with this new LOD [censored], what are we gonna do" i'm pretty sure they'd've worked out some creative workarounds with the new engine.

Yea,with separate cells you could put put a lot more detail on the interiors much more then risen had.

I don't know how much content is in Risen but Oblivion and even Morrowind has a lot. Specifically items, containers, furniture, etc.. Having all that content broken up into different cells saves on system resources, especially memory. It wouldn't be impossible to develop a system that could support interiors and exteriors loaded at the same time but I estimate it would tack on another 2 years of development and would probably lower the amount of content you get in a given area.

It bothers me a little but if F03 is any indicator they at least got rid of the 'loading area' messages. Honestly it would take some serious culling tech to make the world completely seamless. Cells are not unique to BGS. Other game engines do the same thing just differently (Unreal, Source, etc.). Necessary evil.

It's the separate interior cells that allow for all those physics-enabled items cramming every table and shelf inside homes and buildings. The outdoors are far less item-dense by comparison. Even on PC, handling the physics on that many objects seamlessly would be massively resource intensive while maintaining the long draw distances and animated foliage, etc, that we expect from outdoor environments.

Nothing seemed lilike they were being touche to me ::/:

Lol i meant it as in Touché :biggrin:

Did you happen to see the barmaid and bar screen shot? I think the amount of detail they are going for is to potent for a single shot world without exterior/interior. Sure a beefy computer could handle it, but not everyone has that luxury.

Morrowind had separate cells and levitation. The problem is when the cites are close off or in separate world spaces like in Oblivion, as oppose to open like they were in Morrowind.

Wow I have never seen someone be condescending about a word they don't know and another word they can't spell. That is a first.

He said touché, which is a fencing term that basically means good point. The only problem is making the little mark over the e because most people don't know about alt codes. You are thinking of the word 'touchy'

And to answer the OP's question for the hundredth time (seriously, this gets asked a LOT), it is because in a game like Risen, the models are very, very simple and none of the items have actual physics on them. I'll use the example I used last time. Look at Bruma. 22 buildings (some with more than one cell bringing the total to about 42, not including the Castle. That is 42 additional objects to render, not including doors, containers, lighting effects, furniture, or regular items. there are about 65 people in Bruma, including guards. All would have to be rendered at the same time, while if they keep it in separate cells you only have maybe 8-10 NPCs walking around at once. So to do this in Bruma, you need to render all of Bruma, plus all 65 NPCs, plus all 42 cells. Then the doors, furniture, containers, lights, and other stuff which we look at next.

I just took a look at Baenlin's house. The guy you can kill in DB by dropping the wall mounted thing on him. Just the main part, not his basemant. Over 200 objects to render, not including NPCs and stuff I already counted like the actual building interior. More than 90% of the objects have physics. That is over 180 objects that can all fall, roll, bounce, and be interacted with. Take that, and apply it to all 22 buildings. Almost 4000 objects with havok physics being rendered at once, in addition to the furniture and other crap (which is about another 500 objects).

Try and run that on an Xbox 360. I dare you. It would crash as soon as the cell loads. Why can other games do connected interiors and exteriors? Because the items are either severely less detailed or they don't have physics or there are simple less objects to render.

It's quicker, easier and more effective, not to mention it makes modding much easier (In my experience anyway).

console limitations

It seems to me that people are confusing cells and world spaces. In both Morrowind and Oblivion, the entire world was divided up into cells. You moved from one cell into another seamlessly. Interior spaces and, in Oblivion, cities, were in separate world spaces. Moving from one world space into another required the loading screen.

^ This.

If Skyrim was PC only we could easily have the entire world in one cell and have cities in that same cell too, probably have interiors in the same cell as well.

Would the requirements be much, much higher than they are now? Sure.. but it would be possible

I would be disapointed, even if only from an imersion perspective, if we are forced through load screens to transition between exterior regions.

Maybe. And you would maybe even get half a FPS if you had the world's best gaming rig.

Seriously. If you had every single interior and exterior object, NPC and creature loaded at once, the memory requirements would surpass any gaming rig. Even if we step back from your wild dream to something possible, like having the interiors in the same cell as the exterior they're linked to, it would be a MASSIVE decrease of FPS. Have you tried playing Oblivion with Better Imperial City added in? It's causes a very noticeable FPS reduction in the Market District due to all the added objects to render. If the interior cells there also had been loaded, the engine would have had 10-20 times as much to work with, and the FPS would hit rock bottom.

Yes, it would be nice to not have loading screens, but it is even better to have detailed interiors you can interact with while still having a playable framerate.


And I'm a PC player and even plan to synchronize my next gaming rig with the release of Skyrim, so I will have a very good PC to play on, but still know enough about computers to know that what you say is not realistic at all, even for a PC only game.

Hopefully, the creation kit will be extremely powerful allowing us to alter how the game world is loaded. I mean, this is a completely new editor, Bethesda should've made it future proof.

I don't mean that they would be constantly loaded all the time, I mean there would be no loading screen to enter them just like how there is no loading screen when you are moving from one cell to another in the outside world in Oblivion. It would still load stuff in a sense but it would start to happen when you were nearing the cell, not through a loading screen. I'm not sure why I said everything loaded in one cell, I don't believe that.

But yeah I may be wrong, but even then PCs could (and easily do so with Oblivion with the Nehrim mod) have the entire outside world loaded with no loading screens between cells, Skyrim could easily do that if it was PC only but unfortunately we will most likely have cities in their own separate cells again.