This.


It's all limited to how gamesas decide to do interiors. If they do them like they did with oblivion, where each interior is a separate entity, then no. This wouldn't be possible. But if they load areas like a lot of modern games do these days, where it simply loads the entire area around the PC (think GTA), then it would be possible.

To be honest It might even be possible regardless, if nearby interiors were loaded (could cause severe lag, idk) then it'd be doable.

Usually when somebody starts their post with "Gee" they're being sarcastic.

I would think so as well. Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to explain one of the reasons why Beth used seperate cells. Given the choice I'd rather have a seperate cell, which is fully cluttered and decorated than being able to watch out the window from a sparsely decorated room.

Make houses, shops and other buildings separate cells, with a loading screen on the door.

BUT, make it so that windows are made properly, as in they can be looked in and out of.

True, and I agree. I think their approach is pretty solid, and level of detail is really important to me as well. Though it wouldn't hurt to have some exterior buildings, like mills or lighthouses.


The thing is those are essentially one in the same. There have been mods that simulate this effect, looking out windows, but it is very time consuming and doesn't have an automated system.

I'm not sure if Bethesda will implement this into the game although it would make it a lot cooler if you ask me. But after a couple of months there'll be mods that do that.

Yes, Exactly What I want.

If they make posible to have two cells loaded (and operating) at the same time, you could have loaded the exterior cell and the interior cell of the building you are at. This wouldn't be so memory consuming as not having interior cells. Anyway, there would be a performance hit that not everyone would consider justificable (indeed I preffer things like there are in Morrowind and Oblivion).

I don't know how many interiors Red Dead had, but Oblivion had a couple thousand interior cells (maybe more, I opened the CS, started counting interior cells, at 400 I wasn't even a quarter through) and the great majority of these cells have hundreds of individual objects, both static and animated, and that is the difference between Oblivion and other similar games: the number of items the player can interact with. If you played, say, DAO, you know the interior as well as the exterior environments environments, while well rendered, were completely static; nothing in the interiors moved (cups, plates, food, books, items on vendors' tables, etc). And this is true of most games: stuff that moves, breaks, the player can interact with, etc, is very limited to a few models, whereas in games like Oblivion or FO, the player can interact with a great variety of non-consequential items.

As for windows, it really wouldn't be that difficult to make them in-game, within interior cells or the outside world. If the outside world, the modeling is simple, the only issues are the lighting, as interiors will be as bright and clear as if you are outside, but I guess that can be taken care of with shaders; that, and the large amount of individual items in the world... if inside interior cells, you could simply copy the objects the player would see from the window and transfer them to the interior cell. The only issue here is, again, lighting, as you'd like to match the time of day in the interior cell.

Well, in regards to the shadows and opimization, as many a devs will say, any idiot can cripple a ridiculously powerful machine, the difficult part is to make them run smoothly. Being able to look outside shouldn't be too hard to fix - albeit it'd require much more work. I hope they put each building in separate cells, as I'd much rather have a ton of clutter and many building than much fewer ones with less stuff in them.

I also wonder how much higher the "minimum" system requirements are to run those at decent performance..... the Imperial City Marketplace must be a pain, for example. Each of those shops has dozens-to-hundreds of items on the shelves. Put all of them in the same worldspace, and I imagine some machines would grind to a halt.


I've run into this with a couple Fallout 3 mods.

One was an expanded Megaton player house - it added larger rooms with more stuff upstairs, but also added a locked basemant... with hundreds of boxes of ammo/food/supplies/etc and an item display case & sorter - walking into that place, my framerate dropped hard.

DItto with "Lings Finer Things" a mod clothing shop in Tenpennty Tower. It expanded the one shop on the first floor, and filled it with mannequins, all wearing different new clothing. That one, I had a 1-2 minute loading screen followed by a CTD. Luckily, someone came up with a "WeakLing" .esp that left the NPC selling all the new stuff, but took out all the mannequins.


Of course, my comp is running near the minimum specs. But it's an example of the issues with sticking all that stuff in the same worldspace.

Yes, being able to see into a building would be great! I'm really surprised nobody metioned that it break immersion when one can't do so (maybe I missed it)

As noted the impracticality of all of the objects might be hard to incorporate. Is there a way to do so in a Line of Sight kind of way? I truely don't know :shrug:

Seems that the converse would be easier...looking out. Besides, it makes a fun addition to sniping. Loophole shots? :trophy:

Y'know, windows are cool. If interior cells and exterior cells were the same thing, it wouldn't be hard to imagine being able to break into a building through a window. Or opening a window and putting an arrow home.

But I think as long as Bethesda makes rain not fall through solid objects I'll be okay. I've been waiting on that since Morrowind (which, oddly, the modders fixed that before Beth did) and it would make all the difference to me.

No other game ever made has even come close to the number of intractable objects, fully realized NPCs and interior locations as MW, OB, FO3 or NV. Really they can only be compared to each other and none else.



This statement could only be true If Bethesda's games were PC exclusive.




Really? Because I'm still waiting on that break trough in modding. Got a link or a name of a mod that fixes this?

Morrowind Code Patch. Sadly no port seems to be on its way to Oblivion, but with modders injecting awesome texture packs, MGE's awesomeness, and now this, all Morrowind needs is Havok. xD

What if windows were like doors, so that a theif could pick the lock and sneak in that way.

Really? Where's your proof in comparison with all games ever made?

Here's my proof in comparison of some moderately similar interiors:

RDR:
http://media.multiplayer.it/thumbs/images/2010/09/13/324072.red-dead-redemption-per-x360.iyhmp_jpg_640x360_upscale_watermark-small_q85.jpg
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/108/1086537/red-dead-redemption-20100428032917171-000.jpg
http://www.ireddead.com/img/content/640x0/222.png

OB:
http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/2691/oblivion200909251410096.png
http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k11/hans_moleman_200678/Oblivion2006-10-0102-09-11-65.jpg
http://www.stewartcbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Oblivion2.png
http://www.23hq.com/1192286/1402045_d122d3601dd21acac48c4039c5ab2abc_large.jpg

MW:
http://www.rpgplanet.com/morrowind/images/image28_800.jpg

I definitely wouldn't call that "No other game ever made has even come close to the number of intractable objects, fully realized NPCs and interior locations as MW, OB, FO3 or NV." So unless you bring me a few hundred links of proof, then I'd say you can't really make a good comparison. What I made above is just a fraction of a comparison, but it's still a lot better than just saying what you said.



If I remember correctly Immersive Interiors gave you somewhat of a 5 FPS-hit while being in interiors.

Wouldn't surprise me if someone with a tad too much time on their hands managed to port havok into Morrowind sooner or later.

So the thing with the house and interior cells. Well I have this idea, right.

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. 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!

The other great thing this system would accomplish is if you are in a house, you can see out!

The only downside for non-stealth characters is the load would occur, just like always, but now you would still have the door to open, which would just open like an interior door now. Also with this system, a locked wooden door could be "bashed" open by those who have no use for subtlety.

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 one time.

This isn't as hard as people make it out to be.

Way I see it, there are two options for successful windows in alternate cells.
A, a mock up of the outside world outside the building. A few random NPCs and voila.
B, a wrap around texture with layering. Would simulate the window effect just as perfectly as a mock up minus NPCs, but improving performance. It so simple.
However, that still leaves loading screens, but I'm not particularly irked by them.

I'm guessing it's number 2. I love RDR and although it looks like a very detailed world any TES game is a loooot more complex and detailed...I mean in TES every object can be picked up, thrown around, collected and what not...not so in RDR, and yes the world itself is more detailed. You say other games have a lot of clutter, true, but I think TES beats almost all in clutter to detail ratio so to speak

Your speaking in terms of a single scene. I'm talking about the entire game. You want me to present evidence of how hundreds of other games don't stack up? It's much more reasonable for the burden of proof to lay on you to come up with just one game that has a fully realized huge open world with 300-500 NPCs in perpetual time flow(meaning the world moves with or without you) and with 3-5k separate interactive objects. Try as you might you won't find such a game outside of Bethesda.

I know ^^. That's why I said I just made a fraction of a comparison.
And that's why I also said that it's very hard to answer this question.

I know for a fact (since I've played all of the games a lot; so by experience) that the interiors in Bethesda's games are very detailed. There are tapestries, chairs, tables, cubs, plates, armors, weapons, potions, food, etc etc etc.
What I don't know for a fact is how other every other game is in terms of this. So therefore I can't just say that Bethesda's interiors are superior in terms of detail than any other game.

I can just barely guess, and hope as well, since it would mean that Bethesda got a good excuse for seperating interiors exteriors for performance issues which even the best optimized game in the world wouldn't be able to handle.

I wouldn't mind it like Mafia II, even though i was very very disappointed in that game.

I would have no inside out/side zone. Supposedly it was done to allow higher textures indoors where you are much closer to items and don't have "infinite" drawl distance to bog the framerate. Both Gothic 2 and 3 towns/house felt so much more real without separate inside/outside zones and I would gladly loose higher indoor textures for that more connected feeling. There was a graphics toggle for everything else in Oblivion, which I appreciated, why not have one fore indoor textures, or I can wait 2 years and someone will release and incredible texture mod. Please no indoor/outdoor zone. It makes the game feel so much more connected.