This would be a good idea if everyone on the planet had 8 GB of RAM and Windows 7, but sadly, we're not there yet.

Also, the OP's sig clearly states his comp has 1 GB of Ram... Be careful what you wish for.

It would be nice but things like this won't happen until at least the next gen consoles. It is just too much of a performance hit for this time, unless you have a really good gaming PC. For now, I would settle for the windows to have some kind of lighting effect on them when people are home and awake so you know when not to break in.

That being said, I would like to see them put more than one building interior in each interior cell, just to save on load times. All the buildings are made to scale and almost all the buildings could potentially have their basemant, main area and upstairs all in the same cell.

It does not need this. I played Gothic II 6 years ago with 1GB of ram and you can see out doors and windows and the graphics were on the same level as Morrowind. Beth just chooses to have indoor/city/outdoor so they can have higher textures indoors and in towns allowing greater detail. Since indoors you primarily view things that are close and as such its nice to have higher textures. That said, for me its not worth the trade off. Both Gothic 2 and 3 towns/houses felt real since you didn't have this break in game every time you enter/exit a town or house. You could see in a window or open door what people were doing inside or outside. Balmora from Morrowind felt like part of the world because when you were on a bluff above you could see the people and walk right into town from any of many directions including leaping over a wall or building. It can be done they just can't have super high textures indoors or in city. Which as impressive as the outdoor textures were in Oblivion I wouldn't mind.


Since they will probably have indoor outdoor cells this would be the next best. Sigh.

I'm trying to picture a fully "open" Imperial City Market district, with a reaaaaaallly huge radius fireball. Fired at the wall between three shops. And all the items in those three shops doing the bouncing-physics thing....

(And my cpu crying out in agony. :rofl: )

+ Clutter + AI is never fun for consoles.

In something like red dead redemption, or even gothic games. You have npcs that are given a path, in some cases a non-dynamic-non-container inventory, they either stand still, or wander around. Their reactionary ai, at least in red dead, is a singular-in-response-to-action kind, no matter how well animated it is (and it was quite well animated). Oblivion, and no doubt skyrim, will have systems in place that will mean more complicated behaviors. This is a toll on the engine nomatter how you look at it. As flawed as radiant ai was, and as radiant story might be, they are systems I prefer (flawed systems are always better than no systems). Even in 2011. Plus there are reactions in place to theft, guards, many individual items. It's the most complicated system in any open world series of games ever made.

Also, in gothic 3's credit, it also had some conflicting ai in terms of monsters vs npcs. Not quite oblivion level, but it was present in some super simple format.

Back to skyrim.

Make interiors sectioned, but not invisible. Make exteriors sectioned, but not invisible. When looking out of a window, have npcs that wander by, just don't populate them with dynamic behaviors. Make the geometry only something you can see. (so a single building + wall + 2 or 3 npcs) We just need an emulation of the game outside, not the actual game outside.

As for the interiors, just get low poly meshes and textures and populate them behind glass. You can see inside, but you don't need to see the high resolution texture of an apple sitting on a bench. We just need the illusion of population of interiors. Similar to the way dragon age 2 worked. Only perhaps a bit more advanced.

And if you can enter by window in this game, just separate it by a loading screen like everything else. And apply exactly the same rules as if you entered by door.





Alternately - Just create a hugely accomplished lod system. And have it all rez in at different rates compared to what the player will see. For instance an interior though glass have 0.1 lod, whereas the street itself, has max lod at 25% viewing distance, and 75-50-30-10-5 as you scale it back, except for landmarks, combine that with full culling based on sight, and interiors can be as complex as they want to be, they will just always scale in correctly. Assign x 4 cpus a major task with a few secondaries, AI, Object, Animation, Sound, Distant Lod, etc etc. And you have a fantastic engine.

This is not light talk however, as programming all of this correctly would take industry rivaling talent.

Even recent games can't quite get it 100% right. Crysis 2 did a reasonable job however.

Yeah, we already know they will be separating interiors and exteriors again, although they did say open cities if I remember correctly. More to the point, there is quite a bit of difference between what Gothic II did and Oblivion did, heck the difference was even there between Oblivion and Morrowind. The main problem of doing exteriors and interiors together isn't a matter of graphics its a matter of processing. In Morrowind and Gothic II basically nothing had realistic physics like things do in Oblivion. Everything from food to weapons to armor to corpses all had full Havok physics on them. In Morrowind and Gothic there are a preset number of death animations for each creature and it chooses one depending on how it dies, sometimes not even going that far.

Also, even though Radiant AI was cut back severely before launch, every NPC that is being rendered at any time in Oblivion is running AI packages that are still better than most games out there. Most games (like Fable, RDR, and Just Cause 2) use NPCs that only have a few possible packages. They really don't get more complicated then things like Walk Here, Fight Back, or Run Away. In Oblivion all of that had to be processed. So it isn't a matter or them wanting better detailed environments (although it is part of it), it is about whether or not a system can handle processing all of the massive amounts of AI, collision detection, and physics of all that at once. Even Oblivion on the 360 would drop a few fps if you shot a big fireball at a shelf full of books.

I thought I remember and interview where they, Beth, specifically said it was for higher texturing indoors, but I could be wrong. I'll have to go back and try blasting a book shelf. From what I remember when I alt+tab out of Oblivion and viewed my system resource logs my 2 CPU's on my core duo never went over 50% and I tried a lot of different stuff. Granted they were OCed to 3.4Ghz. If you said it drops fps on the 360 when blasting a book shelf I guess it would be CPU capping. Hummm I say bring the big CPU maul out. I should be playing Skyrim with a quad core sandy/ivy bridge clocked at 4+GHz, mmm some 8 thread goodness right there paired with 8GB of ram. Well I hope your memory is good and we do get open cities. This puts some of my troubled heart to rest.

wha should could/should do, is to keep the cell system for houses, so that the game can actually run. But then add a "dummy" version of the city outside the windows of a house, in lower detail and without npc's prolly, but just so you can see outside

And so would window lurking

Interior and exterior separation is about more than just cutting down lag - it was a design choice. Its so the dev can give an interior more flavor (unique lighting, color shade, ambient noise, etc) and functionality. You CAN do this with without separation but it is nowhere near as streamlined - it might even be worse.

However I do like the idea of clear windows that let you see at least something of the world outside. Also actually being able to hear weather FX would add a lot.



Yep. Exactly. I don't know why but I have always felt this way in TES games as well. Some houses in Oblivion make me feel like i am in a coffin.

Meh. Thought I would start the engine of THIS thread again...... Aaand now I have to go to bed...

Modders don't time/budget restraints. If I were a game developer debating whether the team should devote their time and energy towards making an idea like this work, I'd say it wouldn't be worth it. While it would be nice to be able to look through a window, it would really be nothing more than eye candy that served no real purpose to the over all game.

They won't do it because it would greatly influence game performance. (I think)

It would be nice to have not only the cities, but indoors a part of the exterior world. But what about dungeons?

Aren't buildings and structures confirmed to be destructible? How would that play into this?

The hell? Where did you hear this? Destructible and constructible environments are probably the most intense upgrade you could ask for.

There isn't any other game franchise in excistence that has as many (3D) objects in it as Bethesda's Elder Scrolls.

You can't expect an Elder Scrolls game to havre all those objects that are rendered in the interior cells be in the exterior cell. That would be a huge drain on the power. The comparisons with Fable and RDR are stupid because those games don't come close to the amount og objects and details that Bethesda puts in their interior cells. First of all there are a lot less buildings in both those games and neither has a lot of objects in these buildings. And you can't even pick up those objects, they are part of the static invironment.

Yes, because in Skyrim, I will spend most of my time inside a house. :facepalm:

For the love of god this again?

You can't expect this to be done by Bethesda, a random modder will be happy to oblige you about 6 months after the game comes out.

This requires the cell system that Bethesda has almost undoubtedly used in the game to be almost completely reworked so that all the shops and their entire contents are put into a building that has to have an internal and external rendering and collision system. This would make placing everything harder for both Bethesda and the modding community because you would always have a wall getting in the way. On top of that, the game needed some cell transitions so the game could progress. The Imperial City was recreated FOUR TIMES for different quests.

Wait for a modder to make the damn windows function. Stop asking Bethesda to get rid of loading screens and static windows so you can have a touch of realism. They wouldn't be able to make multiple versions of the same location if the cell system is removed.

I don't really know, but in the gameplay trailer (IGN) from around 1:16 - 1:20, you can possibly see that the windows are not done in this way but just the same as Oblivion...

It doesn't matter to me though... I'm not going to have a worse opinion of the game because I can't look through windows...

Pete already confirmed that windows function exactly the same as in Oblivion.

Yup. Dynamic shadows alone will make this game 100x better looking and have a better atmosphere than Oblivion.

Also, it was already confirmed that the interiors are separate like with OB/Fo3/NV. Why are there still topics on this? That is a major engine change that they won't be making between now and release, so these are kind of pointless... :/

While not a marvel of Programming efficiency, you have to remember, even Morrowind was tracking a thousandfold more variables than Red Dead Redemption ever was. That game couldn't even remember your horse unless you parked it in the designated area.

Red Dead Redemption also lacked any real interactive or nonstatic objects in the game. Bethesda's games eat memory like China eats rice for a reason other than "Oh, I'm going to compare apples and oranges, and conclude Bethesda is lazy".

The Shader example I'm not entirely sure about, but What works for one platform, may not work for another. Part of that could be being lazy, part of that could be necessity to bring the game to three different hardware sets.

There is a technology called portals.(Yeah, just like in the game Portal) It can be combined with TARDIS.

I saw it done with my eyes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdeoMeSiL-A&feature=player_detailpage#t=57s

:)
seek to 00:57

It's just a performance issue. If you've ever looked into the Open Cities mod then you'd see how much of a drop in performance that could cause. It's simply more efficient having separate areas with a transition between them. Tamriel itself was already quite huge, having everything else in the game already attached to it would simply have brought most systems to their knees.