Large House Mods WITH Loading Doors

[Counciler]

Hello Nexus,

 

I've been searching mostly in vain for a house mod that uses separate cells (through loading doors) for each room or major area. Back in the days of Morrowind, almost all house mods used this style of building, but ever since Oblivion, it's gone the way of the dodo. For those of us with older computers, or who like to fill our houses with followers, having the ENTIRE house in one massive cell can easily cause low FPS or even CTDs.

 

So, I need to find a large house, separated room by room with loading doors. Yes, that means I'm asking for loading screens when I want to go from the bedroom to the living room. Can anyone help me find one? I've found so many beautiful homes, but sadly they all just stuff everything into one or two cells. :(

 

TL;DR

 

Need house for followers that is not a single giant interior cell.

[Naturlich68]

I think you'll find that more often than not this problem can be solved through optimisation. My system isn't "upto spec" anymore really, and I hate buildings with lots of load doors because then I spend all my time waiting for the next area to load, then the next, and back again, and so on, so frustrating, but a place causing constant lag can be just as bad!

 

The place I'm hopefully going to release later today is a fairly big place with sleeping space for 17, and 4 coffins (not honestly sure is NPC's use coffins), and sufficient space for them to move around in. There are a number of areas in the mod, and aslong as you're in the Dark Brotherhood you can use them all, even if your not you should be able to use Davokiin's room without the guards feeling the need to behead you lol.

 

I've tried my best to optimise the place, and as a level 1 player (using COC from load screen to test the place) I get no problems with performance, when I use it with my level 91 character I get some of those annoying game stutters around wall torches and the few shadow casting lights, so I may swap out the torches for wall scones instead. I've split the place up with room boxes and then occlusion planes inside rooms so I'm confident that this large place wont make a large hole in any ones FPS, but that remains to be seen I guess when it's released, I am a beginner and mistakes are probable lol but I have put alot of work into it.

 

My system specs are Core2Duo E8400 @ 3.4Ghz, 2x HD4870 512mb crossfire, 4gb (3 usable) DDR3

 

So, I'd say to other beginners, and probably some experienced modders also, to forget how good their own PC is, and hammer away at optimisation. Beautiful places are only beautiful the first couple of times you look at it, after that they are work places that people want to use, spend some time on making it run as smoothly as you can and strike a balance :)

 

Hey though Counciler, I'll be looking for particular feedback from you once it's released!

 

Nat

[Counciler]

Thanks for the fast reply. When you say optimization is the problem, would you be suggesting there's something I can do to help that?

 

As someone who's experience with modding starts and stopped at Morrowind (The Oblivion CK confused me madly), I am only vaguely knowledgeable about modding these days. I know enough to do some basic things, but nothing about Skyrim related optimization.

 

Also, are you aware of any hard or soft limit on the number of high quality/poly/definition followers one can have in a household? My game begins crashing to desktop at eight or nine, and reliably so after that. I literally can't get another follower into the house after that.

[Naturlich68]

Sadly with optimisation, no, it's not something you can do, it's done when creating the mod. It's adding things like room boxes with portals and adding occlusion planes, in their own ways they stop whats not in view from being rendered so that a big area doesn't hammer the machine of the person using your mod, and ofcourse being careful with lighting and clutter/vegitation helps alot also. Some of it is unavoidable if the person making the mod wants his/her area to look fantastic, fantastic looking usually means people like you and me simply can't use it. Ofcourse the cheap and nasty way around doing all the optimisation is to use lots of load doors and separate cells every area... so then we spend more time in load screen hell than in the area itself!

 

I'm not suggesting optimisation will fix all our woes, but spending time and effort on it before releasing a mod would certainly help. For example, my lowly machine used to be able to play Syrim with amazing detail settings, I was always massively impressed at how well a game like this played, and I've seen it play well on worse PCs than mine! But, since installing mods, thats changed, I've had to do some serious tweaking of all my ini files and my system itself to keep Skyrim playable (these are tweaks anyone can do to help). Removing some castle and dungeon mods did help alot though recently.

 

As for followers, my Lakeview is full of them!! Hence the need for more space lol I don't think poly count is the major problem (though that depends on your graphic card really), it's more likely down to skin textures, if you use addon races/followers that are using larger textures, or you use a high detail texture that they share, that can really cause issues with alot of followers in view at the same time. I ran a texture optimiser through Skyrim to compress all the textures, it was from Nexus. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801 That helped me keep better quality skins and still keep the load on my graphic card down.

 

Btw, my modding experience only comes from a Flightsim called Screamin Demons Over Europe, Unreal Tournament and UT2003 and Battlefield Vietnam, so I'm not entirely up to date lol

 

But from all you've said, I certainly would like you to try my mod out and give feedback, because although I've tried to make the place look good and be a larger living area for groups of followers, I've also tried to make sure it's REALLY usable by people like you and me as well. So with that, I'll release it around 7ish tonight regardless. It probably wont be in a fully polished state, but mods are never really finished lol and feedback will help guide me more.

[Naturlich68]

Just to add, if you really need a place thats split up into cells with load door, Underground Bathhouse has a version that has had this done to it and there is enough space inside for multiple followers :)

[Counciler]

Just to add, if you really need a place thats split up into cells with load door, Underground Bathhouse has a version that has had this done to it and there is enough space inside for multiple followers :smile:

 

I'll download that and give it a go, see what it's like. Hopefully it's a good one.