[LE] Best Practise regarding using Load Door between areas?

[bongodoctor]

Building my first house/dungeon thingymagig and have finished the first level: Just five small Dwemer rooms and an elevator shaft. The outside load door is connected to a small facade in Tamriel and I am planning to add the next level down by using the elevator to connect to the floor below.

 

Is best practise to actually put the next layer in the same active file and put it physically below it? Or is it better to put the next layer in a new active file/.esp and link to it? Is there any performance benefits from using load doors as opposed to having a super large connected dungeon? Or is it purely cosmetic and a way of saving you from having to walk down stairs etc?

 

I suspect having multiple .esp files is going to deter people from downloading/installing it, but unsure what the optimum or maximum size of a section or level of a building/dungeon can be before it causes problems - I know I can divide it into smaller areas and use portals between doors/openings so everything doesn't have to render at the same time, but unsure whether the game has to render everything in the dungeon/building when I am in another zone connected by loading doors etc...

Edited July 5, 2022 by bongodoctor

[greyday01]

Multiple esp files are not needed. Consider Skyrim and how many cells and exterior locations in the same esm. There are rendering issues if a single cell gets too large or contains too many objects. Different cells that are supposedly in game adjacent or beneath each other are not really. like that. They are just files. The load door simply moves you from a specified spot in one cell f to a specified spot in another cell. There is no physical relationship. If you change your mind and want your cell to be at the far side of Skyrim it's just a matter of telling the interior load door to connect with a different exterior door.

[Hanaisse]

My personal opinion, create your 2nd layer as a new cell and use the load door between them. There is no need to make the 2nd layer it's own .esp, because an .esp can have multiple cells.

 

For example, the Inn in Winterhold has 2 cells - WinterholdTheFrozenHearth is the main part of the Inn, plus WinterholdTheFrozenHearthCellar as the basement, which is connected by a load door.

 

This method makes it easier, like greyday01 said, so that you don't accidentally fill your cell with too many objects (yes, there is a limit regardless of portals and optimization).

[bongodoctor]

Thanks both for the swift and informative responses :smile: I wasn't sure if a seperate section inside the same active file was considered a seperate cell or not - that makes sense - I had initially placed my second level below the first connected by a load elevator - so I will now create a new cell and copy that bit to a new cell then reconnect the doors. Is there a specific number of objects you can put in a cell or a recommended maximum - I am assuming this number includes all of the room parts as well as clutter, npc's and containers etc? Each of my levels currently has 5 rooms - a 3x3, two 3x2, two 2x1 corridors and one elevator shaft - I haven't counted the parts but I would imagine there are at least one hundred parts in each section. If you could suggest a ball park figure that would help a lot. I will have a look at some of the bigger cells in the vanilla game and count how many objects are included - I am assuming they kept the numbers down. Makes me wonder about the Legacy of of the Dragonborn Museum though as that has lots of objects...

Edited July 6, 2022 by bongodoctor