Oblivion Houses that are completely exterior?

[thegreatgamecreator]

What I am talking about is editing the exterior house mesh to remove the wall behind where the door is supposed to go and place the mesh of the exterior cell inside and than tweaking the meshes to fit correctly seamlessly, than adding a door. I would like to know if anyone could help me do this or explain how it is done. I know nothing about editing meshes than placing them back into the game. I need to make the windows transparent also. I basicly want the whole house to be exterior no loading of interior cells. It makes it much more realistic and fun when you can see the landscape outside your house. I know that something like this would take up more memory. (Thats why bethesda probably didn't do it.) but I can handle it. I only really at this time only want one building to be like this so it wont cause any performance issuses. Im not talking about something big like a castle just like one of the houses you see in the city.

 

I would very much appreciate any help. This has always been I wish of mine to do.

[thegreatgamecreator]

I just want to know how I would do it at least. Sure I could edit the model and remove the wall myself but It would probably cause in game errors and crashes because I didn't go through proper procedure or something.

[LFact]

Check 'Exterior Home' category from ORE. By the way, it's not suitable for vampire character, and you will deal with... penetrating rain and snow.

[thegreatgamecreator]

I have seen those. But I would like to know how to do what I proposed. And Im sure I could find some way to solve those problems.

[Vagrant0]

What I am talking about is editing the exterior house mesh to remove the wall behind where the door is supposed to go and place the mesh of the exterior cell inside and than tweaking the meshes to fit correctly seamlessly, than adding a door. I would like to know if anyone could help me do this or explain how it is done. I know nothing about editing meshes than placing them back into the game. I need to make the windows transparent also. I basicly want the whole house to be exterior no loading of interior cells. It makes it much more realistic and fun when you can see the landscape outside your house. I know that something like this would take up more memory. (Thats why bethesda probably didn't do it.) but I can handle it. I only really at this time only want one building to be like this so it wont cause any performance issuses. Im not talking about something big like a castle just like one of the houses you see in the city.

 

I would very much appreciate any help. This has always been I wish of mine to do.

As all the vanilla interior models are either larger than their exteriors or have windows in the wrong locations, unfortunately you would probably need to either make a new model from scratch or heavily modify an existing one. In both cases, as you would only want one house like this, you would need to set it up as a new mesh with its own definition in the CS.

 

In addition to the weather abnormalities as mentioned above, the interior space of such a building would also remain unowned, meaning that you would manually have to set ownership for every object inside unless you wanted them to be freely used by others (beggars stealing your food and sleeping in your bed).

 

There are many other issues related to this which go well beyond the range of issues that just having good hardware can overcome, but as you are wanting to keep it to a very limited usage, there isn't much point in going into details. However the fact that even 5 years after the game was released nobody has successfully managed to implement this sort of thing on any reasonably large scale should tell you that it really isn't possible with the current game engine.

[thegreatgamecreator]

I think its possible. How do hard things get done if everybody says there impossible. :smile:

I know that beggars and stuff would come into the house that makes it more realistic. Theres a chance a beggar could end up sleeping in your bed and you have to off him. I wasn't planning on it being in the city. And yes they would have to be modified but objects can be scaled in order to fit correctly and parts that have clipping issues can be removed or modified. I think it can be done. Exterior houses have been done before so why not now. I would do the modeling myself if the nif exporter would work with my version of 3ds max. I don't know how to use blender and I don't really see any real good alternatives. It hasn't been done becaues nobody wants to have to do it. Its a cool idea but it requires work.

[Vagrant0]

I think its possible. How do hard things get done if everybody says there impossible. :smile:

*sigh* do we really have to get into it?

 

I'll put it this way, it's impossible in the sense that:

 

Doing so would require replacing nearly every model with specially designed ones that solve the problem of interiors not fitting within the exterior model (in the case of Bravil and some other tile sets, the interiors would need to be done entirely from scratch as none of the interiors match the proportions or layouts of the exteriors). As this would require exterior models to be larger due to having to have enough space to fit all the doors, furniture, and other clutter, some of the cities and settlements would need to be expanded significantly or re-done from scratch. As the game engine cannot handle multiple transparent layers (windows) they would either need to be crystal clear or 100% opaque (removing some of the reason behind all this). Furthermore, every building with a basement would have significant problems due to how the terrain can only go down so deep and can't have any holes punched through it. In the case of the Cheydinhal sanctuary, some parts of Chorrol, Skingrad, and every castle/chapel, this would require creating a new mesh to work as the terrain at ground level so that the real terrain can be dropped below the height needed for the basement.

 

To get around the weather issues, you would need to create a duplicate weather type for any raining/snowing/foggy weather which would have certain components changed or removed, including having to create a new particle emitter that only produces rain in the distance (that does not use transparancy maps) in order to make things look consistent. Every interior would need to be setup specifically to work with changing the weather to one of the copied versions based on the location of the player, which would still cause the player to see rain through the roof of a building until they were actually inside.

 

Lighting would be a significant problem as all lights work in a spherical area, so lights which are close to one wall will illuminate the surface on the other side. Lights would also leak out from one building to another without any concern for what sort of wall lies between. Shadows would have a similar problem. Animated lights, like fire and candles alone would flat out kill the framerate below 1 frame a minute as the animations which they play can cause real havok with videocards when used frequently (about 50 times per town cell).

 

Every piece of clutter/furniture would have to be assigned as being owned by an NPC, Specialized trigger zones would need to be placed within every single interior to force a Trespassing behavior and to eject wandering NPCs out to the street if they appeared in someone else's house due to the pathgrids existing within the same space (trying to use a subspace to separate them will only result in making the owner of the house stuck inside or outside (NPCs cannot use teleporting doors within one worldspace to move to a location within the same worldspace)) due to how NPCs ignore walls and other barriers when deciding where they will try to walk to. As every NPC in a city is located in the same space, comitting any crime anywhere in that city will result in the entire town becoming hostile and probably getting killed in the process.

 

The havok calculations for handling all those pieces of clutter and all the physical surfaces of the interior and exterior would grind even the best processors available to a near hault and create severe stability issues due to how the engine handles this information. The videocard demands of rendering every single object and interior within a town would even further diminish that 1 frame a minute framerate that you had, as well as overload the memory and processing buffer for even top of the line cards.

 

NPCs would further add to the reduced speed of graphics and processing to a much further degree. The game, regardless of hardware, regardless of setting, cannot handle more than 12 or so NPCs within the active area particularly well. Trying to accomplish the 20-30 which are present in every town (no town is larger than the normal active area) would force nearly every actor to a standstill and totally diminish any AI response from those actors (even if you could still load up the game and have it run longer than 5 seconds with everything else present). As you would also need countless scripts being run just to keep NPCs out of eachothers houses, the rate that ALL scripts would be processed would suffer greatly.

 

Even if you were running the game on one of those snazzy nitrogen cooled systems the Department of Defense has locked in their basement, the game would be unplayable. This is of course ignoring all the work that would need to be done in rebuilding 40-60% of the game world, creating new models for many things, and re-structuring every AI to work with such a system. Needless to say, the resulting mod would also conflict heavily with almost every other mod out there.

 

There have been dozens of people who have tried this to some degree and they have all failed due to one or more reasons mentioned above. The game simply is not designed to work in this way, and thus makes the idea impossible.

[alonsomartinez]

I did this about 2 weeks ago .Its exactly what you described with see throuh windows so you could look outside.The only problem I had was that it kept raining outside.I have no idea on how to solve that problem but if you wanted I could show you how to create and Exterior home like this one but youd have to solve the weather problems yourself.I think the weather problems have something to do with collision but im not sure.Im not the most experienced moddder.

[thegreatgamecreator]

@alonsomartinez I would greatly appreciate that thank you.

 

@Vagrant0 Yeah I know about those problems. I hope you know I wasn't planning on replacing every single house in the game with a completely exterior. I was just planning on building a single house mod. This house would not have a basement. And considering

in Vince Bly's Mountain Shack mod he made a completely exterior cabin with fire and furniture with lights and havoked objects and fire and effects without a single dropped frame. And no rain or snow penetrates the cabin. And I wont be using any custom weather mods so theres no chance of incompatibility. I am sorry If I wasn't clear but this mod is not meant to be a complete replacer just a simple house mod. I realize that on any computer the game would crash if I tried and replaced all of them, I'm don't lack the ability to see this, I am afraid you misunderstand, I apologize if I made you frustrated, I understand it can be frustrating to try to explain something to someone who seems to not get it, but I do get it.

[Vagrant0]

I'm well aware that you only planned on doing one building, which is why my first post mentioned that is was certainly possible provided you were able to make/find appropriate meshes. It was only the part where someone tries doing several buildings or a whole town that the problems REALLY start. This is what I meant by impossible.