Creating an Open House.

[CaptainAwesomepants]

Hey all, new to modding so mostly speaking in theoreticals, but I'm looking to build a player's home that's got at least one part completely open to the world. As in, doors are open and you walk in and go into the kitchen and whatnot.

 

Does anyone have any advice on this other than "Just get in the CK and play around"?

 

Would love to hear from anybody that's messed about with this and had success.

 

Cheers!

[EmissaryOfWind]

It's really just as easy as building it in an exterior cell, but you might run into some performance issues if you put a lot of objects there.

[thestigma]

There is nothing inherently different about making a house (or even a dungeon or something) that has no loading screen to enter it.

Just don't make a separate cell for it - and other wise do everything normally.

 

The primary reasons seperate cells are used as much as they are is:

 

- They greatly help performance. When in a cell your computer only needs to render and calculate what's going on in there, and nothing else. That lets you add a lot of detail and still have good performance - even if that new area is already in a poorly performing area (like a busy city)

 

- It helps greatly with compatibility issues. With a seperate cell the only change you need to make in the main world is a simple entryway of some sort (maybe including a new exterior of a building or something to make it believable), but in any case the impact is minimal. If there was no loading screen you would be "polluting" the vanilla worldspace a lot by making a lot of changes there - and thus making it far less likely to work well with other mods that edit something in the same area

 

But - if you decided to make an open house in an area that already runs fast and is in a less busy area that is unlikely to be used by other mods anyway then both those disadvantages are at least lessened. You will still never get quite as good performance though. You may notice that large home mods even use several cells in the same house in order to make add extreme detail with minimal performance impact because each cell separately is well within what the game can handle.

 

I would like to add that there does exist a smarter way to do this if you plan well - using occlusion planes. Occlusion planes are basically invisible "walls" that you place down to tell the game that "when you look at these things you can forget about rendering anything behind it for the time being". Using such techniques you could remove most of the performance penalties of the outside world while you were inside the house. Still ... this needs good planning and adds some restrictions. You can't expect to utilize a very open design with with long lines of visibility and windows everywhere - otherwise there will be few logical places to put occlusion planes that actually help out with performance anyway.

 

This mod is one that adds occlusion planes to the vanilla game - and if you want to learn more you might pick up more info there:

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32505/?

 

All in all it just depends on a lot of factors and if you make an open area with no loadscreens you just need to keep the performance limitation in mind. If you aren't going overboard on object density or try to add to an already busy area then you might not even need fancy optimization tricks. Just expect there to be limits. Even huge projects like "open cities" do end up working - so it is possible - it just has it's costs.

 

-Stigma

Edited November 30, 2016 by thestigma

[CaptainAwesomepants]

That is one brilliant and informative response mate, thank you so much for that!

 

Holy cats, I'm all about the occlusion planes stuff. I read a bit about it a couple of years ago in some gamer's mag and am wicked stoked that I can actually implement some of those principles in my own creations.

 

Seriously though, what a great welcome message to my first thread. You're aces.

[thestigma]

:D

[IsharaMeradin]

There are a couple of no loading screen homes out there which you could use to get ideas on how to piece together the various elements you may need to use.

Heartwood Cottage

Grey Ledge Manor

 

One thing about occlusion planes. Don't go overboard on them. I've used the mod that was linked and there are times when it thinks that you shouldn't see what is in the next room and so it doesn't render. Thus you are left looking at empty grey-ness through a doorway. I, personally, find that more annoying than restarting the game every so often to flush the game's memory.

[thestigma]

There are a couple of no loading screen homes out there which you could use to get ideas on how to piece together the various elements you may need to use.

Heartwood Cottage

Grey Ledge Manor

 

One thing about occlusion planes. Don't go overboard on them. I've used the mod that was linked and there are times when it thinks that you shouldn't see what is in the next room and so it doesn't render. Thus you are left looking at empty grey-ness through a doorway. I, personally, find that more annoying than restarting the game every so often to flush the game's memory.

 

Oh yes, they do require some planning. I don't think I have seen much bugginess with them (ie. not rendering stuff it SHOULD be rendering) but you can easily get unexpected side-effects unless you carefully place them and extensively test them. otherwise you can get stuff disappearing when it should't - because the player is viewing something at an angle that you didn't think about.

 

As far as I understand occlusion planes aren't completely "free lunch" in terms of performance either. They do in themselves add another check - so adding too many of them, or adding them in places where they can at best do very little can end up being just as bad as not using them in the first place - or even perform worse.

 

That's why if you plan build something from scratch it is wise to incorporate them into the design idea from the start rather than trying to optimize with them later in a layout that isn't all that well suited for it. Some smartly placed short corridors with corners for example can let you occlude "everything else" from the room you are in in a best case scenario - while if you just have a doorway connecting the two directly you will have a much harder tme getting nearly the same efficiency.

 

-Stigma

[CaptainAwesomepants]

Thanks heaps you guys.

 

My plan is to work out an area that's Lower Story and half of the Upper Story that are Interior, though with hallways and walls dividing things nicely so I can stack lots of stuff in them. Then, the other half of the top floor and a "patio" of sorts will be outside. That will use similar ideas with walls and things obscuring the view.

 

I really, really like those mods you linked too. That dude's got it down to a bloody science.

 

This will be my first house mod, with an eye to porting it to the PS4 (once I can afford SE on PC) so I'm going in knowing I have to be a bit modest in my endeavours, but I'm shooting high anyway.

[EmissaryOfWind]

In a similar vein, do you guys think there's any way to "fake" a view from a window? Like instead of a real view have kind of a parallax effect with a few images on planes, so it isn't just a picture on the wall but also isn't as resource-intensive as really having LOD there

[CaptainAwesomepants]

In a similar vein, do you guys think there's any way to "fake" a view from a window? Like instead of a real view have kind of a parallax effect with a few images on planes, so it isn't just a picture on the wall but also isn't as resource-intensive as really having LOD there

THIS. I'd be all about this shiz, this sounds like something that could help when I will inevitably have to compromise and "seal in" the cell.