LE Outrageous Idea - Open Buildings

[SeanenG]

I waffled over whether to put this in in Talk or Requests, and I settled on this because while I'd like to do it I don't really have the skills to make it happen. Alas.

 

I hate load doors - I could go on and on about all the reasons they annoy me, but I really don't like them.

 

There are a couple great mods - like Grey Ledge Manor and Rangers Valley Lodge - that add buildings directly to the Tamriel worldspace, so you can simply walk into and out of them. I love that. There's also the incredible Open Cities mod, which does the same thing for entire cities.

 

After seeing what other people have been able to do, I started thinking about how amazing it would be if existing buildings could do the same thing. For example, Jorrvaskr in Whiterun has doors on either side of the main hall - imagine if you could simply walk on through. In Dragonsreach, imagine if you could walk into the great hall and then out onto the great porch without loading screens. How cool would that be? It would be awesome.

 

So. I thought I'd poke around and see what I could do - starting with Breezehome in Whiterun, because that's a pretty simple little house. There's some major difficulties with making it happen, though. The interior rooms are a bit larger than the exterior building, the dimensions seem to be slightly off as well, and the exterior model is a single piece that can't easily be rearranged (or resized, but that might be my incompetence with the CK). It doesn't even have a real door - it's just a slight nook where the door activator can go.

 

So... I have only vague ideas about how this could even be accomplished. It would be nice if there was a set of construction pieces for exterior walls (as there are for interior walls) that you could snap together. Two-sided walls would be even better. I guess maybe you could export the house model and edit it to cut a hole for a door, then attempt to snug the interior pieces against the exterior walls. But then the larger size of the interior also messes up the layout of the exterior buildings in the city... would it even be plausible? Could you expand the size of, say, the Whiterun city-space to fit larger buildings?

 

So, am I the only one who loves this idea? Is anyone interested in trying to make it happen?

[crysthala]

You'd have to make new meshes to put the interior and exteriors together, which would be a feat in and of itself. Many areas are built out of individual pieces that you would then have to mesh together and attach to the exterior buildings. And, again, they probably won't fit inside the exterior, so you'd have to fix that, as well. The results would then probably need new textures to account for the changed sizes. Then you'd need to replace every single exterior mesh with the new versions, and replace every single load door with the free-swinging variety. Make sure to get some animators, by the way, since a lot of load doors in Skyrim don't have a fully animated equivalent. Once that's done, take every single interior object out of every single cell and put it in its open-world equivalent, and make sure that every single one of those countless objects retains every one of its relationships to its buddies--parents and children, scripts attached to references, marker positions, and so on. Excellent! Now, what are we going to do about those pesky basements? Well, let's get our animators to make a way of getting up and down trapdoors. Although, there is the issue of the ground being in the way. Let's landscape edit it to get it out of the way. Except now there's a crater around every building and dungeon, so we'll have to make some new form-fitted meshes to cover the holes, since the landscaping system in Skyrim doesn't allow us to selectively remove bits of the ground. Done? Excellent! Now redo the navmesh grid for everything in Skyrim. Rework every AI package. Place a bunch of portals all over the world so the engine won't crash from so many light sources in the same place, and get ready to have weird lighting anyway, since the entire world is now lit by sunlight rather than the standard interior lighting of individual cells. Oh, and you'll want to get an umbrella to take around the house with you, since your roof is about to get really leaky; the Creation engine doesn't allow for static objects to stop precipitation. (That, by the way, is the real reason it never rained in Fallout 3.) And learn the Water Breathing spell, because a lot of Skyrim's interiors will now be underwater, since they're on a level with the ocean.

 

It is a cool idea. It's such a cool idea that Bethesda would have implemented it if it were remotely feasible for this kind of game. There's just too much stuff in Skyrim to allow for the mechanics of that; there are too many individual objects to be manipulated and too many variables and NPCs to account for. It's possible in smaller scale, as with houses and the exterior walls of cities, but making even one city completely open-world is kind of an insane idea. Sorry, bro.

[Rennn]

It's theoretically possible, but difficult. You may actually have to move some buildings outside the town depending on how much space the exterior buildings take up. In addition, you could maybe make stairways leading a short distance underground, so the real house would be below ground level and you wouldn't have to worry about fitting the rooms within the shell of the house. That would make sense for lore as well, as buildings in the tundra are often partially underground to help with insulation, at least according to TES lore. However, that would require mesh modification as the ground would need to be replaced and several buildings don't have real doors. You might also wind up swimming, because some towns aren't far above sea level and therefore would have very leaky basements.

 

Skyrim's engine also only allows for 4 shadow casting light sources in the same cell, so you wouldn't be able to have many shadows at all. Nothing close to the original shadow density in town interiors.

 

Then I imagine this would break just a few quests, but that'd be something to worry about later.

 

All in all, it'd take months or years to get something like this off the ground and you'd almost certainly need a team. It would probably be more viable to get an SSD so that load times are reduced to the blink of an eye.

Edited June 30, 2012 by Rennn

[SeanenG]

It is a cool idea. It's such a cool idea that Bethesda would have implemented it if it were remotely feasible for this kind of game.

 

I labeled it an outrageous idea for a reason. :whistling: But I'm not sure that's completely accurate. It clearly is feasible because people have done it - I can't speculate on why Bethesda chose not to, it may have been due to the amount of work required, or it may be they're just used to doing it this way, I don't know.

 

I know some of the issues mentioned have been addressed already (the modder who made Grey Ledge Manor figured out how to stop it from raining inside the building, so that's possible, and the guy who did Open Cities was somehow able to copy everything over with relationships intact).

 

Does Skyrim have a world-wide water plane at sea level? *Checks* No, it doesn't. You can noclip through the floor near the coast and check - the water is only placed a short distance past the shore. So that's not an issue.

 

As for the lighting issue? Eh. I personally find the interiors of a lot of houses a bit too dark and shadowy, I wouldn't mind less shadows. But that's a personal taste thing.

 

Anyway, I'm not necessarily looking to remodel every building in the entire game - that's clearly an enormous undertaking, and besides, the number of buildings you'll actually find yourself visiting (let alone revisiting) is relatively small. So it could still achieve a pretty dramatic effect by sticking with large and visible buildings - Jorrvaskr and Dragonsreach as I mentioned, High Hrothgar is another great candidate, or the College of Winterhold since much of it is already outside.

 

I figure I'll start poking around with Jorrvaskr first and see what I can manage.

[Pronam]

There are interiors and exteriors because of the load, there would be a huge amount of objects per cell if all homes could be accessed directly. It'd cripple quite a lot of systems or maybe any as the game engine itself can't handle it. Compare it to the videos where people spawn thousands of objects like cheese wheels. That's the effect.

 

Of course that doesn't mean you could do it anyway, but I recommend doing it just in a limited manner :). Any single large building like the ones you mentioned are actually a big undertaking already.

[strazytski]

The even "open Cities" is also a feat at this time. current mods for that is not finished or abandoned and in world things are missing.

 

but it is possible and Modding Resource and Project Resource could help if you like to give it a shot.