!!HousE ModuleS!!LooK HerE!!

[gamer999]

-BUMP-

 

very shameless i know ._.

[QQuix]

Check Oblivion Real Estate. There are some tileset links there.

[Vagrant0]

Interiors don't work well when part of the outside world. This is both for technical reasons as well as performance and general impact.

 

Technically, having the interiors setup as a seperate cell allows better control of what that interior looks like. This includes lighting, but also includes things like size and proportions which you might not be aware of. Many buildings have interior meshes which are larger than their exterior mesh. This was done so that NPCs could actually have enough room to move around. More importanly, having the interior as a seperate cell makes it easier to add and arrange items inside the building, since you wouldn't have to deal with trying to look around or past exterior walls, it also allows ownership and AI to be setup alot easier since everything in that cell can be set to a single owner, rather than having to define everything seperately. Many AI packages make use of functions related to a specific cell so that the NPC doesn't seem so fixed to a single location. Locking, and unlocking doors also doesn't work too well when both sides of that door are in a public area (the world). Lighting and shadows can bleed through walls, which can make buildings with any lights look really bad at night, and durring the day, make them too bright. Rain and other weather does not take statics into account, so there would be rain inside. Some buildings which have a basement or portions lower than the sorrounding ground cannot work because the ground in that area cannot be lowered without affecting other nearby portions, this becomes a bigger issue if the house is rotated anything other than 90 degree increments.

 

Performance wise, the use of cells allows everything within the cell to not be shown when everything outside the cell is. This makes it much, MUCH easier for even high end videocards to maintain a decent framerate inside towns. Most building interiors actually tend to have more polygons than exteriors, and the can do this because nothing of the exterior world, ground, trees, is being rendered. When you add things like clutter an other items, it only further increases the demands which would be needed. Seriously, go to the IC waterfront district, place an empty interior mesh above each of the houses there, compare your fps before that mod is enabled to the fps after, you will notice a significant hit just from the empty interior meshes. Just because you don't see the polygons doesn't mean they aren't being rendered. From a processing standpoint, it does a similar thing, when inside, everything which is outside is not being loaded or processed, when outside, everything inside is not being loaded and processed. Without this, all of the response detection within somewhere like a city would drop significantly because there would be so many NPCs which would need to be processed every second. Without all this, if you commited a crime, everyone in town would instantly come out of their house to either run away, or scold you. By having this, the internal workdings of NPC behavior can be contained to only a small area, and by nature of this, there is less constant strain on processing that behavior when outside that area.

 

There's a reason why open cities was finished, and why open interiors wasn't. Opening interiors only ends up bringing to light many of the failings of the engine, failings of the AI, and limitations as to what can be handled by current hardware. It also causes more problems than it solves, and requires an insane amount of additional work to make it happen with even a single interior. Just because you can see this sort of thing in another game does not mean that it works here. Most other games do not have nearly as much clutter in their interior spaces, or limit things in other ways (stages). Oblivion can really only have the sort of detail it has because interior spaces are setup as cells. You may dislike this, but it is a very important part of how this game works.

[LHammonds]

-BUMP-

 

very shameless i know ._.

Bumping is against the rules. Please do not add a new post if you have nothing of value to add.

 

Consider this an informal warning.

 

LHammonds (Moderator)