Open Cities - Open Interiors

[Arthmoor]

A question that comes up regularly on various forums, reddit, Discord, and the threads here is "Why don't you open the interiors too? That would be so cool!"

I agree, it would be very cool, but sadly it's not possible with the way the game was designed. Here's why:

Interiors don't match exterior size

While it may seem like things fit together pretty well, TES games usually suffer from some level of the "TARDIS Effect" - that is, the interiors are bigger than they look on the outside. In order to be able to make the exteriors work with the size of the interiors, an enormous amount of mesh work would need to be done to combine the interior cells with appropriately sized exterior walls. This is certainly possible, but it's highly unlikely to ever happen given the incomplete unofficial support for 3D modelling in Skyrim.

Render culling would get overloaded

Related to the above point, setting up open interiors would require the use of a large number of additional occlusion culling planes, while at the same time removing the existing ones that are already in place under each of the buildings. Occlusion culling planes are not as efficient as their counterpart boxes are and they would necessarily need to overlap each other in ways that would make the whole system do a great deal more work than it normally does. Again, this could eventually be done, and it may work fairly well, but it's probably not feasible in the end.

Location data would be lost

This may actually be the biggest deal breaker of them all. With the way the radiant quest system is designed, they are entirely dependent on interiors having distinct locations from one another. Moving all of the interiors into a single exterior presents an unfixable problem because the system will no longer be able to assign any radiant quest in an interior because the open versions would now be sitting in the city exterior location instead. Many of the Companions quests require this, all of the taverns need it to handle innkeeper packages properly, and the Civil War would probably break in horrible ways because none of the NPCs would be able to get moved indoors because there are no longer any indoor locations for them to use.

Even if one were to spend a lot of time editing quests to fit this, there are going to be a large number of them that will simply not work anymore because of this. It's actually partly this type of data that made it impossible to move Civil War events into the current open city system and why those battles must be fought in the closed cities.

If something triggers an event that forces NPCs into their editor locations this would also permanently trap them all inside their homes as the navigation data to get them back out will have been removed.

Also dragon attacks would probably mow them all down because there's nowhere for safety mods to make them run.

Weather would affect the interiors

With all of the buildings now out in the open, weather would be able to affect them. While SSE did introduce precipitation occlusion, it's not 100% perfect and it's not entirely known what's needed to make it work. So you'd be likely to see things like snow inside a house, rain falling where it shouldn't, and nevermind the affects of things like meteor storms and cyclones caused by dragon shouting. Indoor cells make it possible to create dedicated indoor versions of the exterior weather that don't include the wind and precipitation parts so that you can still hear the sounds and see the sky while indoors.

Simple Havok overload

Shifting interiors into the exterior worldspace would introduce hundreds of Havok enabled objects that are not ordinarily being rendered. This would happen city wide, and with the way the engine works, all of those objects are being checked for collision events. Even if it were possible to overcome all of the previous problems, this one would remain and there's nothing that can be done about it. Well, almost nothing, but even if every Havok enabled object were replaced with static ones, the problem of rendering all of those objects still remains.

Having our cake and eating it too

So how do we get what we want? Unfortunately it's likely that Bethesda needs to make us a new engine so that we can be rid of those pesky load screens once and for all. There are certainly plenty of other games out there like Dragon Age, The Witcher, and the Gothic series, but those engines all sacrifice a number of things that make Elder Scrolls games what they are because they had to at the time.

The good news is that past hiring trends over at BGS do seem to indicate they're working on a new engine. They posted far too many positions for those kinds of people than it would take to simply keep Frankenbryo alive for another game or two. Let's also not forget that when Todd Howard said "there will be 2 more games on this engine" Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 hadn't yet been released. So with any luck, Starfield will double as the tech demo for their shiny new engine that gives us all what we want. Though personally I'll settle for just getting back what we originally had in Morrowind

[Pseron Wyrd]

1 hour ago, Arthmoor said:

hiring trends over at BGS do seem to indicate they're working on a new engine. They posted far too many positions for those kinds of people than it would take to simply keep Frankenbryo alive for another game or two. 

Yes, Howard has stated that the upgrade to Creation Engine 2 is "...the largest we've probably ever had, maybe larger than Morrowind to Oblivion."   I'm very intrigued by what this could mean.

Bethesda Engine Is Getting Its Largest Ever Upgrade Before Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6

[Arthmoor]

I should probably have noted this was a repost of an article I originally had up on Nexus and hadn't even looked at in ages. My original statement was made assuming we'd be getting an all new engine based on the amount of hiring that was being done, but obviously since that time Todd has come out and made it clear that Starfield is being done on an updated version of the CE.