Why no open cities?

Ok, I'm going to give this to you straight, why would it have open cities when Oblivion didn't? And with the amount of objects, npc's and all that going on in a city, do you expect most people's computer to be able to load that on top of loading that part of cyrodiil in full detail? That's why things outside of the city are a lot lower detail, to not use as many resources up.

Cities will be closed to be compatible with converted Oblivion mods including DLCs (when converter will be ready).

Considering that  skyblivion won't be done until at least mid 2015 I don't think PC's not being powerful enough is completely valid, (that'll be like 4 year after skyrim came out) but overall, it'll be easier to make the open cities down the road then now. Not every thing that could or should be converted has been, And it'll be far more work to recreate those for open city compatibility then then to convert them normally and patch it to an open city later on. open cities would greatly increase immersion but it's not worth it yet.

Actually the limitations are also with the engine itself rather than processing power of the PC.

Lifelong and I were dealing with Suran which has been cluttered out and there is no real good solution to performance problems with detailed cities. We tried occlusion planes, reducing shadow casting, reduced number of different objects, reducing textures, etc, etc. Lifelong has a state-of-the-art PC and the simply fact is that there is an obvious bottle-neck in how the engine can process so many objects in a given render.

Luckily i spent a great while replacing our hi-poly clutter, that would have seen Suran crawl to a halt no-doubt, or more likely ctd at a mere glance :-P

In short open cities are a bad idea period. The reason the Skyrim open cities is not officially been released is that it causes problems...nuff said.

u know how u can run into caves to enter/exit them. like u dont need to press space. just have that at the opening to every city and have it port you the the city worldspace could save alot of cpu usage. might wanna do this with skywind.

I did this thread a while ago [idea] Closed cities - worldspaces for various areas/cities (http://morroblivion.com/forums/skyrim/skywind-development/4647)

I'm always thinking ahead of what problems we might run into. I saw this one coming a long way off, but what is better, cluttered cities or open cities? Of course we want both, but its not looking like its going to be possible unless we do some serious optimizing.

 

 

I'm a long time user of the Nexus, but new here. Just thought I'd chip in with what little knowledge I have.

Open Cities is a wonderful project by Arthmoor (one of my all time favourite mods for both games), and while it worked fantastically for Oblivion, the Skyrim version has been derailed and development has stopped indefinitely. Something about the 1.9 patch just completely broke the Skyrim engine, and now it just can't handle the Open Cities. Arthmoor is something of a genius when it comes to mods, if he says it can't be done, I'm inclined to believe him. Unless Bethesda fix the game to the point where he can make the Skyrim version work again, I wouldn't even consider trying to do it for Skyblivion.

AAWSIUFBWEOYAUWE87OQGI;3W4OOHIW;EFBCAW;ODHGFWEOIDUWOENPSOAE9;POWJFVIWOSU N

LASentry

AAWSIUFBWEOYAUWE87OQGI;3W4OOHIW;EFBCAW;ODHGFWEOIDUWOENPSOAE9;POWJFVIWOSU N

Calm down!

LASentry

AAWSIUFBWEOYAUWE87OQGI;3W4OOHIW;EFBCAW;ODHGFWEOIDUWOENPSOAE9;POWJFVIWOSU N

Not sure if this was aimed at me, but I read your post further up. While I agree with the quality first outlook, I don't think closed cities were 100% necessary to facilitate that. Many people used "Open Cities Skyrim" with very little, if any performance impact. 

In my opinion (which I accept doesn't hold much weight as I'm new and haven't actively contributed yet) I'd like a level of consistency across both projects (something I'm happy to work towards myself, outside the main project once its completed if that view is not shared), and Skyrim itself. This is something I'm happy to work towards myself, outside the main project once its completed if that view is not shared.

If open cities were still possible I'd certainly be interested in making it a reality for Skyblivion, and use it in conjunction with OCS. Morrowind already has open cities, so there'd be a nice continuity, even if it meant more hard work translating city mods across. I personally find that open cities adds adds a good atmosphere to the game, and makes certain gameplay elements (such as Levitate), less of an issue when it comes to "breaking" the game or "immersion".

What, why you only helping out at the end of the project !
If I was you I would start working on it right now on this day.
Or do you only have idea's but don't actually produce anything.

Sjors Boomschors

What, why you only helping out at the end of the project !
If I was you I would start working on it right now on this day.
Or do you only have idea's but don't actually produce anything.

 

What I meant was that I'd help complete the project to the current rules/regulations/ideas, whatever. Then start changing and adapting things to my own personal preference once it's done. I don't want to shoot off on my own tangent before the core stuff is done. It would be rude to do it otherwise (as you've pointed out).

I'm sorry I didn't make that more clear originally. I am planning on helping soon, but my time is limited. Most of my forum time is at work. The moment I get a chance to install Skywind/Skyblivion I will be looking for tasks to do here.

My gut feeling is just don't even go there. Open cities Skyrim was a bug fest for me and as you say Arthmoor knows what he is doing.

Of course you can try but I feel like your time would be better off spent on other aspects to get a completed game.

The idea is hypothetically based on Bethesda patching Sky rim again, and Arthmoor getting OCS up and running again. I certainly wouldn't try something he couldn't do. I'm a rookie nodded at best, but in the time I do get to mod I really want to learn to do it well and broaden my skills. It's one of the reasons I wanted to volunteer here, as well as working on a Skyrim overhaul at times too. I may be being overly ambitious, but I'm determined to get Skyrim perfect.

Bethesda patching Skyrim again

It just won't happen. That is in the can and they will never revisit (by their words), for money reasons they have moved onto the next projects. There is zero dollars in having further development work on Skyrim.

 

No that was aimed at the original thread post...

LASentry

No that was aimed at the original thread post...

In which case I do apologise for taking it as i did. Alas it seems that whether anyone would like to see it done or not, it's already impossible. Shame really as it's one of those things I was really hoping to see work.

We don't know it yet. Arthmoor abandoned OCS because he couldn't find the source of problems, it could be just some linked reference with scripts or other minor issue impossible to track. And it doesn't mean that the same will happen in Skyblivion.

Open cities skyrim  works perfectly for me on 1.9 at least with the latest versions of the unofficial patches. just thought I'd throw that out there.

If that is the case, I think he means he can't further develop the mod.

Well, I know a lot of people are having problems. My game becomes noticeably less stable, even if I just run Vanilla, Unofficial Patches, and Open Cities. If I started adding more mods and/or texture packs it got increasingly worse, to the point where I would crash going anywhere near an Open City until I disabled it (then the game ran perfectly fine). That said, this was with UOP's at 1.9.

Arthmoor definitely seems to think there's a problem (just read his sticky post on the mod itself). That said, if some people are having issues and others are not there must be an underlying cause for the variation. Having an almost Vanilla game seems to help.

I'll do another Skyrim build soon, with a complete reinstall of the game itself, and then running just OCS and the new Unofficial Patches. I'll then add a few of my "must have" mods and see what happens. Fingers crossed.

Well, there are mods that reduce memory usage and load (ENBoost, Stable uGridsToLoad, etc.), so maybe Open Cities could work, but as someone else said, we'd need to optimize a LOT.

I've used ENBoost before, and the results were varied. Safety Load has just been released on the Nexus, which Arthmoor himself see's some light in. I'll give those a go and see if they help together. 

The game already needs loads of optimizing, the performance in general would be nice if it was more similar to Skyrim. I mean seriously, I ran the texture combiner with the highest resolution options and I still get a much higher FPS in Skyrim than I do Skywind.

Right, I've run some (quick) tests. First things first, my system specs:

CPU: AMD FX-4170 Quad Core

RAM: 8GB DDR3 Dual Channel

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7870 1ghz Edition 2GB VRAM

I'm running Windows 7 64bit. I loaded up the latest Unofficial Patches, along with Open Cities, ENBoost using the latest ENB binaries, and Safety Load.

Overall I'm impressed. I managed to play normally for an hour or so, with minor FPS hit in cities, but no crashes. It was only when I started fast travelling to each city consecutively that it started to struggle (and recovered quickly once I started moving around). I quickly fast travelled to different cities randomly about 15 times in five minutes, then CTD'd from gameplay in Markarth.

I dare say more VRAM in the GPU department might help the FPS. While power hungry, I think Open Cities may be workable again. We'll have to wait and see what a heavily modded game looks like, but I'm hopeful. 

So you're getting a constant 60fps? My GTX 560 has relatively similar performance to an HD 7870, but generally I only get around 50fps. In places like the Bitter Coast I get like 35-45.

I couldn't tell you exactly, I wasn't running any analytical tools. It was just a case of "load it up and see how it feels". Wishy washy admittedly, but it told me what I needed to know. At an educated guess, I'm probably getting similar performance to you; 60FPS indoors, ~50FPS outdoors, which then dropped to about ~25-30FPS in the cities at points, but recovered quickly. When I was really overloading it it probably dropped to ~15FPS before crashing. In my opinion it was certainly playable under normal conditions, even with the occasional FPS drops.

Well when it's at the point that I'm running 2k and 4k textures in Skyrim and I get higher performance than in Skywind, that's pretty bad, so hopefully we can sort that out.

Hopefully. I would help with that, but I honestly wouldn't have clue where to start. In fact, I'm starting to realise I don't have any skills that could really help this project out. Most of my experience is in editing existing stuff.

I've got a little side project going to teach myself, where I ask for permissions to use other peoples mods. I then pull it apart, see how they did it, and put it back together how I feel it fits best into the game with everything else I've already got. The overall aim is to eventually overhaul Skyrim, but in a completely seamless, unobtrusive way. I'm detail orientated, so a lot of my time is spent fixing picky details: making sure everything has correct crafting recipes, or the enchanted versions of stuff are correct (well, creating them because people who make weapons don't usually do this aspect). I've got permission to use a Divine Intervention spell, but it doesn't work indoors, so I've got a bee in my bonnet on how to do it. It's these kind of things that slow an already painfully slow project down. It's just me being a perfectionist, and trying to do it right.

I'm also one of those people that sees a good idea and immediately wants to see how it works, and try and help if I can. It's not just restricted to Skyrim modding either. I've got a million-and-one ideas floating around my head of stuff I'd like to do. Unfortunately (in the nicest possible sense), I'm a new husband and father so time gets shorter and shorter. I really need to focus in on one or two projects, and try and forget about the rest. I think building my Overhaul will give me some skills that could be transferred here, and it's such a rewarding project if I can see it through. Plus seeing Skyblivion and Skywind incorporated into my Overhauled Skyrim would be magical! Imagine playing all three games seamlessly, with consistency throughout. 

And I've just realised that I've gone a complete tangent. Sorry about that. I hope one day I'll be good enough to help with Skyblivion (chances are Skywind will be done at that point).

What I was trying to say before I got distracted was that I did some further tests without ENBoost, just Unofficial Patches, Open Cities, and a handful of mods. Plus Safety Load. All is good with my game. Perfectly playable, smooth FPS everywhere. Clearly only having 2GB of VRAM makes ENBoost pointless at best, and detrimental at worst.