A note on tes4 city design

[Astarsis]

Apparently TES4 have a different approach for walled city (seen in rpg codex, MSFD)


you cant levitate over the wall

the horse cant enter the city

the cities are really mock up that can be admired but not entered through air

the real city has its own autonomous region (or possibly interior cell, I hope not, we need landscape)

that way the load time is smoother, and the clutter and npcs only exist inside the real city, the *outdoor* version only have architecture mockup

A bit of a deception, but it it mean more details, could be interesting

Cheers !

Astarsis

[Razorwing]

Thanks for the info

Hmm, so the stables are located outside the city walls? Strange.

I had developed a hunch that levitation would have been taken out altogether, going by the comment long ago that Bethesda tried to close off the game world with natural barriers, i.e. mountain ranges, wherever possible (but had to use the game message in certain places). Doing that wouldn't make sense if the player could levitate over the mountain. Hmm... maybe levitation *is* in, but you can only levitate so high, i.e. not over a city wall or a mountain range. I guess we'll see soon enough.

I wouldn't be surprised if worldspaces / autonomous regions / interior cells turns out to be one and the same, but that's just me. The screenies from inside the cathedral indicated to me that interior cells can have access to the sky, with the sun shining in through the windows and such, and it would be really cool if the weather inside followed what it was outside... I think it will, because it would be silly to have an effect like sunshine if they didn't make the indoor weather effect dynamic.

I really like that cities will be walled-in cell loads, because that'll let us add lots of detail outside the cities without having to worry about the framerate. With our main town in Morrowind for instance we had to have a buffer of very sparsely detailed exterior cells around the city to make it playable, which we then wouldn't have to do in Oblivion. On the other hand expanding a city or making major changes to it would be twice as much work, as the changes in the real town has to be reflected in the "window dressing" of the exterior world... but that seems like a small price to pay for all the benefits it would give

[Astarsis]

actually they're not interior cells, check my thread with screenshots in the official forum

we see plenty of landscape and it's too large and fancy to be an interior cells

besside it got neat features:

you can see inside the city from outside the walls (lets say from the top of a mountain)

you can see outside the city from inside the walls.

you don't see everything. I think clutter and npcs and blanked out. msfd didn't give away all the secrets yet.

it's not clear if levitation is totally cut off. I don't think so,

he said

you cannot levitate over city walls or jump over them

so it seems to be more wall specific

what's great is this:

if they can do that seemless transition with city autonomous regions, I see no reason why it would not work between other types of regions

you could see morrowind from cyrodil and vice and versa. at least for the zone you defined as *walls* or *passthroug* or *zone door(* or whatever you want to call it

it seems very interesting

another thing is it make travel smoother. the whole city is not loaded if you walk arround it.