How many cells for Silgrad city ?

[Siegfried]

Like leveled lists with a small chance of spawning a gang of mugglers

[TheImperialDragon]

Now, about multilayers... Maybe some platforms going overtop the city? A new layer for new houses and stuff? Or that might not be a so good idea?

I like the alley ways idea though!

[Razorwing]

Hlaalu cities are built relatively tight together, as is evident from Balmora where houses are often built back-to-back, but that doesn't negate the point that Silgrad Tower was built too tightly in the TES3 mod.

The old team had to do it that way because they were part of Tamriel Rebuilt back then, and Tamriel Rebuilt used a 1:1 scale of the mainland compared to Vvardenfell, meaning cities couldn't have too large base area. If Silgrad Tower's base area had been twice as big it would have covered like half the distance between the border to Skyrim and the coast of the Inner Sea. Using a 1:1 scale back then made perfect sense since new lands had to share worldspaces, assuming it wasn't a TC, which it wasn't. But we aren't using that scale.

In the end it boils down to pragmatism. I'm not saying it wouldn't be lovely to see an extremely tight-packed Hlaalu city shockfull with clutter and other details, but there's no way a city like that can be played. The FPS would suffer horribly. The old team did half of that equation when they modded Silgrad Tower; they made it extremely tight-packed, which left very litte room (FPS-wise) for decorations and clutter.

Personally I think it would be more interesting to play a city that has tight blocks of buildings spaced out by plazas, town squares, parks, fountains, rock mounds, small patches of forest, and so on (at sandor's and HITD's discretion). Because that both ties in with the tight layout style as well as leaving sufficient room (FPS-wise) for NPCs, clutter, streetlights, windows, street vendors, outdoor restaurants, and what-have-you. I think sandor and HITD agree with me to some extent in that viewpoint.

[TheImperialDragon]

How about some of these images for multilayers (maybe a new section of the city, or maybe the city built overtop the old one?). I did them in the Morrowind CS a time ago, but they may be useful for concept. Never finished it, but there's more in the meine galerie.

[Siegfried]

Originally posted by Razorwing
Personally I think it would be more interesting to play a city that has tight blocks of buildings spaced out by plazas, town squares, parks, fountains, rock mounds, small patches of forest, and so on (at sandor's and HITD's discretion). Because that both ties in with the tight layout style as well as leaving sufficient room (FPS-wise) for NPCs, clutter, streetlights, windows, street vendors, outdoor restaurants, and what-have-you. I think sandor and HITD agree with me to some extent in that viewpoint.

I think that sounds about right, got to be merciful on fps, when I went into ST for MW I got abotu 5fps with a gig of ram and Nvidia 6800GT. You could implement multilayers with bridges crossing over from one block of buildings to the next, spanning the plazas and such. Another cool thing you could do with multilayers is have them become succesively higher as you move towards the center of the city, that would be logical defensively, because when an enemy attacks should they get into the city as they push the archers back they keep moving upwards, and keep the height advantage on their side. Also the most wealthy people should live on the top layers, with the poor living on the ground.

[Aorawn]

Originally posted by Siegfried
I think that sounds about right, got to be merciful on fps, when I went into ST for MW I got abotu 5fps with a gig of ram and Nvidia 6800GT...

Wow, five? I got at least 8 on my ATI x200

Then again, I also had my view distance set back to 3000, about a third of the max. But I didn't notice, because of the tightly-packed buildings. Though I do agree that TESIV Silgrad should be more spaced out.

[raggidman]

That is so that young thieves can get plenty of practice in...

I do understand that TES4 cities are in separate world-spaces from the surrounding area so that you can ignore topography, but I do not advocate ignoring it, quite the contrary.

Suggest that you start by taking the TES4 map of the Area, or those TES4 maps made by our modders, and comparing them with all the TES3 maps you have access to, then build an awareness of the general campaign and quest info etc (by liaising with the bob followed by lots of numbers) and determine how you will be moddelling the underlying countryside. then use that to spark quest ideas and campaign info, then go to cell requirements.

[sandor]

Thanks all for your ideas.

Some remarks.

TheImperialDragon
Most of what you show in your pictures is possible (in the same building).
The catwalks can connect two buidlings at the first level. Not on the second etc.

Originally posted by Razorwing.
Personally I think it would be more interesting to play a city that has tight blocks of buildings spaced out by plazas, town squares, parks, fountains, rock mounds, small patches of forest, and so on (at sandor's and HITD's discretion). Because that both ties in with the tight layout style as well as leaving sufficient room (FPS-wise) for NPCs, clutter, streetlights, windows, street vendors, outdoor restaurants, and what-have-you.

I was thinking the same because it solves the FPS problem and allows us to create tight building blocks. I am going to discuss this with HEIsTheDarkness.

Originally posted by Raggidman
I do understand that TES4 cities are in separate world-spaces from the surrounding

For Silgrad city it will be one worldspace. Thanks for your advise.

[HeIsTheDarkness]

actually it's not 1600 cells, but 24x30=720
OB heightmap tool is really buggy, f.e. I've created a heightmap for area -13..+13/-16..+16, but it also created cells at 32/-16..+16 and so on.

but the used area is 24x30 and the city is far from being square, so actual area is 75% of this - about 500-600

It is really big, but with the means of fast travel (if everything will be ok with the map problem) PC will be able to switch city parts really fast. It's approx 5-6 minutes to cross the diagonal of the city with speed=100 and athletics=40. I'll test it.
And I'll count the cells inside the walls.

Map of the city is a problem, I've found no way to create such. "Create Local Maps" functions create maps for each cell, the problem is how to make them into one. Maps for each cell are .dds, and cell coords are in the filename, so it's possible to write a programm, that will combine them. But who can do this?

[Axen]

Originally posted by Aorawn

Originally posted by Siegfried
I think that sounds about right, got to be merciful on fps, when I went into ST for MW I got abotu 5fps with a gig of ram and Nvidia 6800GT...

Wow, five? I got at least 8 on my ATI x200

Then again, I also had my view distance set back to 3000, about a third of the max. But I didn't notice, because of the tightly-packed buildings. Though I do agree that TESIV Silgrad should be more spaced out.

10 on my X850XT PE. With massive skip lag.