SKYRIMLE Open Cities Skyrim (by Arthmoor)

[MontyMM]

 But simply because of the magnitude of the changes made, I've always held off on it.

 

I think that is the general feeling about its inclusion in STEP.  I'm a fan, and detected not a single issue, but we would need a wide survey of quite structured testing before including it.  It has the potential to be a hellish source of complications, though it appears to me to be a very solid piece of work. 

[peppergomez]

Yeah, I think I will pass on it, as cool as it seems, for fear of introducing any instability.

[mothergoose729]

This mods discussion ended a long time ago, but I felt it might be appropriate to add one final epitaph. The mod, according to the mod author, broke some time around patch 1.9. It appears that open cities fills up the memory and causes instant CTD with large cities. Arthmoor doesn't know how to fix this and apparently has stopped trying. He also mentions several other game breaking issues, and the he himself has stopped using his own mod.

 

By now I'm sure everyone is familiar with the lip sync bug from Patch 1.9. It's a hassle. Nobody likes it. It doesn't appear we're going to get a fix for it. It's not the only problem that 1.9 brought to the table though. People talk about the 3.1GB memory barrier as though it has always existed, but I can guarantee you this is not the case, having seen my own RAM go as high as 3.8GB before 1.9 came along. That is not what this post is about though.

 

Nope, this post is about another problem that's not so well known, unless you're one of the many unfortunate souls to have run into increasingly more serious issues while playing with Open Cities Skyrim. See, somewhere not too long after 1.9 came out, I began noticing increasingly long load times. I thought nothing of it because I was also adding more mods along the way even though they were nothing big. I even figured it might be because my saves were getting steadily larger. So I began paring things down, in a test install of course. Nothing seemed to help.

 

I know I've mentioned this before, but it feels a bit more final now that I've been forced to remove my own mod from my game. At this point, there's nothing that can be done to fix the problem. Whatever it is, it's deeply embedded into the engine itself. Maybe it just doesn't like having stuff moved from worldspace to worldspace. Maybe it really doesn't like having all this stuff in the open world now. I don't know. All I know is I can't fix it, so I give up. I surrender.

 

Since the mod still works for some people, I'm going to leave it up, but I'm not going to do any further work on it except to fix a bug if someone finds one. I'm not going to do any more compatibility patches for it either, as for me there's really no point now.

 

Maybe some day we'll get open cities without someone having to bust their humps getting everything just right only to have it clobbered by a patch after it's done. They'll, you know, just be there like they were in Morrowind.

Basically, it boils down to being unable to travel within range of any of the cities the mod affects. Anything from severe stuttering (which didn't happen in 1. to infinite loading screens exiting an interior, to just plain crashing trying to enter an interior once I was in the city. Also if I was fast traveling in from elsewhere into the city it would usually just hang.

 

Got so bad I had to cook a patch for Dragonborn that returned you to Dawnstar because it wouldn't load Windhelm.

 

Yes, I tried ENBoost. It didn't help. There's not much it can do for me. Without it, Skyrim Performance Monitor says my game eats all 2GB of my VRAM, so there's nowhere for ENBoost to move the main system memory to. It's not a performance issue anyway - the game runs exactly the same for me whether or not I have OCS loaded.

 

I've tried pretty much everything I can think of at this point, short of having OCS being the only mod in the game and that would just get boring after awhile.

 

Considering this mod was finalized for 1.0 using CK 1.9 I wouldn't be able to suggest backporting to 1.8. You can try, but I'm not going to promise it won't blow up on you doing it.

[Aiyen]

Well we had a very healthy discussion about the issue with ILS going to windhelm. The solution to that is simply to reduce the amount of stuff loading.

ENBoost allows you to have higher resolution textures on more things then without it... once you have it setup properly, and not baring any weird driver related issues. But it still cannot solve the underlying issues of the game only being able to handle so much stuff at once.

 

Personally I have never been bothered by the cities being in their own worldspace.... I remember Morrowind... and the cities in that game where not nearly as complex, or detailed as the ones in Oblivion and Skyrim. Also the general level of detail in the world was not as great.

But we can all hope the next iteration will be full 64bit and have the ability to just stack 2x the amount of stuff on it that we can on skyrim now.

[torminater]

Sad to hear... Maybe the Stable uGrids mod could improve on this issue, as it is supposed to make cell transitions less strainfull and more straightforward (at least I heard that somewhere...)

[Salvador]

Sad to hear... Maybe the Stable uGrids mod could improve on this issue' date=' as it is supposed to make cell transitions less strainfull and more straightforward (at least I heard that somewhere...)[/quote']

 

Sad about OCS I waited long time for it to be stable and have enough patches to figure out it was no longer supported. But higher uGrids was cause of ILS for me. 

There was no FPS hit at all on my system going from uGrids=5 to 7 with ENBoost enabled, however, I would have the occational ILS.

 

The ILS would only be there loading from interior to exterior or from loading a save. Several attempts were needed to get it loaded. Yep, if you had the correct loading screen such as the dark elf, not the alchemy table and some others (Very strange behaviour), it would load normally.

[alexbeugelsdijk]

Now that Sheson's memory patch has been released, I have been looking into this mod again. I have a couple of city overhaul mods that add buildings to city worldspaces, and I was wondering if I wanted to make a patch that would enable me to use these mods with Open Cities, what would that entail?

[Masterblakie]

Would Open Cities be compatible with STEP V2.2.9.2?

 

[hishutup]

Likely, however you'd need to ditch immersive citizens

[Masterblakie]

Ok thanks

[TirigonX]

Likely, however you'd need to ditch immersive citizens

Why? immersive citizens has a patch for Open Cities.

[Nebulous112]

I have edited the topic title to add the author's name.

[hishutup]

Why? immersive citizens has a patch for Open Cities.

Oh, cool then you should be fine for the most part