Kindo on 12/5/2009 at 23:50

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Aside from the game loading during briefings - the mission being loaded while this happens, and then you zone into an area separate from the City, or wherever you will move around in this game - I really don't see how it would be justifiable to design Thief IV with obstrusive loading zones.

A comment regarding 'the massive worlds' found in Oblivion and Fallout 3: keep in mind that the exteriors of these games are little more than giant, more or less empty, spaces of terrain. Aside from foliage and buildings, it's a static landmass with the occassional AI running around. In Thief, you need a fully working light/dark system, with AI that do more than run and shoot at random; they need to be able to listen and calculate sound and movement on the fly, preferably very intelligently. Not to mention a much more advanced audio environment overall. This leads me to believe that we can't really have a world as vast as is made possible by the Gamebryo engine, in a game like Thief. While the City (or equivalent hub) might be able to design like this more or less fully, making use of background loading and paging, at least the missions need to be moved to separate zones in order to impress. Having both the City and the area for your current mission active at the same time doesn't sound feasible to me. Naturally, however, the missions themselves should be able to be created in large scale (think bigger than anything we've ever seen in Thief), and more than make up for the cramped experiences in TDS.

Opal-Eyed Fan on 13/5/2009 at 07:23

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I'm mostly familiar with modding for Oblivion, :wot:
and I am not suggesting that Thief4 should use that particular engine,
they'll use whatever engine Deus Ex3 is using to save time and money.

But loadzones should be a thing of the past for a thief game.

I'm going to use Oblivion as an example, and yes I know a thief game has a different approach to ai and sound, but I'm going to ignore that for a moment.
:(
Does Oblivion use loading extencively?
Yes.
If you look at a house in Oblivion,
there is a mesh in the gameworld,
and a door that loads into the cell that holds the interior.
The main reason why this is,
is surprisingly the weather.

It would rain and snow right through the house mesh and that is the first reason why all interior in Oblivion is in a cell of it's own.
Reason nr 2 : daytime vs night time.

If the interior was put inside the housemesh in the main gameworld of tamriel the light inside would be extreme during the day when the sun shines,
and would change to very dark after the sun sets.

This also looks very silly and unrealistic, (I've tried it out myself)
so Beth have no alternative but to make all interior exist in a cell of it's own,
hence all the loading.

If you played through a couple of dungeons though,
you'll notice that they are divided,
sometimes into three cells sometimes into four cells.
Why did they make the player load their way through all these doors between these cells,
rain and daytime is not the answer here.
I've taken a few of these 4 cell dungeons and put them together the way they should be,
the whole structure in one cell,
no loadingdoors,
and guess what...
No difference in framerates at all.

The encreased amount of enemies also had no effect on the performance.

And I've tried forming even larger dungeons by connecting parts from 7-8 different dungeon cell's just to see if a pc can handle it.
Guess what?
- no problem running that stuff at all.
I'm playing on an fairly average pc.

My opinion is that the loadingdoors used everywhere in Oblivion has little to do with their engine limitations,
and more to do with priorities and gamedesign.

Is it possible to make building structures in oblivion that roughly mimicks the levels
bafford cragsleft bonehoard assasins undercover return to the cathedral sword and life of the party,
to name a few,
without having to use loadingdoors?
Yes.
Can one also put all these structures within walking distance of eachother in the same gameworld with no loadingdoors between them?
Yes.
In the same gameworld could somebody make a building with a hundred and fifty rooms and 50 guards patroling it,
and have ok framerate?
Yes
- with enough time and devotion this is possible.

Ofcourse nobody has that much time on their hands,
but large structures such as those we love from thief 1 and 2 should be no problem to make with todays engines.

But then again, I'm only familiar with Oblivion. :eww:

David on 13/5/2009 at 07:34

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No it doesn't. The data can be streamed from the storage medium, be that a hard drive or a BD/DVD. It's why games like GTA IV do not have loading zones.

nicked on 13/5/2009 at 07:38

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Also, you're forgetting about Level of Detail, which can significantly increase the size of playable space.

Volca on 13/5/2009 at 07:43

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This is what I mentioned earlier - the Assassins creed I believe uses that aproach :)

Explanation: In my opinion oblivion uses a different rendering strategy for the interior levels(rooms/portals) compared to the free roaming outside (paging). The interior levels have to fit into memory whole, the exterior levels are streamed from media as needed.