On Bethesda podcast they mention when moding a cell (making DLC ) that they had to be careful of “object count”. What is that? it that literally the number of trees, armor, rocks, weapons and such form ids in the cell? If you have too many what will happen? Is it just a case of to much FR drop or worse?

I haven't listened to the podcast because they warned about Dawnguard spoilers I'd rather not hear about yet.

If they're talking about cells and object count, my guess is they're talking about the memory limit on how many things you can stick in an interior cell before you run into crash problems. The default for this is absurdly low, something on the order of a mere 1,000 objects. Larger dungeon cells push these limits easily. Exceeding this limit in an interior that connects to a worldspace almost certainly means a CTD when the user tries to exist. It's let some people to have to use buffer zones between the main body of their work and the rest of the game.

There's an ini setting that eliminates this problem:

iLargeIntRefCount=999999

Sticking that in the [General] section of Skyrim.ini has been shown to eliminate the problem. The game would probably choke and die long before getting close to 1 million objects in a single cell.

Worth noting this problem only exists for ESP files. ESM files don't have this. I can't see why Dawnguard would have had this problem unless it's coming out as an ESP.

it is in regard to any object type. some are more expensive than others, and some only under certain circumstances (lighting, fx etc)

general rule of thumb is to constantly monitor frame rate in very frequent intervals in-game and check for flickering lights/fx and non-lit statics. these are telltale signs that you are spending too much of the budget in one area.


when the engine has to draw so many verts in a single frame at once, it stresses the system. as far as bethesda is concerned, their limitation is probably a lot worse than ours, since they have to divide by a much lower common denominator than we do (making the game run on an xbox), which is why the object count is probably a higher priority for them when optimizing environments

When I was working on my custom world space for Oblivion, my exterior cells had about 3-5x as many references as vanilla cells and ran about 10-15fps slower. I assume it's pretty much the same in Skyrim, though I haven't tested it.

Basically what Amethyst Deceiver said, you want to be careful of how many objects you put in one cell because it can cause a performance loss also known as "lag". If you are working with large structures, such as a dungeon or something with 3 or more rooms then you should use portals to optimize performance. Portals reduce the amount of stuff that is loaded in rooms that the player is not in thus making your dungeon more performance friendly. You also want to think about line of sight, for instance if there is a room and a hallway on one end with a bunch of stuff in it. Your game will load all of that stuff since it is in the player's line of sight, to fix this you could put a door in front of the hallway blocking the player's line of sight. Just some optimization tips, if you want to know more about optimization or any of the things I mentioned check out this page. http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Optimization