I would really like to see some of these. It's particularly annoying in Riften, since some of the city is outside the main city and there's a canol going through it so it feels like it should be open.

Good idea! Get crackin on it.

I have no idea how to do them.

I'd bet my bottom dollar that Arthmoor already has plans for just such a thing.

And I'd bet there is even less system drag from doing than would be in Oblivion as the space around most of the towns I've been to is fairly vacant.

Do they normally place much system drag on the cities? I don't think I remember a huge amount with Oblivion (but it was already laggy due to putting on too many mods) but I got rid of it anyway because it glitched up with a travel system mod I was using.

I never used the open cities mod for Oblivion, but won't it depend on how much space the city "model" takes up Vs. how much space the actual city uses?

Well, at least in Oblivion, they took up exactly the same amount of space, they were just in a different worldspaces. It definitely looks like it't the same deal in Skyrim. I am 100% sure it's the same deal in Riften because I looked from above from outside and saw that it was the same inside (excluding a few missing details like NPCs and clutter).

Oh god especially Riften, the only open city is Falkreath funny enough and it works just fine, theres 0 point for the Southern cities at least and Solitude (only northern city I've been to) to be walled off.

Morthal, Dawnstar and Winterhold are also not walled, though particularly for Winterhold you'd have trouble calling them cities (though they are hold capitals). I am plotting in my head revamps/expansions of these cities.

Sounds like it should be fairly straitforward then, once the Construction Kit comes out, if time consuming.

Windterhold used to be a lot bigger, but a lot of it was lost in The Great Collapse and no one bothered to rebuild it. Perhaps there could be some kind of quest line to return it to its "former glory" (but I supposed that is for another thread )

What I would like to do, though I would have to learn more about imodelling, I know how to make the models but not how to texture them or get them into the game yet, is to change the architecture for the smaller cities, which all have the same architecture as towns. For Dawnstar I was thinking of basing it off the Nordic ruins, and for Winterhold basing it off the style of the College.

And that is where my knowledge ends, lol. My skills revolve around scripting, scripts, and...more scripting I tried to get into modeling and texturing, and just couldn't quite get the hang of it.

Sounds like you got some good ideas rollin' around there. The 'Kit can't come soon enough >_<

I know, I can't wait to be able to run out onto the lake from the Riften canols and climb down into Markarth.