Hi guys,

I am - so to say - new to modding.
After trying out some stuff and following tutorials for CK, I found that it appears to be less difficult than I thaught.

Now I got in contact with some other german Modders, asking for help for my very own, first project, which includes some - hopefully - rather easy things:

-> new towns with open houses (no cells!); one for dark elves (between riften and windhelm); one for argonians (near solitude), one for woodelves (near falkreath) and maybe a citadel for high elves/thalmor

The sad thing is: nobody could really answer my questions.
Even searching this forum didn't help me too much

Therefore I opened this new topic in order to post my questions, which are:

- is it even possible to simply build open houses in a worldspace, and how ?(-> if I open Tamriel, I can navigate through the world, I know, and I also tried building a house by using different walls, with doors, corners, floor and so on, but I don't know if I have to place a roof, or if it will be generated 'automatically', for example.) Are there any tutorials which might help me?
- do i need further tools/programs?
- of course I know that it will take a lot of effort to create such a mod; and I am willing to learn, even if I have to read a lot and/or watch people's tutorial videos on youtube or elsewhere...

Thanks for any kind of help

Yes, it is definately possible to create "open" houses - I have seen mods that advertise that features, plus I have seen vanilla examples. If you take the road Northish from the Windhelm stables, you will pass a few farms, then on the left is a house that is "open" - (literally, even the door is open) but it has a roof, walls, etc. Just no load screen.

For making the house, I'm sure you just need the CK. If you want custom textures, sounds, etc, then you would need external tools. But take that as it comes.

And as far as learning, there are some good tutorials to speed up the process, so I would start here: http://www.creationkit.com/Video_Tutorials

This is indeed possible, but unfortunately you may need to create most of the house parts yourself as far as I can remember there are not many vanilla pieces that fit your task (and no, nothing just "generates").

I am not too sure how well your mod will perform in the skyrim game engine because what you are planning on doing was avoided by bethesda's devs in the first place. All the objects placed in each of your houses all getting loaded at once, no matter whether the player can see them or not, just seems like wasted memory in my oppinion. Plus, when the game is already suffering memory management issues as it is, I doubt it would be happy dealing with all the extra work you are planning on giving it

Don't get me wrong, by no means am I trying to stifle your creativity, I just think this will be a whole lot of work on your part, just for the sake of omitting some loading screens

It can be done, as has been seen with some house mods. But for a whole town...

- Hypno

Good points hypno88!

Some thoughts - so to avoid some of that overloading/resouce issues, probably would be advisable to create an open house (and even more so city) in an out-of-the way location? That way the cell isn't really interacting with much else?

I know there is the "Open Cities" mod, but I've never used it. So as you say, it's possible, just keep in mind the resource issues?

I would have to say though, for what I know about modding so far, I think I would prefer my house to be in a seperate, isolated cell. For these very reasons.

Thanks for your answers. Now I know better
If I got you right, I shouldn't even try to make a mod where you have cities with open houses, since it wouldn't even work.

So what I can do is open the Tamriel "cell" in Cell View, look for some space where I could place my city, and start building it by using anything I want. Houses will be placed normally (full houses) and with doors that have a link to the respective cell, which I am gonna make seperately.

Would that be possible ?

What I find confusing is, that you have a loading screen when entering Markarth, for example, so that would mean you have a cell, doesn't it?

Yes, thats exactly how most of the towns in the game are set up (with teleport doors to interior cells). The only reason why the big cities are placed in their own world space was because the Xbox 360 and PS3 couldn't handle them in the tamriel world space. The Open Cities mods are basically painstakingly placing these back into the tamriel cell, but they still use load doors to go "inside" the buildings. PC's these days can handle a lot more then the consoles (my iPhone practically has the same specs for pete's sake!), but I think having "open interiors" will be pushing it

If you are new to modding, I know this gets sounds like a cliche but your best bet would be to follow the official Bethesda tutorials found on www.creationkit.com. They give you a good starting point in understanding the various aspects of modding in general

Good luck!

- Hypno

Okay i have been working on my Argonian Settlement for some hours now, and it's glorious. I tried it out already, and it works!! And it looks great!!!!
As soon as I have added some NPCs, I will show you some screenshots. Yay

Looking forward to seeing it mate. Thats one thing that the game is lacking, glad to hear your showing the argonians some love

- Hypno

Since I have no permissions to post links, I cannot let you have a look on my project :U