Empire of the Iguanadons

Yes. Surprise! It's another Oblivion topic. I bet nobody saw this coming, right? Well, did you? :)

I've never done any kind of serious tinkering with anything PC gaming related. I usually tend to play what's put in front of me and leave it at that. That is, except when it came to Morrowind and Oblivion. The number of community based add-ons has kept both games running strong well after their initial release, long after most other games are cast aside never to be touched again. Two years now for Oblivion, and believe it or not, 6 years for Morrowind! Yes, that's right, 6 years. An unheard of span of time for pretty much anything in the PC industry as a whole, let alone gaming. Most of us have swapped our rigs out at least twice since then. Morrowind is still going strong and still looks as good as ever.

One of the things I loved the most about Morrowind was the seamless feel of the world. You walked around, and everything was "just there". You only had to deal with irritating load screens when entering interior areas. The great outdoors was just that. That feeling was largely missing from Oblivion when it shipped as it quickly became apparent that something was different. Cities were isolated from the game world. Much like Bethesda had done with Mournhold in the Tribunal add-on for Morrowind. You couldn't stroll up to the gate, walk through, and enter into the city in one fluid motion. If you happened to be riding a horse, you had to dismount and then walk up to click on the city gate. At which point you were treated to a sometimes lengthy load screen as the game transitioned you inside. This configuration quickly became referred to among players as "closed cities".

Closed cities have some side affects due to how the engine has to deal with it. Internally, it's an entirely separated worldspace. You have Tamriel on the outside, which contains the wilderness, roads, farmhouses, priories, villages, and other smaller bits of stuff in addition to most dungeon and ruin entrances. Each of the 8 major outlying cities - Chorrol, Bruma, Cheydinhal, Leyawiin, Bravil, Skingrad, Kvatch, and Anvil are all enclosed and cut off from Tamriel. The Imperial City is a special case, composed of multiple worldspaces for each section. Sure, it may not look that way from the inside, but find a way to jump over that city wall and you'll be jolted back into reality pretty quickly as the landscape is mostly missing. Go far enough and the game will eventually realize what you've done and drag you back kicking and screaming. Or crash. Depends on its mood sometimes. This experience is especially jarring if you're in Anvil since the docks are outside the walls and are still very much considered part of the city. The load screen irritation is higher there. Worse still, this separation of worldspaces required some faked city decorations to be placed so that the distant views of them from the wilderness would look reasonable. In theory anwyay. It didn't quite work out that way in reality. Find a way over the walls and once more you'll be treated to a jolt back to reality in the form of fake buildings and unfinished landscaping.

It wasn't long before a mod team decided to do something about this. The goal was simple. Place the cities in the wilderness where they belong. Make it possible to seamlessly walk in from outside. Be able to ride your horse into the city and dismount in front of your favorite shop. Flee from attacking beats in the wilderness to seek help from the guards *INSIDE* the cities as well as the skeleton crews manning the gates outside. And yes, if you have the right mods to pull it off, be able to either fly in from above or climb over the walls. All without the annoying load screens. The project was called Open Cities, by Texian and Godhugh. Their first release of the project came quickly. Some 2 months after Oblivion's release. They opened Chorrol and freed it from its prison. Not long after that, Skingrad, Bruma, and Anvil had been done. After only 8 months from Oblivion's initial release, they had all of it done. Open Cities Complete (OCC) was not only shipped, but had already had several revisions to fix bugs that cropped up along the way. The only two not done were the Imperial City, and Kvatch, due to the complex nature of their layouts, the volume of quests that were involved, and the performance hit it would have caused on existing PCs of the time. Needless to say, I downloaded OCC 1.1 very shortly after its initial release and I've been using it ever since. There also exists an alpha version of OCC with drastic changes to Leyawiin to match more closely to the concept art Bethesda released for it, but that never really got off the ground.

It became apparent after awhile that there were still some problems with OCC. Some quests were still broken. Minor anomalies in landscape tears, and some missing distance flags on city buildings. It wasn't anything critical and you could still use the console to get around the problems. But in the end I think the remaining problems hurt the mod more than the overall success of it helped. As a result, the mod lost popularity and the original authors got tied up with RL and left the scene. It sat neglected, needing to be cleaned and polished. Which is where I came along. It finally got to a point where I wanted to do something about it. So I began tinkering with the game's construction set. Fixing a misaligned wall here. Setting distant flags there. Cleaning out all of the "dirty edits" the CS likes to leave behind. I fixed up the broken quests, mainly because I happen to like the Dark Brotherhood quests the most and this mod broke them. While doing so, other scripting issues were plugged up. Upon closer examination, several of the landscape edits were found to be unnecessary which led to better compatibility with other mods. So once I was reasonably sure everything worked, and had taken Scales the Shadows through all of the known broken quests, I decided that it would be nice if the effort could be appreciated by more than just myself.

It took nearly another two weeks just to secure permission from the original authors. Godhugh was more than happy to see the effort made and has fully supported me in doing so. In the few days the update has been available, several hundred people on two different sites have downloaded it. Some of whom had forgotten the original existed and now had newer PCs to try it with. The response has been largely positive, though there are a few people who seemed resistant to the idea of the project's revival. I have no plans to break the mod back up into modular pieces because of the number of NPCs who have multi-city interactions. Trying to test for all the different combinations of which open cities someone has installed wouldn't be practical. Apparently that was the same reason Godhugh went with the all in one package. I also have no plans to revive efforts to rebuild Leyawiin according to the concept art. It's been tried a few times before and apparently everyone who tackles it eventually abandons their plans due to technical difficulties from the Oblivion engine.

OCC was, is, and continues to be my absolute favorite mod for Oblivion and I've no intention of removing it. Even at the cost of other fine mods that do great things in the cities. But who knows, I may be able to provide compatibility plugins to work around these issues :)

OCC can be downloaded from TES Nexus and Planet Elder Scrolls.
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McCain-Palin 2008
http://www.johnmccain.com/

While all I can say about most of that post is gratz on what sounds like a successful endeavor, but I do question where you said:

Samson said:
I've never done any kind of serious tinkering with anything PC gaming related.

Given what I know of your tinkering with FUSS and AFKmud, both of which I would consider "PC gaming related" in a very significant way, I'd have to say your statement doesn't ring true to me. :P

Heh. Well then perhaps I should clarify and say not for anything commercially produced, store bought, etc.

Oh, and remember where I said I have no plans to revive the Leyawiin revamp? I might have been too hasty there. We're talking a seriously improved city here. From what I saw in the CS and in-game testing, it appears almost complete. I'd need to do a complete run through of all the quests involved in the city but I think it would be doable to replace Leyawiin with what they produced. There appear to be some folks falling out of the sky for some reason, but I have a feeling that's a conflict with some other mod I have loaded.

Maybe it's just the sky falling for Chicken Little? ;)

Btw, I think Dragona had wanted to ask you some questions about Oblivion if you two can manage to catch one another online at the same time at some point.


And, I hope you won't mind a slight derailment of your post here while I wish you a very happy birthday! :)

Icarian flight ftw!