Cell preloading

[gblues]

Just a quick heads up of a new feature I'm working on. Background preloading of cells.

My goal is to make flying around the island buttery smooth with no loading bars or frame drops whatsoever. I'm not quite at that point yet, mostly because terrain isn't preloaded yet, body parts are not preloaded yet and because I haven't profiled / optimized the code at all yet. Still, the loading times compared to the main branch should be much improved already.

Currently the preloader will activate if you go near a teleport door, or go near an exterior cell border. I'm thinking about preloading fast travel destinations as well, though of course the downside is we don't know the travel destination the player will pick, so would have to load all of them preemptively.

Feel free to try out the branch and let me know how it goes! I haven't come across any crashes or instabilities yet, which is a good sign that the new resource manager design is solid.

Question!

Is this at all similar to the 'uGridsToLoad' setting used in Oblivion and Skyrim?

The reason I ask is because, in those games, while monkeying with uGridsToLoad does make distant cells look nicer, it has the ugly side-effect of also making those distant grids active for events/scripts/whatnot, which creates really weird behavior. For example, when you approach Whiterun for the first time, the fighter dudes will kill that giant before you can get there, then chew you out for not helping at all. Later, you get dragons popping in towns and killing important NPCs when you can't possibly be there to do anything about it.

So, I'm hoping that the pre-loading you're doing doesn't also impact the size of the "active cell" context like it does in the other TES games, because it's quite annoying and game-breaking because they clearly didn't design/QA their encounter designs around a higher uGridsToLoad setting.

[Pop000100]

This feature is just removing the loading on cell transitions at the cost of cpu and memory usage.

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exterior cell load distance = *

is the equivalent to ugridtoload in the script capacity while

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viewing distance = ****

is the graphics side if that makes sense.

[zackogenic]

Wow, preloading is an amazing feature! It definitely makes loading faster, even on the old laptop I'm using.

However, when using my mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/43805?

Which is a cell that's connected to dozens of cells throughout Morrowind, but only enables one at a time, it destroys performance.

Once you enter the "MUNDIS" cell, it (I assume) tries to preload all the cells connected to it, which is over a hundred.

If there could be a check that made sure the number of cells to preload is reasonable, it'd probably fix this.

I get a normal FPS inside the cell with 0.38.0, with the nightly I get under 1.

Thanks! If this isn't an issue I understand, since it isn't something that happens normally.