Editorial Yet Another State of the RPG at GamePlayer

[Sarvis]

Yes, you're realising two versions of each building, but we're not talking about an equivalent workload for each. Once you have a fully modelled, undestroyed version, it's not that hard to modify the asset you've already created. Yes, it's extra work, but it's not going to break the budget.

I don't think game engines work quite the way you think. You're essentially carving an area out of clay, not building one out of pieces. This means that if the building has to collapse or something, you need to carve an entirely different shape out of the clay... you can't just go into the editor and tip a wall over.

I suppose you could do low level damage though, scorch marks and holes in the wall could be done with just placeables really. (Well, as long as no one expects to see THROUGH that hole in the wall...) The level of destruction found in KVatch is the goal though, and you're just not going to do that without rebuilding the buildings.

And you're not remodelling an entire city, because for the most part, the cities are made up of copy/pastes of a very small set of buildings.

It still doubles the work if you're making all of those buildings twice.

Not to mention things liked blocked paths that have to be added, and the possibility of buildings collapsing into each other and requiring a completely new model.

RAI, by design, was intended to be a very high level scripting function, so the develop could say "Go buy food at 5pm" and the NPC figures out an appropriate way to do so. It's supposed to be able to deal with change. For instance, if The Twig and Berries gets razed to the ground, then NPCs that would normally eat there now go somewhere else.

From what I understand it ended up being nothing like that...

If they can't buy food anywhere, they steal it.

Again from what I understand, this is one of the reasons it had to be toned down. People would steal the food, then get arrested and killed and suddenly a key NPC would be gone...

The cities are in isolated cells, if the player is defending against daedra, they're either in the exterior cell, or an oblivion plane cell. It's a little abstract if you never allow daedra to enter the city cells, but it's like a "watched pot".

Why wouldn't the player be defending the city from inside the city after a few daedra got past him?

Far more complex? As far as the AI is concerned, the only difference is an extra boolean along the lines of "isDestroyed". Sure, that causes ripples, as any dynamic change would, but the systems related to RAI were intended to be robust enough to handle it. If it was a necessity, they might have actually got it right.

You might be right if RAI had gotten to where they were advertising it. However the general consensus is taht it didn't, and the devs pretty much had to write all the scripting like normal anyway. I think "if it was a necessity" it's just one more thing that they wouldn't have gotten right.