Build my own custom city mod that I can load everytime I play a new game

[SCSIraidGURU]

I started on the tutorials.   I want to build my own city that I can load as a mod every time I start a new game.   How difficult is it to build many buildings.  I was thinking of something like the Smithsonian style museum with many buildings.   A complete city.   What are the limitations on size?   Will it scale to my hardware? 

[DarkRider]

Hi There,

The tutorials here start with building a house and cover a lot of the building blocks you will need to build a city like creating cells, laying nav mesh, lighting, placing objects, etc. From my experience, learning the basics of modding first will help you avoid making large scale mistakes later in your city, so definitely a good place to start.

That said, once you can build one functional house you will be able to build more to make villages or even cities so modding many buildings isn’t that difficult; it’s a lot of repeating basic skills.

There are limits to how big you could make a city, obviously you’re going to have to be mindful of what’s already in game and where you could plant a large city among what’s there. The developers would likely create a new world space for such a city and force players to take a boat or portal to reach it to avoid competing with the existing game space. That’s certainly a technique I recommend if you want a really LARGE city.

The hard limits are difficult to precisely nail down. The more you add to the scene for the engine to render at once the more it will impact performance. If you have a powerful rig you might not notice but if your rig is more modest it might struggle to load a full city. One way to combat this would be to break your city into several cells with load doors between districts to reduce the load to sections. 
 

Sounds like an ambitious mod, which is awesome, I would just recommend getting the basics down first to save you some headaches. Happy Modding!

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

I was thinking 30-40 buildings at most.   Not large ones.   I studied architecture when I took my B.EE.  I needed out of major classes.   So I have designed actual buildings.  Coding isn't difficult for me.  I can just picked up C# and Python.  I don't think scripting will be an issue.    I am planning to build a new Windows 10 workstation next year.  My current rig has no issues with Skyrim SE.

Intel i7 2600K
ATI 6970 with 3GB of memory
16GB of the fastest ram I could get
LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS RAID controller with 128 MB battery cache:  1.097 GB/s cached reads and 850 MB/s cached writes
Seagate 15K SAS drives in RAID 1 for OS and gaming
Seagate 10K SAS drives in RAID 1 for temp and paging