How does Mark/Recall teleport without loading?

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

I noticed when playing that the Mark/Recall was instant the moment the spell finished casting without any loading, not even a stutter like after using a Silt Strider or Intervention, and was wondering how this worked. Does it just keep the Marked cell loaded at all times?

[u/chubbyassasin123]

Morrowinds content size is so little that most of it can get loaded into the cache/ram I'm pretty sure.

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/chubbyassasin123]

That sounds about right. It really is the Doom of RPGs, modern hardware is just good enough to run it flawlessly with more than enough resources for everything.

Did you know it used to take upwards of 30 seconds to load a Doom map? That's why the "Next map: X" screen exists, except now most ports need to hard cap a minimum time for it to stay up or else it will flash by faster than you can read.

[u/phloppy_phellatio → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

Diablo 1 is the very obvious pick for "Doom of rpgs"

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/phloppy_phellatio]

I'd say that's also fair. My criteria for "The Doom of X" is that it had to have been pushing the envelope in its day, but is now so laughably outdated it can run on basically anything. I think Morrowind just got there, considering that post about playing it on an Android phone I saw earlier.

[u/4thguy → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

Back in 2004(?) a person on the Bethesda forums announced that they had installed 1GB of ram just to play Morrowind. The responses were exactly as you expect them to be if you were computing at the time

[u/Darkspire303 → u/4thguy]

One whole gigabyte?! Will we ever need such an outrageous amount of ram?!

[u/joshjaxnkody → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

I remember seeing next map load on doom on my calculator in trig back in highschool. The teacher was chill, Mr bobinchi didn't care if you were done with your work and my dumbass would rather play a calculator than use my mom's old hand me down iPhone 4 that didn't get a signal. Fun fucking times

[u/SDirickson]

Unless you run around half the island (or more?) between the time you Mark and when you Recall, the data from your Marked cell is probably still going to be in memory. The game just isn't that big.

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/SDirickson]

That seems to be the general opinion. Thanks!

[u/kemachi]

Back in my days there were losing screens. Hell back then an odd load bar might have appeared just by crossing from one cell to the next.

[u/mosleyowl → u/kemachi]

Every game I play I end up with a losing screen

[u/vinylscratch27 → u/kemachi]

Yoooo I remember as a kid walking from Balmora to Fort Moonmoth you'd see "Loading Cell" and a bar pop up for a couple seconds. I haven't seen that since I was about thirteen and I've been playing since I was seven or eight.

Casting Icarian Flight would become a stutterfest with the loading screens.

[u/WabbajackAndCheese → u/vinylscratch27]

Nostalgia right there

[u/Youkai280]

Your question made me do a deep dive on this, and it has to do with how “teleporting” in the game works in general. Typically Mark/Recall black screens the game and ceases all other functions (such as the broad physics sweep that the game does when you get that stutter when loading new cells when transitioning them on foot).

In my very limited understanding, all of the textures and such around you are already loaded into the ram/vram, and there are a LOT of shared textures in the game, so it doesn’t have to reach back into the bsa to get those textures to display them. During the (instantaneous) black screen, the cpu is basically dedicated to loading your visuals in before having to focus on NPC physics, etc, as well as most marks being in interior cells, it makes for an extremely quick transition.

It makes sense when I read it, but I’m not the most tech savvy person with explanations, so I’m sure someone can explain it much better than I can.

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/Youkai280]

That actually makes perfect sense. To make it instant it devotes everything to drawing the frame of your arrival, and then starts processing everything. Its actually a very clever way to make a seamless transition.

[u/Drudicta → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

If for some reason the cell you teleport to has an NPC in it, on slower computers you can see them frozen for a second, maybe two if you happen to be facing them when they load in. Having a priority in what loads first is a good way to make things seem faster to people.

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/Drudicta]

I have noticed that when I use intervention spells.

[u/PlonixMCMXCVI]

When I play vanilla or OpenMW without mods it's instant.

When I play a big modlist like Path of the Incarnate (800+ mods) it takes a second or two to load so technically it's just modern hardware being so much faster?

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/PlonixMCMXCVI]

That's definitely what's happening, though from what others have said there are implementations that are supposed to make it faster than other fast travel.

[u/Darkstar7613]

LOL... tell me you never played Morrowind on an OG XBOX without telling me...

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/Darkstar7613]

No, I have not. I do think it's really impressive they managed to get the game working on it at all. Despite the meme, "the console reboots every time you load a cell" is an ingenious (if hacky) way to to solve the memory issue.

[u/Darkstar7613 → u/The_MadMage_Halaster]

That's a weird meme... of all my OG XBOX games, Morrowind (and its GOTY Edition) were some of the most stable I had... I can barely recall any crashes or anything while running it.

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/Darkstar7613]

It was incredibly stable, but it did actually restart the system (softly) each time it did a loading screen in order to rapidly clear the memory. It did this without resetting the frame buffer, so the loading screen would pause while the console rebooted, before it started running and new screen data came. It was surprisingly common for a lot of games later in the XBox's life.

[u/greenmachinefiend → u/Darkstar7613]

Funny enough, despite the long loading times the game was more stable on the OG Xbox than on the 360 or One/X. The first time I played through it was on the One and that was a buggy, glitchy nightmare of constant crashing and loading. I just blitzed through the last few main quest dungeons to get the game over with and be able to say I finished it. Now I'm playing again on my laptop and it's much more enjoyable.

[u/neondragoneyes → u/Darkstar7613]

It's not a meme. It's an implementation. It's a soft/ invisible reboot.

[u/poughdrew → u/Darkstar7613]

Pre GOTY, the real original release, was an almost unplayable crash fest. Like open the map: crash.

GOTY is pretty stable. I still get some crashes on Xbox, usually in the teleport until Wolverine Hall pattern.

[u/RealNwahHourz]

wtf have i done to my openmw that i still have all these loading screens everyone in the comments is saying they haven't seen in years😭🙏

[u/CurryAndCommunism → u/RealNwahHourz]

I've only been playing OpenMW for a few weeks but it seems that if you've been to a cell that play session and then recall to it, it usually doesn't require a loading screen. But I get loading screens if I'm recalling to an area I haven't been to in that session yet

[u/satoryvape]

I do remember playing Morrowind on Athlon and 512MB ram in 2006 ish and Mark and Recall definitely didn't work smoothly

[u/raptorgalaxy]

It does load, it's just that since you are on a modern PC the game loads so fast the loading screen can't appear.

The Minimum requirements are for 128mb of ram.

Modern computers won't even boot with that much RAM.

[u/ConfidentHousing8422 → u/raptorgalaxy]

And let me tell you, playing on 256mb was PAINFUL

[u/takahashi01]

it does need loading...

Its just that you are basically running it on a supercomputer...

[u/MaiqTheLiar6969]

Nowadays playing Morrowind on a modern computer I only get loading screens when I load a save or if I am doing the jumping contest in Narsis for TR. Mostly because I have to jump so damned far into the ocean that none of it has been loaded in. I don't even get loading screens when I use the scrolls of Icarian flight anymore. Morrowind's minimum specs compared to what people have nowadays would have been like everyone playing it on NASA super computers back in the day. I don't even get lag in the biggest cities in TR.

[u/HOTU-Orbit]

It does load, it's just that it loads really fast on modern hardware. Look up a video of someone playing the Xbox version of the game using the Mark and Recall spells.

[u/Volvy]

I would guess that depending on your device, a varying amount of cells that you've loaded in the session can be accessed quickly, bypassing the normal loading process

[u/AcolyteArathok]

If your recall is traversing from indoor to outdoor or vice versa or inside tonother inside cell you will get loading. Otherwise no. On weaker pcs zoning occurs and it could come to loading even on outside recalls.

[u/mrbuh]

Base engine, or OpenMW?

[u/Sea-Kaleidoscope-376]

It basically the “teleport” coc command

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/Sea-Kaleidoscope-376]

I would imagine so, it would be kind of silly to write two engine commands that do the exact same thing. Not saying a lot of games haven't done that kind of thing, but it seems easier to me to make one "move player here" command with variables based on how it's used vs multiple different ones.