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[RELz] Cutting Room Floor


Arthmoor

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Version 3.1.1

The Nobles on horseback encounter (WERoad02) was not generating a saddled version of the second horse.
The Alpha Wolf south of Riverwood had some incorrect faction and aggression settings that would cause him not to attack on sight like his 2 pack mates.

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Version 3.1.2

Added a rock to cover a gap above the entrance to Hoarfrost Grotto. (Bug #26294)

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  • 1 month later...

Hey, got a question.

Without CRF you can find Ilas-Tei lying dead at a Talosshrine with his ring. With CRF installed which actually adds the quest to find him there is no body and the ring lies at the shrine. Is that intended ?

Or a kind of bug which only causes the body to spawn if you recieve the quest ?

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Corpses don't generally stick around so that's intentional that the ring is on the shrine where you can access it in case the corpse disappears.

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Ah, I see. The placement of the ring makes sense then. Under which circumstances do bodies disappear ? Just asking cause I got some strange npc behaviour I can't fix and I actually have no idea which mod is causing it. Not using any npc-altering mod actually.

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Most often when you happen to pass close enough to get it to load into the game. Once that happens the timer starts and if it's not in a quest alias it'll be culled like normal.

The problem with the ones CRF is using is that they didn't start off as being in aliases and since people can install the mod at any point during the game there's nothing I can do about keeping this from happening if someone happens to have passed by the area previously.

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I'm not blaming CRF, got problems with other NPCs. Was just curious about the tech details. Some of normal NPCs behave unnormal and I don't know why. I tried "resetai", "recycletarget" with disable and enable before and after. They are just frozen and I can't bring them back in a normal routine. But that's another problem obvs.

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I'd suggest avoiding the use of console commands as a solution since most often that just breaks things further.

Stuck NPCs usually means you have something installed that's interfering with the navmeshes.

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Stuck was the wrong word. They interact normally, like talk and answer but the stay at one place and don't do their daily routine. Can move them by Shout but then they stay just somewhere else. Not a real issue, they aren't quest npcs or something. Just a whiterun trader and her kid.

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Yep, that's definitely broken navmeshes. Someone on our Discord just had the same kind of issue with Eorlund and figured out that the "Where's Your Smelter?" mod was responsible for it due to having deleted navmeshes in Whiterun's worldspace.

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Version 3.1.3

Added lighting to Heljarchen and Frost River exteriors.
Consolidated location and map marker data for Frost River to more uniformly cover the area.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Version 3.1.4

Two sets of light poles were somehow added to the skies above Heljarchen and have been removed.

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  • 1 month later...

The Frost River updates caused some problems with Touring Carriages. The signpost (in the lavendar) near the road junction rock pile is inside the preferred road mesh, and the wagon kept hanging on it. Kuhlmann (Real Carriages) had moved the rock pile farther away from the road. I've moved it back now to provide visual stimulus for why I've added path markers sweeping around it. But the wagon still hits the post, although it doesn't hang anymore. (I'll try to have my next version out soon to avoid complaints.)

Better would be to move the signpost "above" the top of the T intersection, outside of the preferred roadway. That's what vanilla does in most places (Whiterun, Windhelm, etc). In general, that's the best place. I'd had to stop using Point The Way years ago because of so many posts too close to the road.

The horse near the wagon is often (but not always) in the road. There should be a horse seat marker, and a horse sitting package, so that he doesn't wander.

But the biggest problem is that once again the carriage won't pass Trilf's House (either direction). Years ago, I'd given you a fixed navmesh; but you've changed so many things since that it doesn't apply anymore (for one thing, there are more buildings with doors). I've looked really hard at it over several days, and nothing is obviously wrong. The cell border triangles match there on the road (although not in other places).

An easy test is to run backwards past the house in 3rd person, and see what your follower does. My follower often gets stuck near the corner of the building, but sometimes near the rocks on the other side of the road instead. Usually, the follower will run all the way around through the middle of town. (That's what the horse does going East, but just hangs trying over and over going West.)

I've got some test files. Where would be the best place to discuss?

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Mentioning in passing that the light post on the road near the Nightgate Inn also is too close to the road. But the wagon just grazes it.

In general, sticking posts under the armpits of the 'T' is problemmatic. Followers (and horses) run into them, because navmesh isn't that specific. They cut the corners, often following the edges of the preferred navmesh.

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On 5/2/2019 at 7:24 PM, Arthmoor said:

Stuck NPCs usually means you have something installed that's interfering with the navmeshes.

Could loose scripts also cause a stuck NPC issue?

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I know, but what I was trying to say is about a script that's used for AI packages and having a loose script would definitely interfere with a script inside of a BSA.  Wouldn't it?

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That's why my test was with a follower. Directly tests the game engine pathfinding. That's revealed fixes to a dozen or so places where the navmesh doesn't work properly, even though it looks perfectly valid.

The usual problem, and the likely problem in this case, is the game engine doesn't like long skinny triangles that have to be crossed lengthwise. For example, where the terrain artist built the road at a corner of a cell, gradually crossing the side of the cell into the next cell.

Another problematic shape is larger triangles in the midst of many skinny ones. The NPC behaviour is often to stop and "look around" (spinning or casting back and forth).

The best triangle shape seems to be equilateral, with travel perpendicular to the sides. But the automated navmeshing usually makes a lot of skinny triangles radiating out from a central point.

The path marker solution that I've used in various places (such as the main road leading West from Whiterun near the burned out farmhouse) is putting the marker just off the preferred road mesh adjacent to the road. Marker locations are chosen by observing NPCs. Those locations look perfectly valid, but NPCs swerve off the side of the road. Sometimes, they swerve off different sides depending on the travel direction. No idea why, but just have to use what works no matter how inelegant.

One of the problems fixing this spot is that the CRF navmesh changes are extensive, and there's no visual before and after comparison utility. xEdit has some nice navmesh data comparison features (not on by default) that are okay for small changes, but this looks like nearly everything changed.

The only way forward (that I can think of) is to take a snapshot of the current CRF navmesh, then start over changing the fewest possible vanilla triangles to reach the desired result, testing and re-testing.

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Just to note that I've gotten it to work, after 15 hours of trial and error. Now need to do the interior non-border paths that I'd skipped, and I'll post it soon.

Most of the error was by the CK. The current version crashes every hour or so. Most often as I'm trying to save, sometimes corrupting the save file. Losing my work twice after nearly completing it, on the 3rd pass copied the saved file after saving. And sure enough, had to go back several times.

The SE game engine seems better in so many ways. After a few thousand hours on the oldrim CK and testing, I'd never expected that the newer CK would be worse.... :wallbash:

We need an open source community CK.

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I have no idea what it is people are doing to the SSE CK that they complain so much about it being unstable. I've been using it extensively and have only had a handful of crashes in nearly 3 years. There are a scant few things known to cause CTDs but if you're doing navmeshes that's never been identified as one of them.

And for the record, CRF navmesh changes are extensive because they need to be. Attempting to redo them "as vanilla as possible" isn't going to go anywhere because that's simply not feasible in the 3 main restored village areas. You know as well as anyone that obstructions on the path must be dealt with and that's what's been done already.

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16 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

[...] There are a scant few things known to cause CTDs but if you're doing navmeshes that's never been identified as one of them.

[...] You know as well as anyone that obstructions on the path must be dealt with and that's what's been done already.

  • I've been hearing about instabilty of the latest (1.5.73.0) over on the Nexus.
  • I've had it generate bad bsas, and probably bad esps.
  • The old one used to crash after compiling 19 files, but haven't done much compiling with the latest version, so unsure whether that's been fixed.
  • On navmeshing, the first Undo works okay, and subsequent ones get slower and slower. Mostly it crashed on Save, once destroying the saved esp file. Finalize caused a crash (once); then had no problems on redo. Find Cover caused a 18 triangle island to merge the main 420+ triangles into itself, even though I'd never made any changes to it and there were no obvious links; then also had no problems on redo. So these are likely transient memory management issues. Had upwards of 20 crashes yesterday, only doing navmeshing.

In this case, there were 3 main problems with CRF that I've found:

  1. Lack of Finalize. Iron Tree Mill and Frost River Smith both had missing border links. When I Finalized the SmithCELL, a small 3 triangle island split off in adjacent FarmSE, so that was not Finalized properly either. [Another CK error.]
  2. Border triangle renumbering. POITundra22 was trying to leap into the vanilla triangle, but that was no longer on the border. This was amazingly hard to find, as they are very difficult to see, long, skinny, triangles on both sides of the border. An easy fix, as I've detailed on the navmesh repair topic.
  3. The main road was narrowed, and renavmeshed with a lot of skinny slices. The vanilla worked better, and a few simple improvements make it work much better.

As you know, I've been using CRF since early days, and contributed to it. I like it, think it important, and it's long been essential to my load order. I'm just not playing often anymore, so not noticing the changes as quickly as before.

https://afktrack.afkmods.com/index.php?a=issues&i=27173

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@DD: How much memory (RAM) on your rig?

16Gb here, I think @Arthmoor has at least that.

The Undo facilities on most of these programs commit to RAM only- if were done properly it should page Undo data to a swap file on disk. The CK should emit warnings when running short of memory:

https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Version_control#Masters

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4 hours ago, lmstearn said:

@DD: How much memory (RAM) on your rig? 

64 GB, and it's not using it.

Interesting link. My guess is there's a lot of 32-bit cruft, and not much in the way of error checking. My technique for keeping triangles intact (new triangle carefully selecting vertices in the same order, deleting the old triangle, then 'Q' joining) probably uses more memory than the usual. Multiply by 400+ (and a lot of hours) for this effort, likely stressing the memory.

But I didn't mean to hijack this topic. Do we have a CK bugs topic here? There was an extensive one on the old bethsoft site.

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18 hours ago, DayDreamer said:

As you know, I've been using CRF since early days, and contributed to it.

I'm not sure what it is you've contributed other than reporting a few bugs here and there. In any case, given than I am seeing no issues in testing, I'm reluctant to just apply a patch for a bunch of navmeshes the CK says test out fine and followers don't have issues with navigating. I especially do not see any missing border links between cells anywhere. Are you sure you haven't somehow incorporated an old navmesh into things?

7 hours ago, DayDreamer said:

Do we have a CK bugs topic here? There was an extensive one on the old bethsoft site.

No, we don't have one here but I'd have no objection if someone wanted to go retrieve the old one and post it here, but that topic was also stale in 2013 and didn't reflect the correct status of the LE CK at the time, much less the SSE CK now.

FWIW, I'm using SSE CK 1.5.73 and to this day I don't run into any of the issues everyone complains about with rampant crashing etc. I've left the thing sitting open all day long without incident on multiple occasions. Yes, it does sometimes crash, but it's been a pretty rare thing for me. Which leads me to believe a lot of folks are trying to do a lot of really crazy things with it that it was never intended for. Or they're trying to mod on potato PCs or something. It's also not going to just consume all 64GB of your RAM simply because you handed it that much :P

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