[LE] Troubleshooting a Worldspace that doesn't load

[saintgrimm92]

TLDR;

World space was working b4 navmeshing. After navmeshing, placing NPCs and setting up their AI Packages it will no longer load. The problem persists even after deleting navmeshes, all NPCs, and even copy/paste in place the entire world into an entirely different worldspace. What else can I try to fix it?

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EDIT3-Solution:
I'm not sure what was up with that first ESP I was trying stuff on. I copied my backup (same one I used for 'the first ESP') again, deleted all of the NPCs out of all cells, and it fixed the issue. So it's for sure NPC related; my best guess about the first ESP was that there was just something wrong with that ESP and that's why deleting NPCs didn't fix it. I'm not sure what about an NPC would cause the issue though, as I've previously tested each NPC to make sure there were no problems, I'll redo those tests and go from there, doubt I'll be updating this any further.




EDIT: All markers deleted, still stops responding indefinitely. Double checked ALL interiors by COCing into ALL of them, no issues at all with interiors. Everything added between it working and not working has been removed from the worldspace entirely but the issue persists. Makes no sense....

EDIT2: I went back to my backup that still had all the NPCs/markers/navmesh. Deleted it all again, 1 thing at a time (all navs,then all markers, then all NPCs) and after all NPCs were deleted from the world/interior cells, it's magically working again.

So I went back to the ESP I was previously using, where all NPCs/Navs/Markers were deleted already, double checked, all NPCs are gone. All navmeshes in the exterior are gone. All markers are gone. Both ESP's are identical......... But one of them works and one of them don't........ Literally the only difference in the ESPs is the order that the things were deleted..... Seriously wtf???

Guess I'll copy my backup again and see if JUST deleting the NPCs fixes it this time. Even though the worldspace is working, just how nonsensical this is tells me this entire mod is probaby just never going to work correctly.

 

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I've ran into a very strange issue with my world space no longer loading and I've run out of things to try, so I'm hoping someone else can give me some ideas.

So here's what happened:
My worldspace was working fine. I navmeshed it. Being a dumbass, I didn't load into the game to make sure it was still working, instead I told myself "to test the navmesh, I need to set up AI Packages and markers for NPCs to leave their houses, otherwise how would I know it's working?

So I went through every NPC in my entire mod and created their daily routines.... Which included adding farming markers, patrol markers, lots of markers in the world space, with patrol packages, guard patrols, everything a worldspace needs to seem "alive".

Then I went to test it... I can COC into any interior cell, but when I try to leave the interior into the worldspace I created, Skyrim just stops responding forever. It doesn't "crash", it just stops responding. I left it open for over an hour last night. Never crashed until I finally just used task manager to close the game.

That's a problem I've NEVER had before when making a mod. If somethings wrong, the game will crash in a specific cell/near a specific NPC and then I can figure it out.

But the CK doesn't crash in the world space, I get no errors when loading the world space in ck, except the usual ones and a few navmesh errors.


Here is what I've already done to try to find the problem:

So I put each NPC in the mod into a testing cell ONE at a time and COC'd into the testing cell. There was a couple NPCs that did cause a crash. So I fixed them up, got them working correctly where I could COC into the testing cell with no issues with every single NPC in my mod.

The issue persisted.

So I thought maybe it was the navmesh.... I deleted the entire worldspace's navmesh, ran the ESP through TES5Edit, cleaned it, all that good stuff, but same problem. So I tried removing EVERY npc from their cell.... If its an NPC, and they're not "in" the game anymore, they won't be going outside and causing my problem.... But ofc that didn't fix it either.

With the only errors that pop up being same as ones when u load into a vanilla worldspace, I decided okay I'll try remaking it completely..... I created a new world space, same parent space as the world that's causing problems. (AAAtmora01 is the parent space of AAAtmora02 (which is the world that will no longer load), I created AAAtmora03 with AAAtmora01 as the parent, so all I had to do was select every single object in AAAtmora02, copy it, and paste it in place in AAAtmora03. Just to be clear, AAAtmora01 does NOT cause the game to stop responding, I can enter/leave that space at will)

This new worldspace, 03, has no navmesh. It's exactly like 02 was when I know for a fact it was working.... Except it has markers (farming, patrol, just generic markers that are used all over the game)...... But it has the same problem! Game just stops responding forever when I try to COC into the worldspace, or enter from a linked interior cell...

So what could the problem even be??? Why would a worldspace work fine before navmeshes, stop working after navmeshes, and even when re-created in a completely new worldspace without navmeshes, still cause the same issue??

The only thing I can even think of is maybe I just have too many markers in the world space. There is quite a few; my AI Packages were pretty complex with a lot of moving around and complex patrols with multiple over-lapping paths. So Just for the f*#@ of it, I'm going to delete every single marker I added to the exterior cells. Not just the basic idlemarkers, but furniture markers as well, and I will report back.

But I'm posting this now because I have very little hope that that will fix anything... So does anyone else have any other ideas of what to try short of spending another 2 months rebuilding this from scratch?

Edited July 31, 2023 by saintgrimm92

[Sovrath]

I think adding things slowly and seeing what causes the crash is the smart way to do it. You never know what can cause it.

 

In my mod I had an issue where I had gems out in bowls. It wasn't an issue in 1st person for Special Edition (and was never an issue in Oldrim) but when moving your character in 3rd person the area would crash.

 

At first I thought it was the size of the cell but after shorting it didn't work I started removing things and "lo and behold" I discover the culprit when I put my character in 3rd person.

 

Good luck.

[maxarturo]

In my case was one corrupted 'face gen' nif of an npc that was placed right at the center of the worldspce, and I could only move at the perimeter of the worldspace before ctd if that cell with the npc got loaded.

[saintgrimm92]

Thanks for the replies!

By cutting it down, I found it was a combination of things; not JUST the NPCs.

The world space loaded without the NPCs, and that's as far as I tested when I was editing the OP. It went from not loading to loading so I called it good.

When I got around to doing some better testing, I found it freezing in a couple different locations with none of the NPCs placed. Those specific freezes were related to an SE converted resource I was using that wasn't converted correctly or something, idk really, I downloaded the original SE resource, converted it myself, and it fixed that specific issue.

Some of my custom beards were also causing freezing in the worldspace for some reason. I can place the NPC into a cell and COC into that cell with no problems, but if the NPC with that beard went out into the world space and I got too close too him, it caused the game to freeze indefinitely.

I haven't worried about fixing the beard yet and just taken it off of NPCs while I go through and touch up their AI Packages and stuff like that. I've ran into another problem with when the player is considered to be trespassing inside of interior cells. I've made a separate post about that here:

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/13101924-how-to-make-interiors-not-trespassing-during-day-and-trespassing-at-night/


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I think adding things slowly and seeing what causes the crash is the smart way to do it.

 

With the amount of issues I've encountered when trying to make mods, I should know very, VERY well to only do small bits at a time and then test it, but it seems like I make that same mistake at least once on every single mod I've created lmao.