Fast travelling effects on NPCs

[dizietemblesssma]

I'm trying to troubleshoot a situation where an animal NPC (from a mod) alters their appearance when I fast travel if they are not following me.  I've been trying to find a comprehensive list of what the game engine does, what is reset etc. when the player character fast travels, changes from exterior to interior or vice versa, or enters a new world space;  my suspicion is that this knowledge might answer my question as to what is happening.

Can anyone point me to a resource please?

 

diziet

[Sphered]

Is it behavior based appearance changing. Or are they using a visual enchant. Or are they changing race. Etc. These details kinda matter. Might be AI package related, or a graph, or other

[dizietemblesssma]

in Vigilant SE you can get a hound as a follower dog, the mod allows you to give the hound a 'white wolf pelt' and its appearance changes accordingly.  on leaving the mods worldspace the hound can come with the player and stay as a follower and fast travels etc still 'wearing' the pelt.  but as soon as i dump him at a house - say golden plantation, when i fast travel back there i see the wolf pelt look has gone.

From some reading I get the impression that this is related to how the game engine treats NPCs when the player fast travels, hence my interest in the details of the game engine and fast travel in general.

 

diziet

[xkkmEl]

This is likely not an issue with fast traveling, but with resetting cells, and their contents.  Well, reset or persistence...

Resets happen to cells if they are not visited for some time.  Most cells reset when you return to them after 5 days of absence.  It causes all objects/references whose CK location is that cell, or that are currently in that cell, to revert to their CK inventory and state; i.e. they 'respawn'.

Persistence, or rather lack of persistence, allows the game engine to not load certain references in memory when they are not of immediate interest to the player.  When that happens, the reference that is not in memory looks to scripts like it does not exist (it will look like 'None').  Some mods misidentify this condition and act as if the reference no longer exists and then proceed to wipe any state information they had associated with that 'missing' reference.  PapyrusUtils is the worst culprit in this area, as so many important mods depend on it.

[dizietemblesssma]

I see, that makes sense, it meams there is nothing I can do except make my own patch for this one NPC dog!

Further to your explanation, if a mod did not "misidentify this condition and act as if the reference no longer exists" then upon reloading the cell a script would then behave properly with respect to the reference, do I understand that correctly?

 

diziet

[AaronOfMpls]

2 hours ago, xkkmEl said:

Most cells reset when you return to them after 5 days of absence.

I thought it was 10 days for most cells (30 for cleared dungeons), but yah, the point still stands.  Or is it shorter for outdoor locations?

[Hanaisse]

The dog resetting sounds like typical game engine behaviour to me.

Take Housecarls, for instance. They have a "default" outfit, like steel armor. I can give him/her ebony armor and they will wear it when recruited and following. Once I send them home, they return to their own default outfit. They will still have the ebony armor in their inventory and re-equip it the next time I take them out (usually takes going through a load screen before they do).

Have you tested re-recruiting the dog? Or checking their inventory to see if the pelt is still there (if you can) ?

[xkkmEl]

8 hours ago, dizietemblesssma said:

Further to your explanation, if a mod did not "misidentify this condition and act as if the reference no longer exists" then upon reloading the cell a script would then behave properly with respect to the reference, do I understand that correctly?

Only testing the hypothesis will prove me right, or wrong... but I expect it would behave consistently with how you last saw it.

Edit: Testing/fixing this may be easy.  Just put the dog reference in a quest script variable or an alias.  If the "reset" stop, it was a persistence issue.  As for cell reset... I'm not so sure...

Edit2: I had a comment on testing the cell reset hypothesis, but I haven't tested this well enough to stand by it.  So I deleted it.

Edited April 30 by xkkmEl

[xkkmEl]

8 hours ago, AaronOfMpls said:

I thought it was 10 days for most cells (30 for cleared dungeons), but yah, the point still stands.  Or is it shorter for outdoor locations?

Five days fits my experience with flora and outdoors ore veins... it is however true that not all cells have the same reset time and I have not paid that much attention to the calendar.

[dizietemblesssma]

On 4/30/2024 at 7:32 PM, Hanaisse said:

Have you tested re-recruiting the dog? Or checking their inventory to see if the pelt is still there (if you can) ?

This was interesting, although the mod does not give the option to trade with the dog I can use the console. And that shows the while wolf pelt still in its inventory.  So I 'rehired' the dog and when I fast travelled it was wearing the white pelt without my having to give it one or tell it to.

So I think it might be the 'default outfit' thing.  Thanks for the tip.

 

diziet

edit: looking in the CK I can see that the dog doesn't have a default outfit but I imagine that still leads to the same issue.