Disabled Enable Parent crashing the game?

[zeidrich]

Hello, I'm having a problem and I wonder if anyone has had the same problem before.

 

Basically, in the mod I'm working on, you change the environment a bit depending on options you choose in the quest. In this case you choose to employ a Maize Farmer, and he, and his Maize appears in what was otherwise an abandoned house.

 

The way I wanted to do it was this: I create an xmarker, the NPC, and in this case 5 Maize objects (2 activators, 3 statics). I set the NPC and Maize to all have the xmarker set as the Enable Parent. This works just fine, if I disable the xmarker, the corn and the NPC disappear. If I enable the xmarker again, the corn and NPC reactivate.

 

The problem I'm having is this:

If I set the xmarker to be Initially Disabled, the game crashes on start up. Before it gets to the title screen, before I can load a game, whatever.

If I set the xmarker to be enabled, but set the 6 objects to have their enable state opposite the Enable Parent, the game crashes.

If I set the xmarker to be disabled, and set the 6 objects to have their enable state opposite the Enable Parent, the game runs fine.

 

So I thought maybe you couldn't have an Enable Parent with all of it's child objects initially set to a disabled state.

I tested the xmarker to be initially enabled, the 6 original objects with their Enable Parent set to the xmarker, and 2 more statics (boards over a door) set with the xmarker as the Enable Parent, but with their enable state opposite the Enable Parent. This again worked fine.

However, I set the xmarker to be initially disabled, so the 6 objects should be disabled (corn and NPC) but the boards on the door should be enabled initially, and the game still crashed.

 

Eventually, I worked around it by just leaving the xmarker initially enabled, with all the objects set to the same state as the xmarker, and disable the parent in a gamemode block when initializing the quest. But I'd really rather not do it that way, in case for some reason that initialization doesn't run, or something funny like that. (In my limited experience with the TES engine you can't really expect anything to work in order, it typically seems to run correctly and completely when it runs, but always seems to be a chance that it wont run when you expect it to or at all)

 

Does anyone know why it's doing that to me, or if there's a way around it (other than the way I'm doing it). I'll probably just have a sort of timed heartbeat that just makes sure the enable states of everything are set correctly as per quest objectives, but it just seems like that's excessive given what I'm trying to do seems like it should be straightforward.

Edited January 20, 2011 by zeidrich