vertical navmesh? (NPC's using Jetpacks and jumps)

[Ekayne]

So, come CK I'm going to be living breathing and sweating mods, and I have a hierarchy of mods I want to make/ look into. on the lowest rung (one I fear I'll never get to/ hardest to actually make) of that list is the possibility to make NPC's actually use jumps or jet-packs to get around, and while a lot of the later rung mods I want to learn to make look impossible, this one seems full on actually impossible to me.

 

a possibility is invisible NPC only doors that use some script magic to check if the NPC has a jetpack. but I mean, I want the NPC's Moving exactly how the player does. how impossible is this?

[Langy]

From pretty impossible to very possible, depending on your definition of what it is you want it to do. If there are script commands that can make an NPC jump or use a jet pack to a specific location (which there may be, at least in an akward way via forcing an NPC to play a certain animation), then you can place markers around the world that would enable NPCs to jump to them. You'd probably need to alter the scripts on the NPCs in order to make them actually jump when they get close to one of those markers, too - and it's very possible that doing this for every NPC in the game could be rather demanding, especially if you have a lot of jump locations.

 

It could be a lot simpler if you used two markers - one marker to tell an NPC that they can jump, and another to say where they can jump to - but you'd still need to come up with some AI routines to tell when jumping is a good idea - and I don't think there are any ways to get an NPC's path to a target, so you can't just say 'if jumping shortens your path, then do so'.