A question about pathgrids

[Carl S]

From reading tutorials I understand that pathgrids are used in outdoors enviroments.

I have made my own housemod , but I have an anoying problem with companions

in the house. Often they stand walking in a corner of a room with their faces towards

the wall , and they don't seem to find their way around.

When I played with the vanilla house in Skingrad I did'nt see that often.

Is it possible to use pathgrids indoors ? or is there another solution ?

Somebody who knows , please help.

[Vagrant0]

Basically, anywhere you and NPCs to move through, you need to use pathgrids to tell them the routes they need to take. This appiles to both wandering and routing durring combat. Nodes on a pathgrid are typically where NPCs stop and loiter until they see something they're told to approach. For extriors, you can get away with autogenerating the pathgrids and then tweaking or adding to that pathgrid to move around or ontop of objects. For interiors, you have to do it all manually since autogen works off of ground and slopes, and there is no ground or slopes in interior spaces. The method for creating the points is covered in the wiki. Personally, unless I'm doing large open spaces, I manually make all my pathgrids so that I have better and more immediate control of how movement through those areas is handled. Autogen can also occasionally crash the CS, or cause bordering cells to become affected, so can lead to alot of extra work going back and fixing things.

[Povuholo]

Vagrant0 did a good job explaining that, so I don't have much to add. :)

 

If you need to know more about pathgrids (like how to place them, and what the different colour nodes mean) take a look at this page.

[Carl S]

Thanks a lot Vagrant0 for clearing things up for me.

Glad to hear that there is a solution.

And thanks Povuholo for your help too.

 

I have been thinking about making a house where it is possible to

see what is going on outside the windows. Maybe you (or someone else) would tell me

if the following procedure can be done :

 

Load the exterior and the interior meshes for the same house in Blender.

Make a hole in the meshes where the frontdoor should be. (if it is'nt there allready)

Put the interior mesh inside the exterior mesh and combine the two into one mesh.

Make semi-transparent textures for the window glass and retexture the windows of the mesh.

Export to nif format and in the CS , put an animated frontdoor (vanilla) in place.

In that way the system should recognize the house as one (doublesided) mesh in the exterior world

and therefore there would be no need for loading an interior cell.

 

It would be nice if it can be done , besides the view through the windows ,- the light conditions

between day and night would be more realistic.

[TheTerminator2004]

It could be done, in theory... but I should warn you that the vanilla interiors don't necessarily match the exterior models- ie they probably wouldn't fit together without a lot of work. Also, there's the problem of slowdown- it would be a pretty complicated model, and so might slow the game down considerably.

 

There was a mod that did something similar called 'On top of the world' (or something like that), try searching for it on Nexus, and have a look at how the author made it, it could prove helpful.

[Carl S]

OK Terminator , I agree with your warnings , but still I think

it is worth a try , - to start out with a medium sized house.

I am a newbie to Blender , but this could be a good opportunity

to exercise and learn more.

I'll have a look at "The top of the world".

As I understand the system , the slowdown will only happen

when the player is in the same cell as the house , - and normally

there is not much else resource consuming action near the house.

I will have to wait and see then.

Thanks for your advice.

[Carl S]

sorry for the doublepost

[Povuholo]

I think that would cause problems with the A.I. of the npc's who live in the house, because they won't be able to leave or enter the cell. But you can give it a shot.

[Carl S]

If that is the case Povuholo, - it is allmost a "showstopper".

I'll have to think of a solution.

Maybe if I removed the collision physics from the door + made proper pathgrids.

It would probably cause the door animation activator not to work , but even

if the NPC just walk through the door , it is'nt worse than the rest of the game.

 

Please keep posting (anybody) if you see a "showstopper" for this house.

[TheTerminator2004]

The thing is, the NPCs will try to go to the old interior cell, not the new exterior house. You could make an entirely new house, I suppose, or you could change the AI for all the NPCs who enter the house.

 

Not sure No twos worth the effort though, you might just be better off making an entirely new house.