I want to make my own mod, is this possible?

[MunkySpunk]

Hi,

 

I'm new to the modding scene. I've done a few outfit conversions, and now I want to get my toes a bit more wet. I'm willing to do this myself, so all I ask is that some more experience modders read this entire post, and help out a brother who wants to do it himself.

 

I've run into a problem with guard pathing myself that is bugging the hell out of me, and I can't find a mod to fix it.

 

So instead of being one of the thousands of people saying "Hey, wouldn't this mod that's X, Y, Z (and takes forever, and is a huge project, and they won't pay you for) be great? Yeah, if one of you could whip that up in your gobs spare time over the next three months for free, it'd be awesome!" I want to do it myself.

 

So I'm hoping you guys could #1) Tell me if this is possible, and #2) Point me in the direction of some tutorials where I can get started and do the legwork myself?

 

Here's my issue: I hate guard pathing. Sometimes my guards can't step onto a damn curb to finish their rounds, sometimes they navigate complex mazes no problem, sometimes they stand there for a week. All the while, I see Raiders, ghouls, animals, Minutemen patrols, my companion, super mutants, dogmeat and just about everyone else in the commonwealth shoot over and around obstacles to patrol through my settlement, or get at me - and they have no f*#@ing problem doing it. But my guards? Yeah, throw a bubblegum wrapper in their way, and they're stumped.

I assume there's no way to change the AI to make it more I, but is there a way to switch the guard's pathing decisions to say, make their destination the guard post, but also have them do whatever it takes to get to it, like the Raiders do when they're trying to kill me, or the ghouls do when they run a complex hedge maze in 4 seconds to eat me? Is there a 'get to the target' mode for AI that raiders use but they don't give to guards?

Is this a job for FO4edit? Where would I start?

[genolune]

Hey there MunkySpunk,

 

You are doing what I'm doing, starting with outfits and going deeper down the rabbit hole. I believe that would have to have something to do with navmeshing from my limited understanding. I know this is for the Skyrim Creation Kit but its a good place to start learning about these things:

Let me know if that helps.

[damanding]

It's actually a combination of navmesh and NPC's AI packages. I know very little about their AI packages in general. Navmesh is basically a layer that gets added to the floor or ground and gives information to the NPC's AI package about where and how they can walk, where cover is, if there is water they need to swim through etc. Navmesh comes in different colors to indicate the different types. You've got your basic red navmesh which is just general navmesh. Then orange navmesh is designated as "preferred pathing" and is typically used on roads and other walkways that NPC's should be using as a higher priority. Blue navmesh indicates water, particularly if deep enough to swim. So you use that under the ocean, rivers etc. If it's very shallow and no swimming is involved then it can be made standard navmesh if I remember right. Navmesh can also be used to indicate where cover items are such as sandbag walls. So when you see NPC's crouching behind something that's because the navmesh in that spot tells them there is something they can hide behind in a firefight. You can also specify if a ledge is a safe place for an NPC to jump down from. So for instance if a dungeon area requires you to drop from one floor to another to proceed the navmesh at the upper floor's edge will tell the NPC's (like your companion) that it's safe to jump. There's more to navmesh but this covers quite a bit of it. For all the detail see the Skyrim Creation Kit wiki page on it. It still applies to Fallout: http://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Bethesda_Tutorial_Navmesh

 

Also the DarkFox127 tutorial series as Genolune posted a link to is a really good way to get an idea on how to do a lot of things. His tutorials are almost entirely for Skyrim but much of it does still apply. I prefer his tutorials over many of the Fallout specific tutorials readily available because he tends to explain the why as well as the how and he gives more details than many basic Fallout tutorials. DarkFox127 has a different and longer navmesh tutorial from the one linked above that is the one I originally learned from.

 

To bring this back around to some of the problems the original poster is seeing. It's probably a combination of the NPC's AI and poor navmeshing in specific areas. For instance NPC's can't jump up. They're just not capable of doing so. So if they need to get up on something like a curb then the navmesh has to act as a ramp from the lower ground to the higher ground. If you look at the navmesh of stairs, from an NPC's perspective it's a flat ramp, there are no bumps in the stairs as we see it. This is why if you watch NPC's walk up or down stairs you'll see them clipping through the staircase.

 

When you see NPC's repeatedly bump into a wall that you built in your settlement that may be in part because there isn't a break in the navmesh to tell the NPC that there is an object they have to go around. If you've created a location using the creation kit when you create the navmesh for it, you go around things like walls, pillars, and furniture you don't navmesh under them. But due to the nature of creating constructible building pieces that you can use in your settlements, the floor pieces are going to have navmesh on them but since you're not creating your own navmesh in your settlement then there's no way to put breaks in it where you've placed walls, dog houses, a couch, etc. using the workshop menu. Plus the ground and the floor of any buildings that were part of the vanilla settlement when you first find it are already going to have navmesh of their own that isn't going to be broken up by any objects you build on top. So settlements are probably a little more confusing for their poor little AI brains than non-settlement locations.

 

Now here's where we really get into my lack of knowledge about the AI, but my understanding is that when they bump into the collision field of an object in their way, they're supposed to kind of do this pivot and approach from a different angle and if you watch them when they're repeatedly bumping into something you can see this in action. But sometimes they're just not as efficient at it as we would like them to be. I've read that they have a particularly hard time with finding the doors and stairs in settlement workshop built constructions but I'm not entirely sure on the reason why. Someone with more knowledge needs to answer that one.

 

Unfortunately if you decide to poke around and really get into this you're going to definitely need to use the Creation Kit. You can't do things like create or edit navmesh using FO4Edit. So it is a bit of a higher learning curve. I don't know if the AI packages are fully editable by modders but I would think probably not because that seems like a very low level game engine kind of thing.

[damanding]

Wanted to add a final thought: Sometimes Bethesda employees are either lazy or rushed (shocking I know) and the navmesh for an area is poorly done. So you might just be having fits with an area with shoddy navmeshing.

[MunkySpunk]

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate the time you took.

 

I knew the rudimentary working principles behind navmesh, but not much else. I'll start looking into CK.

 

Is there a way for me to go into my own settlement in a savegame and edit it in CK to fix the navmeshing and then apply said changes to the savegame?

 

I wanted a reason to get into CK anyway. Looks like this is it.

 

I'll do some more digging on the AI. It just seems odd to me that ghouls can sprint through a complex maze of obstacles and find me in record time while my guard bleeds out his ears trying to figure out how to get onto a curb, and I wonder what the differences under the hood are that give rise to it.

[damanding]

If you go to a settlement in the CK it will be the vanilla settlement as you first discovered it. Any changes you make will be saved to an esp file. I suggest looking up some beginner CK tutorials to learn how to create an esp, set active files, etc. I'm pretty sure DarkFox 127 has one but it's been at least a year since I watched it because I first started messing around with making mods in Skyrim.