Invisible walls for Navmesh control

[Pentegass]

Ive come to notice that somehow, mods that claim to have navmesh do not really work well. And I see that my settlers are bumping into walls and ultimately clipping through them. So I ask, if it is possible to have an INVISIBLE(yet passable by player) obstacle-structure set, so we can put these obstacles next to the walls that dont work, and make settlers do not leave zones that we defined?

[damanding]

The technical reason for this (assuming I'm understanding it correctly as there's not a lot of information available on it) is that mod author developed items may not have the same navmesh cutting capabilities that Bethesda was able to implement with their greater access to tools. Items placed with the Creation Kit can check an option to cut the navmesh (though not all mod authors may know to use it) or the author may not have modified the vanilla navmesh to account for it as navmesh can be a bit intimidating to new authors. Items designed to be placed with the workshop menu by end users don't have the ability to cut navmesh natively implemented unless the item was made using 3ds max which not all mod authors have access to. Having not yet gotten 3ds max setup and taken the time to learn how to use it to do navcuts, I'm not positive if it can be done with just walls.

 

Next challenge is if you want an invisible wall to be visible while in workshop mode you have to use some scripting to get that to work. So far I can only think of one mod that has done this, Invisible Furniture.

 

The final challenge that I can think of off the top of my head is that NPC's basically have the ability to teleport themselves if they really want to get to something they're having problems accessing. If you've ever seen them trying to get around an obstacle and then basically jump a short distance away, you've seen it in action. It was intentionally designed into the system because navmesh and navcuts are not a perfect system. Nor is their AI the smartest.

 

Edited to add: I'm not claiming myself to be an expert mod author, this is my understanding of the challenges.

Edited January 25, 2017 by damanding