All the New CK Created Houses Lack One Thing

[P210]

First post here folks so be gentle.

 

Meeting a new NPC, forming a friendship with them, and then getting them to hang at your house and be a follower on adventures when requested, is one of the funnest things to do in Skyrim. In fact this makes the game an exceptional experience for me. But as it stands now the end user can only do this with the 5 player owned houses. Don't get me wrong, all the new houses made with the CK are great, but they all lack in being able to actually use them to the full extent that the 5 player "owned" houses permit.

 

In the NPC editior the AI pack for this behavior (I'll use Honeyside as an example) is called "MarriageSpouseRiftenSandboxPlayerHouse". I can assign this AI pack to any NPC in the NPC editor very easily and the NPC will go hang out in Honeyside and stay with me there. I would love to be able to do this with all the terrific CK created houses but none of them allow this as of yet.

 

I think the first CK created house mod that allows the user to assign AI pack behavior via the NPC editor for it will be revolutionary in Skyrim. One CK house creator suggested to me that the scripts from one of the 5 offical player "owned" houses could be transfered to the CK created house. Would this be a solution? Could a modder creating a home in the CK add 5 additional optional files that would allow the user to substitute one of the player owned homes for the CK created home in terms of ownership and AI pack behavior? And could the same be done so that when you buy a house from a Jarl you would actually buy the CK created home instead?

Edited February 19, 2012 by P210

[Qutayba]

You can get your spouses to move to custom houses (you don't need to replace the vanilla ones) by adding dialogue options and accompanying scripts. New NPC's can be made for the houses, too. You'll see more. People are still getting the hang of the CK: making the house itself is easy, but learning the scripting and quest functions take a longer time, but you're right that they're very powerful. I've done some of these things in my mod (shameless plug: Whiteview Manor). There do seem to be some irregularities in how the game handles custom scripts, though, so that might put a damper on things until that gets worked out.

 

You can also put little markers in houses that will trigger animations in the NPC AI (like sweeping, cooking, reading, etc.). However, this can be messed up by the dreaded Navmesh bug, where custom navmeshes don't get loaded if you visit a cell multiple times in a play session (so they'll animate the first time you go home, but not the second). The NPC's will just stand there.

 

In short, all these things are possible, but there seem to be some barriers to those things working smoothly.