[LE] Strange cell loading dilemma

[icecreamassassin]

So not too long ago we released V19 of Legacy of the Dragonborn and during beta we experienced a strange issue which we previously had seen a couple times but wrote off as a strange fluke. Well now that we have released it seems that it's happening a lot more often and I have no idea why.

 

First the setting. The museum is in the Solitude worldspace, and there is a doorway which leads to a cliff side hot springs area that is in the tamriel worldspace, overlooking the land. There is also a door in that hot springs area leading to the interior of the museum safehouse.

 

The issue is that sometimes, seemingly randomly, the player will use a door to go to the hotsprings and instead of ending up in the tamriel space, they end up in the dummy area outside the museum wall which is a visual copy of the hotsprings so when you look down from the balcony, it looks the same as the real space. This area doesn't even have doors, yet somehow the player will end up out in this space with no normal way to get back. This area should not be accessible in any way but it seems to be happening more often. Also NPC's seem to now be getting stuck in this dummy area and I am at a complete loss.

 

This doesn't appear to be a mod conflict that we know of and the only real changes we made were to delete a dummy building in the fake space and allow the LOD from the real building instead (because parts of that building would seemingly vanish randomly). It seems that solving one problem broke something else.

 

This issue seems to defy logic and everything I know about cell worldspace inheritance so any advice would be very helpful, thanks.

[Kapteyn]

So it's either a debug zone or an incomplete piece which ended up being shipped. Either way, it sounds like two devs or teams were not communicating, possibly that two were working on the same thing and nobody cleared up the unfinished stuff. If it's not duplicate entries in the editor then surely it's a script, or indeed two scripts, calling separate functions on the same thing which lead to different places. So somebody screwed up. As for which of them ultimately gets called first, I guess that would be a matter of latency.

 

Hang on... is this even vanilla stuff or due to mod changes? I'm tired.

Edited October 8, 2017 by Kapteyn

[icecreamassassin]

Really it's more likely Skyrim Voodoo than anything we specifically changed. There are no scripts involved here, just two worldspaces and two doors that do not lead to an area that is somehow getting redirects from the doors. My suspicion is that it may have something to do with how it was a LOOOOOONG time ago, when the hot springs area WAS an active part of the solitude worldspace and the exit to the Tamriel worldspace was by going through the guildhouse. Somehow the NavMesh index may have the areas cross linked or something. It's just peculiar because this wasn't happening to this degree until I removed some dummy objects in the dummy space and now it seems to happen more rather than less. We had issues where if you entered from the safe house interior cell into the hot springs, sometimes the safehouse would vanish, or even parts of the platform and you'd fall to your death, which just didn't make any sense but probably was people being ported into the dummy space somehow, like something deep seeded in the ESP still thinks that the doors are linked to that space when they simply are not.

[Kapteyn]

Well I dunno then. But... is it worth considering how the two doors at Helgen work? There is zero interaction with them, ones just walks up to the door and automatically enters the fort - this remains the case if skipping the normal starting scenes so that Helgen does not destroyed. So maybe it's possible that there is an auto-trigger which was originally blocked by an invisible wall, which was then removed (the dummy thing) so you're now hitting that trigger (sometimes, if you don't activate the door quick enough).

[DavidJCobb]

If your problem is with the Solitude-side door that is to the right of the Blue Palace's entrance, then the bug is occurring because you have two different load doors there, one directly behind the other. One of the load doors leads to your Solitude-side dummy area, and the other door leads to the Tamriel-side real area. Here's an image of one of the doors moved slightly, so you can see the other one.

 

Of course, I could have the wrong door. I don't have time to download a 2+GB mod just to check on a door; I grabbed your 2MB hotfix and cracked that open.

Somehow the NavMesh index may have the areas cross linked or something.

For future reference: this is unlikely. Load door references are "decorated" with an object, ExtraTeleport, which appears to only store the other-side door (as an integer "handle"), and the position and rotation of the other-side teleport marker (i.e. the marker in that other door's worldspace/interior). I didn't see anything referencing any other fields in ExtraTeleport when I was disassembling parts of the engine related to load doors: there shouldn't be any other data in that class.

Edited October 9, 2017 by DavidJCobb