[LE] Exterior navmesh questions

[cumbrianlad]

 

 

Hi. I've never really touched vanilla exterior navmesh before and dread doing it. I'd like some advice. The image may help to explain.

 

I'm modifying Severin manor. If I hadn't found a way to take family to the place I'd have left the navmesh alone, along with all the basalt mounds.

 

However, the family will go outside but they all bunch up on the narrow path of vanilla navmesh between the front door and the road into Ravenrock... it looks ridiculous! We become quite literally a very close family!

 

To get around this, I'm going to need to remove the ugly basalt. I don't see that being a problem. I can make one of my x-markers the enable parent of them and disable them. This results in a gently rounded terrain that I can add a few ash yam's and plants to. The family could easily negotiate the area and use my idle markers, child dummies etcetera.

 

I could do the same with the small bushes, scathecraw etcetera that you can see in the image, or I could floor these to the terrain where necessary.

 

After that, there's the navmesh.

 

Am I supposed to drop the entire mesh below ground? (this will involve the navmesh for two cells, since the manor nicely straddles one boundary!)

 

In the image, arrow 1 points to a feature that I put in. I could probably leave that alone and add a primitive with L_Navcut around it, as I've done with the two statues.

 

Arrow 2 points to one of many navmesh nodes that will be left slightly above the new terrain, once the basalt is disabled. Can these be floored again without problems? I could leave them slightly raised so as not to alter the original data for each triangle but my understanding is that NPCs struggle with navmesh that is not floored or slightly below the terrain.

 

Arrow 3 points to one of the many holes in the vanilla navmesh around the front of the manor. My thinking is that I could simply fill in the gaps, keeping the original two navmeshes with a few extra triangles each.

 

There are no islands in this area so I wouldn't be effectively deleting a vanilla navmesh by filling in any of the spaces.

 

Am I alright to do what I propose or will this cause major conflicts for the game?

 

If I really shouldn't mess with the navmeshes at all, how do I go about dropping the navmesh?

[agerweb]

What I normally do when changing vanilla navmesh in a relatively small area is to cut out the Navmesh around the area I am going to redo and then replace it with my own. If you need to bring any navmesh down to ground level - select the vertices you require and press f.

 

Afterwards you need to go into TESVEdit and do a clean. If it finds any deleted Navmesh it will undelete it, you then go back into the CK and you will have two layers of navmesh. You just select the layer of Navmesh that doesn't involve your changes and move it well below ground level out of the way. If the area you have cut out was quite small you may getaway without TesVEdit making a second layer.

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks a lot for that reply.

 

I'll back up my mod and do a clean first before I go tinkering around with it.

[greyday01]

I've been doing quite a bunch of navmesh changes the last couple days. What I did was with no mods installed I made a note of the NM IDs in the cell, and also just for checking also in the cells just N, W, E and S. In Some cells I dragged the entire NM that needed altering down below the ground and simply redid that NM. In a few other cases I just added or deleted triangles as needed. I noticed the CK did not always update the triangle count that showed unless I clicked out of that cell then back into it, or sometimes I needed to finalize before the count updated. The important thing is to keep an eye on the NM IDs that show while you are in the cell. Just make sure that whether you move the NM down or alter it any of the IDs don't vanish. Save often and back up each stage. Easier that redoing all your work.

 

For some reason I found that if you make changes to the NM with either method, the cells to the N,E, S and W also show *'s even if nothing was changed in those cells. That's why I would write down the NM ID's in the adjoining cells just to make sure I didn't accidentally delete one of them

[Evangela]

The adjacent cells you mention are probably being flagged as edited because you made a mistake editing/creating a triangle that is connected to another triangle that is part of the other cells' navmesh. Be sure that when you are making a NEW triangle that you build it FROM two vanilla vertexes. If you do it the other away around, every triangle connected to it will be overridden, possibly hosing the adjacent cell's navmesh in the process. When editing a vanilla triangle, you can split their edges, you can move their vertexes freely, and you *could* delete them but it's not wise to do this. Reason being is a save will crash if there's a mod installed that references a deleted triangle. Also finalizing, I had read that this should be generally avoided for vanilla navmeshes unless you need a door triangle.

 

It's best to just take the whole vanilla navemesh and pull it all the way down(or up) and rebuild it yourself and take extra care when it's time to connect it to cell borders.

 

For the OP: A sure way of knowing a navmesh is hosed is when their FormIDs change to your mods'. So long as it starts with 00(and 01 I think, but definitely NOT 02 and above), everything is fine.

 

I ultimately decided rebuilding an entire navmesh wasn't worth the effort, so I don't bother with editing exterior navmeshes at all, and methods I know of are so restricting anyway.

Edited October 29, 2017 by Rasikko

[cumbrianlad]

Lots of good advice here.

 

Thanks for the tips.

 

I followed your advice Agerweb and got no problems running the esp through SSE edit afterwards.

 

Those bleeping boundaries are a real pain though. It took me an age to work out that I had to nudge the nodes right up to each other, floor them and then finalize for the green boundary marker to show. That last bit had me scratching my head for quite a while. Oddly, no amount of cursing and threatening to smash the computer had any effect on the process. It's a shame because I employ the technique quite a lot with CK.

 

I'll check for adjoining navmeshes that I didn't touch being added to the mod.

 

The proof of the pudding is probably that in testing I had my character run around all of the meshes with Serana trailing dutifully behind without any problems. The wife and kids also wander around much more now and have started using the idle markers. Oddly, at this point they also started using the idle markers inside the manor.

 

I used 'Custom Family Home' by WitchRiser to get them to move in. Maybe the inability to use the external gear blocked the internal stuff too.

 

As an aside, I also cured a problem whereby my 3 ghost cultists over the hill towards Bloodskal Barrow would fast travel to Ravenrock instead of attacking the player. It turned out that although the ambush site is navigable by NPCs, it was not navmeshed.

 

Edit: Although I did tweak the navmesh outside the manor, it worked much better after subtly editing the landscape to smooth out the areas where the NPCs were getting stuck.

[TomTesoro]

Sorry to seriously necrobump this but I just had to point out cumbrianlad's solution here.

 

Those bleeping boundaries are a real pain though. It took me an age to work out that I had to nudge the nodes right up to each other, floor them and then finalize for the green boundary marker to show.

I wasn't able to get the door markers to show on the navmesh until I did what's described above. Now they're working perfectly thanks to this. Hopefully anyone experiencing the same issue sees this.

Edited April 11, 2021 by TomTesoro