Everything works unless I reload my save.

[EPDGaffney]

My mod has a cellar and a lot of scripted AI stuff goes on there, kind of like a setpiece. There are fifteen radroaches (well, they're my custom roaches but they're almost identical). They scatter when one of them sees the player. Then they are all disabled and marked for deletion and all the trigger boxes are disabled and marked for deletion. I have probably seen this play out during testing well over a hundred times by now, and there has never been a problem.

 

I recently made some massive extensions to the cellar but hadn't navmeshed that, and it all still worked.

 

To-day I added a scripted jump-scare-light^TM event and navmeshed the rest of the additions to the cell. The only other change I can think of is that I installed GECK PowerUp to-day, which I hadn't done since installing my game and OS again maybe a week ago. But before that day, PowerUp was installed and working with this mod for months. I mention PowerUp only because I saved my file again after installing it. Also, removing the .dll file from my NVSE Plugins folder doesn't seem to uninstall PowerUp (I still get all the warnings), despite the fact that that's the only file I've ever used to install it (at least, according to my recollection).

 

I can't honestly think of any changes besides this, but it all worked until I tested the jump scare an hour ago. The weird thing is that everything works absolutely perfectly the first time, and then if I reload my game in any way (dying, loading any save slot, anything that doesn't involve quitting to desktop and relaunching the application), the game behaves as if I navmeshed just patches of the area, with the roaches running in place or just standing there, then teleporting to various spots in the cell. One group seem to want to run to the door (which is 90 degrees away from their travel package destination), and they run straight into the wall until I push them sideways, which allows them run up the stairs to the door, and they just run in place at that door until they can teleport through the door to the nether darkness beyond.

 

One roach that gets enabled later by a trigger box, is now being enabled in the middle of the cell, as opposed to where it should be, right near the trigger. This, like everything else, works perfectly the first time I load my game, and then it breaks if I reload to test again, unless I quit to desktop and relaunch the game.

 

All ideas welcome. I've tried redoing the navmesh, and that didn't work, so now I'll do some more tests. Cheers.

[uhmattbravo]

I remember reading something a long time ago about Oblivion not clearing stuff out properly when loading a save game unless you exit to your desktop. Back then, I took the advice loosely, and eventually ran into odd behavior one time and started fully exiting to the desktop before loading a save every time. I've stuck with the habit since and carried it over to Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Skyrim, and have noticed less odd behavior. I honestly can't say wether the two things are linked, or if the newer games have been better optimized to avoid stuff like that, or even if someone just developed an unnecessary habit and suckered me into following suit, but in the least it's something you might want to look into before beating yourself up too bad trying to fix it.

 

That said the first thing i'd try, and this is purely hypothetical because I have no practical experience with any of these functions, would be to run a check to see if the game was reloaded with GetGameLoaded:

 

https://geckwiki.com/index.php/GetGameLoaded

 

And try to reset the navmesh by disabling and re-enabling it with DisableNavmesh and EnableNavMesh:

 

https://geckwiki.com/index.php/DisableNavmesh

 

And

 

https://geckwiki.com/index.php/EnableNavMesh

 

Again, this is hypothetical, so I can't promise that it'll work or even if the latter 2 functions actually work that way, but it's the first thing i'd try if I were in your position.

[EPDGaffney]

Well, I'm hoping it's a faulty installation of GECK PowerUp. I didn't do it right this time after installing my game and OS again, so just now I corrected that and deleted most of the room and navmesh, and it seems to work fine. I have a back-up of the plug-in from before. I'll try to save all my scripts again and see what happens.

 

Thanks for the advice, though.

 

And on exiting the entire game, I have never ever been in that practise and I think it was needed back in Oblivion but only affects minor stuff in newer games. In Fallout 4, I remember that if I had saved before tripping a mine, and then reloaded that save in hopes of getting it right, the mine wouldn't be there. Of course, I didn't spend a whole lot of time in that game and they may have patched it, but that's the only one I've ever personally encountered. And I have thousands of hours in New Vegas.

 

So, whilst it's tempting to call it an engine bug, just so I don't have to tear my hair out fixing it, I kind of think that would be the wrong thing to do here.

 

Edit: Having trouble confirming that navmesh command is doing anything. It gives no error messages even when I enter gibberish. Either way, I've found a back-up with a timestamp I misread, and it turns out that back-up is just before I did more of the navmesh (and some packages and scripts), with everything else working perfectly. Sure enough, loading and reloading that save yields the expected results every single time. I'll make another back up of this and redo a few hours of work (probably faster now that I know what I want to do), and see what do I get.

Edited February 26, 2018 by EPDGaffney

[EPDGaffney]

All right, so, it's definitely the navmesh. It turned out that all the scripts and packages I thought I had to redo were already done, so when everything was working, that was with all that stuff in place. I just had to correct one line of code and do the navmesh, and the problem remains if I revert that line of code, so it's apparently the navmesh. The navmesh is 100 triangles. I'm starting to wonder about size, but I don't really know what's appropriate. A vault for example would have to have far more than 100 triangles of navmeshing. This leads me to consider optimisation techniques like Rooms and Portals, but I've never done that or needed to, so I really hope that if I start learning that, it'll actually work.

 

Edit: I do get this error:

 

https://prnt.sc/ijt4oa

 

 

 

Warning: PowerUp - Reports

Unable to find Package Location Reference on owner object (00000000) "GSBCellarBugCalmHeadExploderPackage".

 

Origin: 0049FCF5

"Yes to all" will disable all warnings of this origin.

 

Edit 2: Seems people have similar problems, though no-one yet mentions it working fine until you load a save, and some people say navmeshes are impossible to use in New Vegas, and other people say that you need to use an .esm file. Unfortunately, converting my mod to a master has never fixed any problems it was supposed to fix, but I'll try it. Also, heard that these conversions can destroy your dialogue if it's already done, so I'll need to look out for that.

Edited February 26, 2018 by EPDGaffney

[EPDGaffney]

So, using it as an .esm file fixes everything with navmeshing and even races (the latter being one of the problems it didn't fix last time I tried), but it of course completely breaks my 1000 lines of dialogue. At least the audio for them. Now that I think about it, I was going to re-record that anyway, so maybe I should just make it a master file...I was trying to reduce plug-ins on load orders by just using one file for the people that download it, but maybe I either need to use two, or maybe I can just make it a master file. I don't think it has any conflicts that it could lose against other mods, really, so it's probably fine to do that. Which of course will be so much fun to edit...God help me, GECK, why do I love you?

[uhmattbravo]

That should be easy, just change the dialogue's folder name from whatever.esp to whatever.esm. Edited February 26, 2018 by uhmattbravo

[EPDGaffney]

And rename all the recordings if I want to use them, and generate new lip files. Also, there's a lot of dialogue and I'd have to test literally every line, but some people report missing topics. Every time I think I've jumped over all this editor's and engine's hurdles, I am adequately reminded how stupid I am to think that.

 

Oh well, if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is.

[uhmattbravo]

I honestly don't think you really need to rename each individual file. I made a personal edit of Vincent Vincent (the companion mod..... highly recommended BTW) and added my 'Um' prefix to the .esp for my current (TTW) playthrough and finally got to the Mojave about a week ago and realized his voice was missing. Just changing the folder name was enough to fix him for me.

[EPDGaffney]

Oh, really? Well, that's nice. I remember reading about this a while back and I thought it was more like what I said above, but there could be a number of reasons for that, like patches, other changes I didn't know the modder had made, me being completely wrong about the entire thing, stuff like that.

 

Still need to run through that quest and make sure all the lines are still in place. If they are, I may just distribute this as a master file. Have to look into what reasons, if any, there are not to do that.

[madmongo]

If your mod changes or deletes existing game references, it may not work properly as an esm.

 

Let's say, for example, you make a mod to fill in one of the boarded up homes in Goodsprings, and you delete the wood planks and the static door. Then you add in your new interior and a new door that is actually a functional door and not a static.

 

Once your mod is done, if you then convert it to an esm using FNVedit, and YOU DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE TO IT, it will work (that's in caps because it's important). However, if you then edit your mod using the GECK (with powerup, because the vanilla GECK won't edit an esm), after you save your mod, in-game the wood planks and the static door will still be there. Your new functional door will also be there, though you may have a really hard time activating it since the static door might be completely blocking you from touching it. Your esm will be able to add new stuff, but if you move or delete anything that isn't defined in your mod, those changes won't show up in-game.

 

The only way I know of to keep your mod functioning correctly as an esm is to convert it back to an esp every time you edit it, then convert it back to an esm using FNVedit when you are done.

 

It's also possible to convert your mod to an esm using TESsnip, but I've been told that you should never ever use TESsnip with FNV as it can corrupt your mod and ruin your save games and cause all kinds of trouble. I never had any problems with it while I used it, but I stopped using it once I found that out. I do know from experience that you'll get the above bug as soon as you convert your mod to an esm with TESsnip, regardless of whether you edit the mod later with the GECK or not. Just the conversion to esm is enough to cause the bug to show up.

 

On the other hand, any NPC you define in an esp will likely suffer from the infamous mismatched head/body texture bug. Some people think that all you need to do is edit your ini files and you can fix this bug, but while that works for some people, the solution doesn't work for others. If you don't want your NPCs to have mismatched skin textures, and you want it to be done reliably so it works for everyone, you need to define the NPCs in an esm.

 

Because of these issues, depending on what you are doing, you might need to have both an esp and an esm for your mod.

 

I know plenty of mods that have been released as esm only. As long as you do it correctly, it's not a problem.

Edited February 27, 2018 by madmongo