[LE] NPCs attacking my mannequins! Any ideas why?

[cumbrianlad]

Hi.

 

the title says it all, really.

 

I have a fort with a keep. inside the keep are Thalmor, some merchants, with their own faction and some of my own mannequins with different skins to show various Thalmor armour. Outside the fort are some Alik'r sailors at a ship. They are friends of the player faction and player follower faction. It's possible to get them to follow the player into the fort and help out slaughtering the Thalmor, which is what I intended.

 

My mannequins have their own race but are basically the vanilla mannequins with 'is immobile' checked to prevent them wandering completely. Everything else is the same, including AI data and the dunprisonerfaction.

 

I've used them in player homes and had no problems.

 

the problem of the NPCs attacking the mannequins only showed up in testing today, when I was taking a follower (serana) into the fort to check out that followers functioned correctly. all prior tests in this area ran without mannequins being attacked.

 

Serana and two of the Alik'r sailors followed me into the keep and all hell broke loose! The merchants don't fight the player or player followers normally but one of them must have been hit by Serana or the Alik'r because they all joined in attacking my character, Serana and the Alik'r. This is also fine by me. the trick is not to involve them in the fight with the Thalmor and they'll end up selling you gear, some of which is cool stuff like jarrin root.

 

Part way through the chaos, one Alik'r sailor started attacking a mannequin. Serana finished off the Thalmor and joined in the assault on the hapless dummy. The last remaining merchants also charged in to defeat the motionless 'enemy'. It was laughable, really, but obviously I don't want this to happen.

 

Any ideas? my only thought so far is that the Alik'r sailors don't have 'dunPrisonerfaction' as friends, neither does Serana or my merchants. I could add that to the sailors and merchants but I don't want to mess with Serana, for obvious reasons. Also, adding this faction as a friend to Serana, if it sorts the problem would mean I'd have to do it to every single potential follower in the game. Even altering the merchant and alik'r factions to have the prisoner faction as a friend could cause problems if one of the Thalmor guards inadvertently hits one of them in combat, leading to my merchants joining the fight and getting killed.

 

I know this problem of NPCs attacking mannequins has been seen before but can't find any solution that seems relevant to my case.

 

edit: I've just had a thought for a solution. The mannequins are only in the cell to add a bit of realism to the area where the conscripted blacksmiths are repairing Thalmor armour. in other words they're eye-candy and not intended for use by the player. I could try adding collision cubes around each of them with the primitive set to L_InvisibleWall. That should stop any weapon or magic strikes on the mannequins. I'd still like to know what's causing the problem in the first place, though.

[foamyesque]

Are you sure that that's the *only* faction the mannequins have? There exist mods, for example, that have equipping certain sorts of armour add the user to that particular faction.

 

Does the same issue occur if you give the same Thalmor robes to a vanilla mannequin?