Handling NavMesh for rebuilding interiors?

[Deleted44948562User]

Copy/pasted (mostly) from a Reddit post I made and got literally no responses to because Reddit is unhelpful.

 

At the moment, I'm working on a needlessly ambitious mod that drastically overhauls many of New Vegas' vanilla interiors. Mostly in-door/out-door size/window/door handle inconsistencies, but also re-arranging furniture and clutter to just generally make the rooms look more lived in and convincing.

 

I'm still kinda new to modding and have only just found out the dire implications of deleting NavMesh. But the thing is, I've overhauled these interiors to such a degree that I'm not sure it's practical or worth the effort of simply editing the vanilla NavMesh vertices to fit all the complicated new furniture arrangements. So I've defaulted to something that's very stupid...

 

I simply drag the vanilla NavMesh off to the side, and make new NavMesh where it used to be. No deleting.

 

This is basically a "brush it under the rug" solution. So far it seems to have no noticeable effect on sandboxing/pathing. But my instincts are telling me it's a terrible idea. Is this... fine? Am I good? Should I stop being lazy and just figure out a way to re-arrange the vanilla NavMesh to fit the new shape of the interiors? Is there literally any other option? Thank you!

 

E: UPDATE! I think I may have figured out a cool way of addressing this. After moving the original NavMesh out of the way and adding the new NavMesh, I followed

. Technically this is for removing deleted NavMesh, but it ended up working out that this method actually replaced the original NavMesh orientation with my own, no deletion necessary. This ended up working out so smoothly that I'm honestly suspicious it didn't work, but... it seems to check out so far! And no deleted NavMesh notification in FNVEdit, so I'm optimistic! Yay! Edited June 21, 2019 by Guest

[madmongo]

What exactly are the "dire implications of deleting NavMesh"?

 

In any event, the one issue I can see is that FNV will sometimes move NPCs around in cells when the player isn't there. It's extremely annoying because you put an NPC on one side of the room with a barrier preventing them from getting to the other side and no link at all in the navmeshes between each side and the NPC will sometimes end up on the other side of the room anyway. So I can picture an NPC moving to an invalid part of the cell just because the navmesh is there, and then they get stuck falling out of the room possibly in an endless loop, depending on where they respawn after they fall.

 

If you are just moving things around, you don't have to delete the entire navmesh. Just delete the nodes that you are changing and attach your new navmesh bits to the remainder of the existing navmesh.

 

If your mod is an esm and you are editing the mod using the GECK powerup, you may need to make this part of your mod an esp or the original navmesh might still end up in place in-game which is going to cause some screwy results.

[Deleted44948562User]

Just that mods which reference deleted NavMesh will cause endless, horrific CTDs apparently. I definitely don't know much about it, but I've heard enough that deleting NavMesh is a practice I'm trying to avoid.

 

That said, my current practice definitely doesn't feel any better, not least for the reason you outlined. Even though I haven't run into issues so far, my gut tells me NavMesh outside the interior proper would just cause weird NPC behavior like you described.

 

As for your advice, I'm not sure that really addresses the issue, but then I'm not sure of most things here. I figured the CTDs weren't caused by deleting the entire NavMesh, but rather by deleting even just one triangle. If you think deleting a few triangles isn't a big deal, I suppose I can just give it a shot and pray it doesn't make my mod totally gamebreaking (god knows if I'll ever even publish it at this rate).

 

Man, I hate NavMeshing.