[LE] What are my NPC's doing?

[maxarturo]

I had experienced similar things as Tasheni described, with VRAM.

In one of my massive heavy cells i had several issues with npc not spawning or objects disappearing.

Everything got rectified and haven't had any issue from the point after i optimized the cell, cutting by 3/4 the objects that the engine renders at any given point.

[sammidraco]

AL can be tricky. You have to set up your packages so that all their time is accurately ordered. Say for instance, you have an AI Package Sit that places your npc in a chair from 20x2, but you have another Sandbox AI Package above the Sit Package that allows your NPC to Sandbox from 18-4, then you have a conflict between the two packages and the one that is higher up in the AI Package List gets priority and overrides the other.

There are no conflicting AI package schedules. They're all assigned a single AI package where each of them does a series of actions or idle animations on repeat. There aren't multiple AI packages to interfere.

 

I never did COC from the start menu. I wanted to use various saved games to play through the mod at different levels to see how anything might be adjusted. I usually read that as long as it's a clean save like the other person said, it should be fine. But I tried what you suggested. Didn't fix the disappearing NPC problems, but it did make me aware of another issue that I didn't know I had. So that was a plus at least.

[sammidraco]

Try making them persistent in the locations they start in. ie assign a Location to the cell, then double click on the NPC in the render window and set that Location in the persistence tab.

Â

Also just to be clear - a clean save is a save where the your mod was not loaded, not just not interacted with.

I tried your suggestion, and as far as I can tell that actually worked. Don't understand why the NPCs in other areas aren't having this problem, but at least it seemed to fix it. Thanks!

 

And yes, I was using clean saves before, where the mod was not loaded. I just didn't word it as clearly.

[sammidraco]

I can't say what's causing this, but I would clean the mod with TESVEdit and make a seq - I experienced that some packages are not running properly without a new seq despite they were not integrated in start enabled quests.

I know that waiting for several hours ingame or sleeping too long breaks the timetable of the AI (I'm not sure, but I guess more than six or eight hours), so npcs will mostly not be at the right place in time.

The only situation I can imagine for your dead npcs is that they fall from great height when spawning. It happened with my sheep, when they sometimes suddenly popped in, they crashed on the ground and died instantly. It happened mostly when I was nearly out of VRAM.

Â

This could be the cause for the absence of the npcs also. If you go in the cell, npcs are not spawning because VRAM is too low? If you load the game again, VRAM is not out and they spawn correctly. These are just my thoughts, could be terrible wrong ;)

Huh, that's interesting. I'm not sure if that was the cause of it. I'd have to look into it more. So far I've found at least a temporary fix by using agerweb's suggestion. But I'm not sure if that actually fixed the cause of the problem or just the symptom. I'll definitely look into this more, and keep it in mind if I start having similar problems later on. Thanks for the input!

 

 

I had experienced similar things as Tasheni described, with VRAM.

In one of my massive heavy cells i had several issues with npc not spawning or objects disappearing.

Everything got rectified and haven't had any issue from the point after i optimized the cell, cutting by 3/4 the objects that the engine renders at any given point.

It's possible that could be part of my problem. My cell isnt massive, but there is a fair amount of things stuffed in it. I'll have to look into it. Thanks for the advice!