What Causes My Custom Interior Cells to Get "Compacted"?

[user826]

I'm working on a mod right now that has lots of custom interior cells, and sometimes, when I enter one of these cells, everything appears to have been "compacted" to a single point. I can't move, I can only look around and everything in the room has been squished around me, overlapping each other. Can anyone tell me what causes this? It seems to be random as far as I can tell, but if I load the ESP in the GECK, click "Save" and exit, then it appears to be fixed when I reload a previous save and enter the cell again.

 

Does it have anything to do with me editing the plugin with FNVEdit afterwards, or with having multiple instances of the GECK open at once, or having the GECK open while I run the mod in the game for testing?

 

I'll try to grab a screenshot next time it happens, but hopefully what I've described will sound familiar to somebody.

[dubiousintent]

Sounds like a "junkado/junknado" or "vortex on junk" situation. Please see the Issue_-_Entering_an_Interior_spawns_the_player_in_a_huge_ball_of_items_and_NPCs_aka_junkado entry under the "Solutions to Graphics Problems" section of the wiki "Fallout NV Mod Conflict Troubleshooting" article.

 

-Dubious-

[user826]

That certainly describes the issue that I'm having, but I don't have any of the mods listed in the solutions section, nor am I using any weather mods. The issue is MY mod, but I don't know what's causing it.

[mindboggles]

There's a chance you might have items outside the havok bounds which can cause problems. Good practice to keep your dungeon close to 0,0,0 of the cell. The havok boundary is huge but there's always a chance you could have items outside it.

 

Maybe you have an item in the cell with no collision under it preventing it from falling when the cell loads which might also cause havok problems.

[dubiousintent]

What mindboggles describes is the essence of the "z= -3000" setting problem mentioned: something is outside of the havok boundary (though it wasn't described in those terms in the solutions I found). Could be in any axis, though the "negative z-axis" is most "invisible" and likely if an item doesn't have collision.

 

I would be interested in hearing what does eventually resolve this.

 

-Dubious-

[user826]

Ah, crap, the whole crux of my mod is that it's a space station using the Mothership Zeta space dome and sun meshes at 10x scale. Those encircle the entire interior and extend along every axis. It was working fine before, though, so I only started experiencing this recently. Is ~3000 units on any axis the maximum?

[dubiousintent]

The "-3000" was just a "large number" that happened to be used in a specific instance. I have no idea if there is an actual value limit, though I would expect one.

 

My speculation would be the issue is one of exceeding the cell boundary where a havoked "static item" was originally placed by a significant amount. I found the following in the "Bethsoft Tutorial Optimization" article on GECKWiki:

 

WARNING: Havok physics and the room markers do not play well together. Avoid placing Havokable objects near portals that they might be knocked through. [if an object is in, say, room A, then drawing of that object is restricted to people who are in room A, or who can see the object through a portal to room A. If the Havok engine causes the object to move (because the player picked it up with the Z key, or an explosion threw it) then the object will continue to be drawn so long as the object is in the motion under the control of the Havok system. However, once the object comes to rest, it is passed back to the normal renderer, and is once again drawn only for people in room A... even if it is now in room B. If you are in room B, with the object, it will be invisible to you.]

 

So the question is not that your "mod" takes place in a space station, but rather did some item in your interior cell get displaced outside of that original cell?

 

-Dubious-

[user826]

I haven't gotten to the stage yet where I'm furnishing the interiors. I'm still building the cells themselves, and so far have only placed static items.

 

Although the Mothership Zeta space dome pieces are considered moveable statics in the GECK. Could that be the issue? I also have a script running that uses the SetPos command to rotate these space domes while the player is in the cell, in order to simulate the station rotating in orbit. I have 10 interior cells where space is visible out the window, and I previously had the script spin all eight sections of the space dome in all ten of these cells all the time, but recently changed it to only spin the ones in the cell that the player is currently in. You think that could cause the problem?

Edited August 12, 2019 by user826

[dubiousintent]

As I understand it, if it's a "movable static" then it has havok physics.

 

If you can see from one interior cell (i.e. "room") to another, then you have a "portal".

 

While I am not experienced in this matter, it appears to me the "warning" I found in the previous post seems likely. That the issue didn't surface until you changed the script regarding which "movable static sections" are spun seems a likely starting point reinforcing that idea.

 

Note the remark about "once the object comes to rest, it is passed back to the normal renderer". I don't know myself, but could it be that when you don't spin ALL the sections, their relative positions get out of alignment (as in the warning example), possibly causing the boundary problem? (Suspicion only. Haven't thought this out fully. Short on sleep and heading to bed.)

 

But it could as likely be a red herring.

 

-Dubious-

[user826]

I'll try changing the script back to spin all the sections all the time, even though that seems to be a waste of processor cycles. I thought I was being clever to make them spin only if the player is there to see it...

 

EDIT: No luck. The first cell I entered was corrupted, although all the other cells I entered after that one were fine. Also, looking at the space dome meshes in NifSkope shows they don't have any collision properties at all, so I don't think they're Havok-ed.

Edited August 12, 2019 by user826