SSE A cautionary tale

[TyburnKetch]

I knew this but went ahead with it anyway! I am now paying the price.

 

DO NOT BUILD A STABLE OVER A FOUR WAY CELL DIVIDE!!

 

Having spent the best part of a week trying to work out which script and what functions were causing my horses to jump around the paddock after fast travelling to them, to my relief (that I have worked it out) and my horror (I am going to have to reposition and rebuild the majority of it) it is navmesh and cell boundary related.

 

A horse seems to find it impossible to stay where I want it to if the position is on a cell boundary. Even worse when it is positioned over four!

 

I am sure most of you know this. I sort of did too. But I felt the need to reiterate this so someone does not have to go through the pain that I just have.

 

Laugh it up fuzzballs!

[cumbrianlad]

I'm not laughing! I feel your pain!

 

I didn't know this, so thanks. I just got away with it by a combination of laziness and 'Lady Luck'. Not a bad combo, as it turns out. I always try to find a single exterior cell to construct anything that is going to replace vanilla, if I can manage it. My mod player home is thus positioned smack in the middle and using up all of a single cell. i do this largely to avoid all the extra navmesh edits being included in the mod.

 

Lady luck intervened because there was a vanilla cliff just over the cell border North of the stable, and I mean just over, as in 1 jump of a flea (from my mangy horse). I therefore plonked my stable just inside of the cell border, as far north as possible, but without crossing the divide. I was further assisted in this regard in that I wanted a patio to the east of the stable (still stubbornly within the same cell. My horse is completely happy and totally untroubled by the woes of not knowing in which cell it should stand :thumbsup:. Without these 2 factors my stable could well have ended up straddling 4 cells. It's in the right area.

 

I can happily report that my fish hatchery does slightly cross a cell boundary, but my fish spawn sites are all firmly and completely entrenched in the cell to the south of the main house. My fish are equally un-confused and swim around quite happily (until I harvest them to make a potion or two).

 

I wonder if the same sort of thing applies to spawn sites?

 

My mod has a TG theme, so maybe Nocturnal had a hand in the placement of the stable?! :unsure:

[TyburnKetch]

Ha. Yeah. I had no option but to straddle a few cells as the location of this home is so great that it could not be compromised on.

 

Navmesh is already a pain and I can see it only getting worse when I get around to doing a deep clean.

 

Live and learn. Good news is that ripping the structure down and repositioning the horse markers has worked.

 

Now I get to be creative with a custom stable structure. Could have done without the time consumption but at least it will now be unique :)

[cumbrianlad]

"Now I get to be creative with a custom stable structure. Could have done without the time consumption but at least it will now be unique"

 

I've found that a few times. Sometimes these things have a plus-side. "Every cloud has a silver lining" and all that.

 

Navmesh, I take it you're fine with the best way to handle that for dragging down, rather than deleting?

[TyburnKetch]

Yes. Although it is all new. I gather sseedit has a function to repair? I am careful now. Not so much when I started out. Needs some work.

[cumbrianlad]

Hmmm...

 

I wouldn't personally rely on repairing.

 

Better not to need it in the first place!

 

For me (and others may jump in and say I'm wrong!), in the cell(s) I'm editing, I carefully select and 'Flood-Fill' all navmeshes, including islands. I then use the 'z' key to drag them way down. I mean 'out of sight down. I deselect and press on with adding an entirely new mesh to the cell. At the borders with other vanilla cells, I place navmesh points in my 'new' mesh close to the vanilla nodes in each neighbouring cell. I then push my 'border nodes' up to the edge of my cell, adjust the height with the 'z' key until they overlap. When I'm done, I 'Check Navmesh, find cover edges and finalize'. Once I've got green bars all around my cell, I'm happy.

 

It's worked every time for me. Not doing it this way has caused NPC problems in personal mods, until I deleted the navmesh edits in SSEedit to restore the vanilla mesh to my esp, and did them again by this method. It's the only method that I know works, guarranteed.

[TyburnKetch]

Good info. Thanks. I will use this moving forward.

 

The cells I am working with did not have any navmesh originally, from memory. I am high up a mountain. As in, Inaccessible normally. The CK does throw errors at me with the navmesh I have added, and I need to check if indeed I have edited any Vanilla navmesh by mistake. Although, again from memory, as a noob, I am pretty sure I selected generate navmesh, and then spent ALOT of time fixing what the kit gave me. Will not be doing that again!

 

I am kicking myself, fairly regularly at the moment, for mistakes I have made along the way with this mod, when I did not know any better. As long as they can all be rectified it is not the end of the world. Just annoying. And time consuming.

[cumbrianlad]

inaccessible normally, doesn't mean it wasn't navmeshed.

 

In vanilla lots of places that can't be used by NPCs are auto navmeshed.

 

Here's another of my personal preferences, that people may argue with me about...

 

I never use any form of automatic navmesh generation, whether that's in an interior or exterior. I navmesh all of them manually. Why? Because the auto-generated stuff is generally bad and takes more work to correct, Also, my defective brain is still better at working out where NPCs will struggle than the 'auto-gen' ever will be!

 

It's why followers and enemies get stuck in stupid places in the vanilla game.

 

It may seem daunting, but it's faster to manually mesh than it would to use 'auto' and correct. The final result is always better imo.

 

Two, I prefer to decide manually where NPCs can and cannot walk. When I navmesh a cell, I already know what is going to happen in there. If there's going to be tons of enemies, I want them to be able to attack the player where they can. If nothing is going to happen, I can navmesh minimally. the player won't notice or care if their follower doesn't wander off for miles... this saves on navmesh and since navmesh is a big user of data, it cuts my mod down.

 

Don't rely on correcting things at the end... that's storing up more trouble than it's worth.

 

The old adage of 'Get it right, first time', espescially applies to mods.

[TyburnKetch]

This is all how I do it now.

 

But I am confused. When I first clicked on the navmesh in my exterior cell(s) there was not any!

 

Are you saying that the game will have automatically created navmesh there? At what point?

 

I am resigned to having to start over ...

[cumbrianlad]

No. I'm not saying it will have automatically generated navmesh in every cell.

 

Sorry if I confused you. It's very unusual for there to be none in any exterior, but it is possible.

 

Often a cell will just have a couple of navmesh islands on flatter pieces of a mountain ledge.

 

You can easily tell if your cells ever had any navmesh by using SSE edit. If it did and you've 'deleted' them by accident... deleting a navmesh isn't just a case of literally deleting the triangles. If there are a couple of little navmesh islands in a cell, they are classed as 2 separate navmeshes. If you link them together, the game sees this as a single, totally new mesh and thinks that the original two have been deleted! It will be recorded in SSeedit if you've altered or 'deleted' any navmeshes, even by accident.

 

Right down at the bottom of the page will be all the 'Worldspace' edits your mod makes. This bit includes any terrain edits and navmesh edits.

 

It will show up with red highlights for 'deleted' navmesh and terrain edits.

 

Don't start again!

 

Just check SSEedit.

 

Even if you have accidentally deleted a navmesh, there's no need to start again.

 

Just right click any deleted navmesh, plus your own new mesh and hit 'remove'. That will force the game to reload that cell with the original mesh in place. Next time in CK you can then do as I said and select and drag down any meshes that were originally there. Now you can navmesh again.

 

By the sound of it, there was no mesh in your cells, but it doesn't harm to do a quick check in CSSEedit.