Pathing question

[exanimis]

I've noticed that if a creature is placed in a mod that has no path grid, he will stand in one spot until the player comes near, then he will attace as if the grid was there. This has me wondering, If you want a player to follow a certain course you have to set the blue path in the pathgrid. (not sure of the name for the blue markers)

 

Here is my question

If I set a creature or a ship to be visible at a distance and If I place a blue pathgrid for them to follow in the ocean or a river, would the player see them swim or sail by at certain times?

 

Sorry, my mistake, I posted in the wrong place

[Vagrant0]

creatures and NPCs can't be made visible when distant, and even if they could, they would not be having any real processing done... Which is why they would just stand there till that area was loaded. This is also true for any activators that you move around with scripting. The activator would remain static until the cell which it is placed in became active an the scripts would be processed. For most uses, packages and scripts need to be attached to something within a loaded cell, for those packages and scripts to be carried out. Things which are in the distant, are not loaded, and are processed irregularly. This is why you can often enter an interior and see several NPCs who are suddenly deciding to leave the moment they are loaded. Although their packages may have told them to leave sooner, they were not in an active cell, so those packages were not being called.

 

As far as setting blue pathnodes go, think of them first as a means of determining nodes which are of higher priority usage than red nodes. If there are multiple blue nodes connected together between 2 points, the NPC will likly use those blue nodes more. Their secondary use, road maps, deals more with pathing between interiors or worldspaces, or the player's fast travel.

 

If your goal is to have moving things in the distance, you may find yourself disappointed. The distant environment is more for just appearances than anything substantial. As things moving in the distance was never used, or incorporated into the vanilla game, it may not be possible. Even an animated _far.nif may not work because the animations associated with it require being in an active cell. And as far as a ship goes. If you have any NPCs on that ship, even if you moved the ship, the NPC's position may remain static, causing more problems. You may be better off focusing on more important areas of your mod, and working on the appearance of the distant environment at a later date.

[exanimis]

Thank you VagrantO, I knew I could count on you for the best explanation. This is something that I would love to have in my mod but I had a feeling it wouldn't be reasonable to attempt. I've read a few threads about creatures like sharks for Oblivion but they have the same problem with pathing and distance. Just like the idea of constant daylight, this would require much more than a simple script to acomplish.