[[RELz] Nagaia Molag, dungeon and quest mod]

I just released Nagaia Molag, a relatively simple quest that leads the player through a medium-sized Ayleid Ruin. The mod was designed to be extremely lore friendly (to the point of making some very obscure TES historical references and littering the place with translatable Ayleid text), and to fit seemlessly into Cyrodiil.

 

Description:

The call has gone out for experienced mercenaries looking to make some coin. An untouched ayleid ruin has just been uncovered at the mouth of the Brenna River, and the expedition set to explore it is in dire need of sellswords to defend workers and scholars from the unknown dangers of this long buried tomb. But while the expedition toils away, another force is at work in the long-lost depths of the Fire King's tomb.

TESA: http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/1716-nagaia-molag/

Nexus: http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/44936/?

[Missiles ignoring CollisionBox01]

Okay, found a wall that's only visible from one side, it serves nicely. Thanks for your help.

[Missiles ignoring CollisionBox01]

I've thought about it, the trick is making said walls invisible, without mucking around with models. I'll explore this, but I don't know how I could fix the problem with walls.

[Missiles ignoring CollisionBox01]

Just looking in the CS there doesn't seem to be any setting like that. Maybe in Blender or something, but not here. In any case, I'm not using any unique missiles, just vanilla assets. I've tested using Iron Arrows and the Fire Bolt spell so far. My mod hasn't touched them, so naturally they collide with everything else they're supposed to--actors, level geometry, and so on.

[Missiles ignoring CollisionBox01]

So I'm trying to create an invisible wall that the player can't shoot arrows or spells through. I figured this would be a simple task, but apparently the CollisionBox01 static collides with everything but missiles. I assume Bethesda intentionally set it up that way. So my question is, what's a decent workaround (that doesn't require opening a modeling program)? I'm also curious as to what exactly, under the hood, is causing the collision box to ignore missiles.

 

EDIT: Solved, found that a wall piece that's only visible from one side does the job, as long as the player can only ever see it from one direction.

[Weird Issues with Reanimation]

Yeah, when loading without exiting. Too bad it's part of a game-wide issue. I did notice the problems the On Load block has with reloading without exiting (namely, it not running). And yeah, I knew I could circumvent the problem by exiting, but I was trying to eliminate the bug for the players' sake.

 

So there's no way real workaround?

 

As for the code segment, I just copied it directly from the CS editor into the forum's code tool. Strange that that doesn't work (well).

[Weird Issues with Reanimation]

This is a weird one. So I've got a Necromancer NPC that casts a Touch reanimation spell on an NPC that's dead by default (health at zero in the editor). It took a while to get just that working properly (the game doesn't seem to like reanimating dead-by-default actors), but now it does. The new problem is that, after the reanimation takes place, if I reload a save prior to the reanimation, things get... weird. 

 

On that first reload, the dead NPC's model is properly placed and positioned (as it was in the Havok sim). But somehow in reloading the model got decoupled from the actual actor, which is now invisible, standing behind their own corpse. Yeah. After subsequent reloads, the same thing occurs, with the invisible actor behind their starting position, but the model of the body is drawn somewhere else, nearby. The body is positioned in the same way (animation-wise, not coordinate-wise), but might be on the floor ten feet away, or floating in the air beneath the room's ceiling, or sticking out of a wall.

Here's the code attached to the dead NPC to be reanimated. The Necromancer's own script activates the dead NPC before casting the Reanimation spell. I've tried calling Reset3DState all three blocks, just to be sure, but that's probably just affecting the animation position, not the weird decoupling. I'm considering using a MoveTo on Activate, before the reanimation, but again I'm not sure if that'll stop the decoupling effect.

ScriptName ESRenaSulScript


short doOnce
ref mySelf


Begin OnLoad

	set mySelf to getSelf

End


Begin OnActivate

	if ( doOnce == 0 )
		mySelf.setav health 0	;to reset Health change during previous loads
		reset3DState
		mySelf.setav health 100    ;Used to fix AI issues with reanimating an actor with 0 base health
		set doOnce to 1
	else
		Activate
	endif

End


Begin OnReset

	mySelf.setav health 0
	reset3DState
	set doOnce to 0

End

EDIT: Woah, how do I make the code segment not look terrible and unreadable?

[Preventing an NPC from using any combat dialogue]

Ah that worked perfectly, thank you.

[Preventing an NPC from using any combat dialogue]

I'm trying to keep a (ghost) NPC from saying anything during combat, as vanilla combat dialogue doesn't sound like the sort of thing a 3000-year old Ayleid ghost would say. I don't have much experience with dialogue, but I've gone through the wiki and read tutorials. I've looked around, but outside of adding a "GetIsID != NPCname" condition to every single combat dialogue info, I can't find a way to do this. And that particular solution is so ugly it makes me cringe.

[Preventing the Shield spell's shader effect from overwriting another shader.]

So I've got a skeleton with a shader "spell" applied to it (the unused Skeleton Hero shader). It can also cast a shield spell, but the shader of that effect overwrites the skeleton hero shader for the duration of the spell (once it expires, the original shader is restored). I'd like to prevent this from happening, although I'd like to keep the shield's initial casting effect and animation (which shouldn't be a problem). Ideally, I'd also like to keep the shield's "on-strike" effect--where it momentarily glows bright whenever the caster is struck (which should be a problem, since I'm guessing that's part of the shield's shader).

 

I only discovered shaders a few days ago, so I've got no idea how to go about this. My best guess is a custom scripted spell, which is why I posted here, but I might have to create a custom shader and somehow getting a custom shield spell to use it instead of its default effect.

 

Any ideas?