syscrusher

Sorry for the delay! It's been a crazy work week. I am pleased to say that this problem is solved. The changes I made were: 1. Added the EvaluatePackage call suggested by WillieSea -- thanks! 2. Moved the script logic, which wouldn't compile as a stage result, to the main quest script. I had done this before, but it turns out I had too many logical AND conditions, and sometimes they were not being all met. So apparently sometimes the only thing I was getting was the slow-speed AI processing, with the quest script being ignored. 3. Removed the code, no longer needed, on my NPC's own personal script. This also appears to run in the slow low-level-processing mode. Once I got the quest script code debugged, this became redundant. Thanks for the comments, especially the suggestion of EvaluatePackage, which caused the NPC to make his dialog available instantaneously when the quest stage triggers.

I'm out of town right now but will be home this afternoon, and I'll post my scripts then. Thanks for the AddScriptPackage link. I had forgotten about that function. I don't think it will solve my problem, but I do think there's a good chance it will help make the AI move more quickly into the right package than just relying on conditions as I am now.

That's Skyrim...my mod is Oblivion.

I feel stupid...it was a long day, and I asked this question totally backwards. I'm sorry. Here's what I meant: What I *wanted* to do was to have a quest result script that did something like "myNPCref.movetomarker myMarker" and then force him to reeval his AI. But the CS won't let me compile that result script in. It issues no error message but won't let me save it. Other result scripts in the same field that don't involve the NPC ref work fine. So what I actually *did* was to have a quest script that had a GameMode that looked for the stage and did the MoveToMarker when it detected that the stage was the desired stage, and the NPC was not within a certain distance of the marker. I'm sorry for the horrible phrasing in my question. As I say, my only excuse is that I had had a long day and just didn't think clearly when writing.

Okay, I have this working right now, but I'm not terribly happy with the way I did it, so I'm looking for suggestions of a better approach. I have an NPC who normally wanders about my town. At a particular stage of the quest, he needs to be put in jail. The good news is that when that quest stage activates, I can guarantee the player is nowhere near the NPC or the jail. (The player is far away talking to another NPC at a fixed location, and that dialog updates the quest stage.) What I have now is a quest stage result script that does a "movetomarker" on the jail-bound NPC, and he has a high-priority AI package that tells him to wander within a few units of the marker. This is working, but what I've found is that the NPC being not in the same cell as the player causes his AI not to always evaluate right away (backgrounded), so sometimes he isn't in the cell until the player gets close, then he goes there by walking. I think what may be going on, really, is that he got moved to the marker on schedule by the movetomarker call, but then his previously-active AI package made him leave it until the player is close enough that his AI re-evaluates to the high-priority package. Is there a better way to do this? The existing jail scripts in the vanilla game aren't much help because they operate on the player, so this whole issue of low-level processing is moot. I can't rely *just* on the AI to "walk him into jail" because the door is locked and he (of course) doesn't have a key.

For relatively low-poly static meshes, you can also have Blender make a linked copy (alt-D) of your visible mesh. After alt-D, just hit Enter to place the linked copy on top of the original. Then, in Object mode, select the Object tool panel and change the Draw Type to "Bounds", add Bounds to DrawExtra, and select "Polyhedr" as the mode. Now, take this linked copy, which is drawn as a collision mesh, and make it a child of the original. Believe it or not, this works. This is NOT recommended for complex meshes with a lot of polygons, as a hand-drawn collision mesh or a bounding box is MUCH more efficient, but if you have a relatively simple object, such that a hand-drawn mesh would have almost as many polygons anyway, this can be a quick way to get a collision mesh that automatically follows edits to the visible mesh.

Wow. Just....wow.

+1 for this behavior!

Yep, and knew this from Oblivion, which is why I buried that log rather than nuking it. Oh, I didn't realize it would still waste resources, had always assumed the landscape itself acted like an occlusion plane. Framerate in my exterior cell hasn't been a problem, and I only buried a few objects, but I'll make a point of disabling them as well, in my next release. Thanks much for the tip!

/me smacks self in forehead.... That's basically like an HTML "img" tag. I hang my head in shame that I was frustratedly looking for a way to *upload* an image within my post, when I should have simply tried this cross-link approach. Thanks for the post.

It's working now, thanks to you good folks' help. The Location keywords were the issue; I had the ownership correct, but had failed to add the LocTypeDwelling, LocTypeHouse, and LocTypePlayerHouse keywords to my interior because they weren't in the original exterior location. FWIW, a few days ago I tested my mod against the Civil War questline, which uses part of one of my exterior cells, and found no conflicts. So it looks as if retaining the extant keywords from the vanilla cell was in fact the right answer. @WillieSea: As far as I can tell, those keywords aren't documented on Bethesda's CK wiki. I would add this myself, but given my relative newbie-ness, I'm a little hesitant to make changes to that wiki other than a couple of typo corrections I have submitted. Could I suggest that you post that information there when you have some spare time?

That's very helpful, Arthmoor, and your additions are new since when I had last read that wiki page, so thanks for bringing them to my attention.