TigerCubofPNW

Ah, you clicked this thinking this was a simple question didn't you? No, this is about more than dragging and dropping. And I mean literally "the world" as in Tamriel, not an interior location. Here is the problem: I have added several NPCs to outside locations. Randomly, some of them do not appear. Usually, a reload fixes that but obviously that's not the best solution. I remember seeing something in one of my endless searches for answers on something else that there was something particular about NPCs being placed in the outside world, like something they needed to be linked to or something. But naturally I can't find anything on that at the moment. Would that be what the deal is? That they need something else to work right? Most of the time, they're fine, but sometimes.... Anyone have any thoughts?

LadyontheMoon: It's war and compromises have to be made!! IronBlockGames: Yeah, I know it can be done. I'd rather build it myself into my mod than take someone else's work. Also, the problem doesn't seem to be make them not attack the player. That seems to be the easy part. The hard part seems to be in making them not attack NPCs that are their allies. Like I said, it appears to be random. Half the time, the wolves just walk around, chilling. The other half they go into fight mode.

So, I have been playing around with wolfies. I was working on making them into pets/companions. And I am confused by their behavior and what the eff Skyrim is up to. I have set them to non-aggressive and removed the ones I'm using from the Predator faction. I even added a faction that is allies with the surrounding people. However, the wolf still randomly turns hostile (and I say random, because it doesn't happen all the time) and has to be put down. From what I gather from other mods that have tried taming wolves, this seems like a problem others have run into. Like, even though the AI and the factions all say there is NO reason for the wolf to get aggressive, Skyrim looks at a loaded area, sees a wolf and says, "It must attack the nearest person!" Anyone have any thoughts?

Um... Okay, let me see if my semi competence can help, since you helped me Everything I've seen on "self" is that it is another way to refer to the Player, so not sure why it's written that way. But the essential concept seems sound (also, I'm not sure why the bodies don't disappear on their own as per Skyrim's normal thing, but anyway...) The DIsable seems the way to go. If you used the Random NPC generator thing, then you would have a property like "ObjectReference Property RandomThief1 Auto" and fill it with the random generator thing. (obviously doing this for each generator.) So then at the final stage of the quest, say Stage 100, you have it run your disable function. Which is basically... Function CorpseCleanup() RandomThief01.Disable() RandomThief02.DIsable() {etc} EndFunction {this will also keep them from respawning} If they are NPCs you made and placed in the house, you would substitute Actor Property for ObjectReference and the rest would basically be the same. (I hope that makes some sort of sense. If not, I can try again) As for the dialogue, that seems to have to do with Factions. As in, I think when the game goes looking for what random dialogue to fill a place with, it looks at the character's faction and puts that in there. I haven't perfected the whole "Go here for next part of quest thing" but this video has some info on that and it talks about the courier which may or may not help you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iustaHoHnEE Hope that helps in some way

Yeah, I felt stupid. It was just that I fixed that once. I just lost track of when and when crashes happened. Still got lots of good info, though, like the fact that yes NPCs are really stupid. "I need to go here. I'll just walk through this wall... Hmm... This isn't working..."

Er... So... I was finally able to find the problem. It seems that somewhere in my various CK crashes and so on, I lost the part where the quest with the aliases were was actually turned on. So... Yeah. Seems to be working. Sort of. Thanks everyone for the input

Interesting. I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me about the location alias. I should make a location alias for this place the NPCs are supposed to go and put it at the top of the list of aliases? Never seen anything like that before. Also not sure what you mean about priorities I did read somewhere that the order of the AI packages matters (for some reason) so my 24 hour package is at the bottom. And the other packages are in order of time of day, starting at hour 0 Like you, I found that a general sandbox did not suffice. So I created a handful of packages that move them to different parts of the house--what I said before about sandboxing in different places. I did use debug messages in the testing phases. If nothing else works, then I will verify that they are in their alias via test dialogue. I just don't get how the same code and package system that worked fine for the first group has failed on a larger scale. I did have this problem with the NPCs running home in the initial testing stages and that was where I learned that having them sandbox in their editor location meant I was telling them to sandbox in their original location. But I fixed that. I could place them in the house and then use a script to move them to their initial locations at the mod start, but then I might have the same problem in reverse--they'd run to the house before being sent there. So, either way, I have to convince them to stay put. Another way, which would be insane, but I suppose I could create two instances of the character and disable the one in the house at the start and then have them enabled as their counterpart is disabled. That's a heck of a lot of work though and seems like it shouldn't be necessary. I'd much prefer if you hit the shiny button in CK and things just worked.

That's a very kind offer! Unfortunately, that would involve you also having all the custom mods involved in this thing Happily, I found the answers to two of my questions 1) The CK wiki does make mistakes 2) I'm an idiot. Even though I know this to be true, because I was blindly trusting the CK wiki I failed to remember get that in addition to the script, the call function line also needs the quest the script comes from. Here is how it is supposed to be written, for the class: (WICourier as WICourierScript).additemtocontainer(alias_invitation.GetReference())I haven't tested this in game to be sure this hasn't hosed the part of my quest where the courier comes to find me, but this was what was making the error. Thanks for the input. It's helpful to have other people to talk to. Even if they shake their heads too and say, "Huh, well, it should work..."

No, these are all packages made by me for the house I previously posted about. I try to avoid messing with any of the vanilla stuff There are a lot of aliases, so what I did was group them. So, say, group A all have identical AI packages. Your thought about some of them being right and some being wrong was what I thought too. The thing is, they all (every group) has the same 24 hour package so that, if no other packages apply, they should do that one. Or so I understand it. It's interesting that you do the travel and then sandbox method. I did try that in my early testing phase, but it didn't seem necessary. When I tested this, on Group A, I said "Sandbox over here for a couple hours" and then "Go sandbox in the basement" and it worked fine. As I said, I tested this to exhaustion before I used it on a large scale which is why I am so frustrated that things have gone to crap. I'm thinking (hoping) that there is just something effed with my test PC. His save files have been through the ringer. Given that as near as I can tell, the NPCs are doing their aliases before I walk into the house (which is like opening the fridge to see if the light is off when the door is closed) and that some of the Aliases are doing their thing, I hope that maybe this is a glitch. A very very bad glitch, but I dunno. If no one can point to a magic button I am failing to hit (hey, it's happened. My Navmesh tutorial never said anything about finalizing Navmesh so there was a simple fix to ONE of my problems) I will just have to try this with a different character and see if it works or doesn't work. Unless you have another suggestion?

Yep. Or rather, the alias was filled automatically. Basically, at stage 0 of the quest, the above line is put into the Quest Stages fragment so that when the quest starts, the note will be added to the courier's inbox. I know the Quest Stages fragments are super sensitive and like to throw out errors and usually they go away but this one seems to persist. It's not, as I said, impairing the functionality of the quest. I'm just trying to figure out why my mod is of a sudden causing CTD and I don't know if this anomaly has anything to do with it.

No, I always use the same name as the name of the script when calling a function from that script and it never wigs out.

Aliases.... I've posted many times before about them. Every time I think I have them mastered.... Well... So, this mod basically invites people to live at a new place. I have struggled mightily in the past with the task of getting silly NPCs to stay in their new home. Here is how I understand it so people can correct me if I'm wrong. When an NPC is placed in the game, that is called the Editor Location. That is where they will always go back to barring some AI telling them not to. If you want an NPC to consider a new place their home, you need to give them a new AI package via an Alias and then use the Evaluate package to make them refer to the new AI package instead of their homing pigeon instincts. There must needs be an AI package that encompasses the entire 24 hour period telling them to sandbox in their new locale. So, I did that. I tested the aliases in game to be sure they were staying put and all was good. Specifically, their 24 hour package said, "If you're not doing anything else, just sandbox in this location." It worked. Life was good. I moved on. Now in the beta testing stages, the NPCs have decided they don't want to obey their AI packages and instead they just want to go home. I tried changing the AI packages to say. "Sandbox around where you are" with no better results. In a bizarre twist, some of the NPCs are obeying their packages. But every single one has the same 24 hour package So, here are my questions: Once an alias is filled, is tweaking the AI package associated with it futile? I want to say I've done it successfully, but I won't swear to it. I'm asking because I'm wondering if it's worth trying to run the quest with the tweaked AI packages from the beginning. That will be a royal pain and I don't want to, but if people think that has a chance that I will see better results, I'll do it. Did I miss something? Is there some other trick to get an NPC to stay at new location? I've studied the vanilla game and other mods and I think I have it right, but like I said, these aliases never seem to quite cooperate

So, following one tutorial I got nowhere. Using the data from the creation kit wiki, I made it work. However I had some CTD and looking at the log made me look again at the quest I'm using the courier with and while it compiled and did great before, now it's vomiting at me. I am using the exact line of code from the instructions here: http://www.creationkit.com/Using_the_Vanilla_Courier WICourierScript.additemtocontainer(alias_invitation.GetReference())Yet CK keep throwing this at me: "cannot call the member function additemtocontainer alone or on a type, must call it on a variable" That to me sounds like the property isn't filled, except that it is. Not sure what to do with that. Hopefully, someone here can tell me The Pap log was filled with "cannot fill alias with a none object" about a thousand times, so I'm not sure if it's this or the other thing I'm about to post about.

I know I downloaded it over the summer and there is apparently a new update. But of course this isn't the proper place to do troubleshooting on that mod (which is actually Organized Bandits, sorry). It's just one of the bigger mods where I encountered it so I used it as an example. The other mods I encountered it in were more slapdash. I was just seeing if there was a trick that needed to be done and there doesn't seem to be. So thank you.

Really? I assumed, since I've now run into a few times, that it was inherent to the "put random character here" thing. Like, if you go in and edit all the stock bandits, say, even if you did the Export FaceGen stuff, it wouldn't matter because when it's generated in game, it screws everything up. Because, you know, if you even glance at an NPC you have to re-export the face gen data. I will have to investigate further. As complex and immense as Immersive Bandits is, I would have figured they wouldn't have forgotten the basics. Or maybe it's just my Skyrim being a bitch.

Hello... Yes, so, grey face. We all hate it. Of course the solution for creating your own NPC is simple and straightforward. But a problem occurs, at least from what I've seen. Randomly Generated Characters. I really loved Immersive Bandits, for example, but the random NPCs all had the gray face issue and that was so distracting I couldn't deal with it. I've run into it with other mods that use random NPC gen. My question is, as I ponder a mod that will alter random NPCs (and thus run me into this issue), is there a fix for this?

So.... Here's the answer, if anyone is interested I've been trained quite thoroughly to always, always ALWAYS go into properties and fill them. Always. Like, seriously. Naturally, the MCM doesn't work that way and of course that's not mentioned anywhere. When you create the bool property, CK helpfully supplies you with the option to fill it. DON'T!!!! That's where the issue came in. I have some half-baked theories on why, but I'll just leave it at if you want your ticky boxes to start empty, leave their bool properties unfilled. Of course, that's the answer today. Tomorrow it could be entirely different....

Thanks everyone for the replies. I have basically beaten the idles into submission. The bard and the music is killing me. So, I did that little fix I mentioned with the music. I loaded the game, the music was playing. Satisfied, I went on to run other checks and then, when I return, the music has once again stopped. Dead Silence. AGAIN. Oy vey I have studied Sven's AI, looked at the Bard Songs quests and I'll be honest, I can't see anywhere at all that anything ever says to play a skyrim audio file. It all seems hardcoded into a "well, they'll play it when they feel like" thing. I have managed to force my bard to play instruments, but they don't make any sound. Is that wrong? Shouldn't the sound of drums play when the NPC is playing the drums? Like, when an NPC uses the grindstone idle, the sound of the grindstone can be heard. This and that damn MCM problem are killing me. I don't know how to fix them and a lot of work will be for nothing if everything else is up to my standards and this part of the mod sucks. I did a wipe and reinstall of Skyrim a few months back and I don't want to go through that again.

I have a suggestion for a tutorial--an MCM tutorial. The one over at the Github is obtuse and not very helpful, IMHO. I'd love to see a detailed tutorial here, complete with tips and tricks.

Thanks. I'm going to try that next. ETA: Awesome! Never would have thought of that. Much better than my solution of creating an object in Blender!!!

AH, Hana, my savior. Seriously, you have no idea... Every time I work with Blender now, with confidence, understanding what it's doing I want to send you virtual hugs. I) So, I assume once I create this static, that is yet one more thing that has to be packed with the mod? 2) Okay, like, I have a Warm Hands Idle Marker and I have a Lean Rail Idle marker, as an example. I am establishing their daily routine. So while I want some random Sandboxing, I also want them to do specific things. So, say, at Hour 4 I want them to Warm Hands and then at Hour 6 I want them to go and lean on the rail and then, when not busy, just sandbox. So I have the AI package for Hour 4 set up as "Use Idle" and I have it linked to the Warm Hands Idle Marker. For the Hour 6 package, I have the "Use Idle" point to the lean marker. Then I have the General Sandbox, in position three of the stack, telling them just to do whatever whenever they're not busy. The idle markers are set to ownership of a specific faction and the NPCs are all in that faction. In fact, while randomly sandboxing, they will sometimes use those idles. However, at Hour 4 and Hour 6, they don't use the idles as ordered. My thought was just that this Use Idle Marker thing in the CK's AI Package maker just doesn't work. So I was wondering if anyone knew about that. I don't really think patrols are going to work for me. As stated, that seems to have it so that every idlemarker can only be used in one patrol and that's no good. Also, patrols are too structured and they don't provide me a daily routine option. 3) I did. That is, I called up my non test character who doesn't have all kinds of weird bugginess attached to him and he also got no music. ETA: FIXED!!! Okay, so, in my efforts to solve another problem I created a Location for my house in the Location list. Locations have their own music choice drop down and since I hadn't selected anything there, I got silence. I changed it and now all is well. WHEW!!!! 4) He is in the BardPlayerFaction (or whatever it's called). As to an X-Marker heading... That wasn't in the tutorials I watched. What's up with that?

Ah thanks for the replies, IronBlock and LadyontheMoon. I guess I was misinformed about Havoksettling. That will change some things... I know the music isn't turned off because I have one character whose game/save file thingy is all kinds of messed up and one of the playful things it does is start playing the dramatic "Fight!" music when I'm, you know, picking flowers or mining ore or, well, walking. Poor character has been the victim of all my testing and now everything with him is buggy AF. And I thought his weirdness with music might be the problem so I did the thing I didn't want to do and used my non-test character just to be sure and no, no music. It's eerie as heck, having a big house that quiet. And at this point, that's my biggest issue. I'd like to control NPCs using certain idles at certain times, but I can live without that. The silence thing.... I dunno. All the tutorials I've read say it's just as simple as selecting the music in the interior data. There's no other trick to it so I'm stumped. I tried both the interior tavern music files. I suppose for giggles I could try one of the other music files just to see what happens...

For the most part, as I've said, I enjoy figuring out the puzzles of how to make stuff work in Creation Kit. However, when it's dumb stuff that should just work and it doesn't, my patience is tested. I created a really nice custom house. It's all Nav meshed and decorated and I'm happy with it. However, some stuff is not working and I just don't know what to do. 1) "Don't Havok Settle" is being ignored. For wall decor, I created this really sweet array of shields hanging on weapon plaques. Each shield is set to "Don't havok settle" so they should just stay put. However, they fall off the wall. I'm guessing this is just one of those "Skyrim is dumb" things and I will be forced to abandon the displays or, using the skills granted me by the amazing Hana, create static items. Unless, is there something about "collision" (a mystery as yet to me) that can change this? 2) Getting people to do stuff. I've studied the Patrol Method and the Setting Daily Routine method. I studied the thorough and wonderful work Andragon did with the Underground Bathhouse. At the moment, I can get my NPCs to randomly sandbox in one area, but directing them to use idle markers is not working. They will use them in the process of generic Sandboxing, but neither method of directing NPCs is making them use idles. a) It seems to me that each idle marker, object, etc can be attached to one patrol pattern and that can only be assigned to one NPC. Is that correct? (with everything failing, it's hard for me to even know) So, Bob can patrol to the table, to the railing and back. However, Sam can't patrol first to that same table and then to the same railing and back. Yes? b) When making a custom AI package, is the "Use Idle Marker" one of those Creation Kit things that just doesn't work? I tell them to use an idle marker at a certain time and they tell me to go get stuffed. (yes, the ownership data is all set correctly) 3) Dead Silence. I edited the internal data to use the same music and sounds as the Bannered Mare. The house is dead quiet save for the crackling of fire. All of this has me a bit frustrated since this should be the easy part. So any help would be appreciated. 4) Finally, a bard question. I just want my bard to play an instrument. I don't even want to make requests. I just want him to stand there and play. I've created him according to the tutorials and the only thing I didn't do was give him the "Nord Male Voice" which should ONLY make the dialogues not come up and make him not be able to sing. But he isn't playing his instrument either. Any ideas how to make him do that?

So, I have my MCM working and all, but what I want is for the toggle boxes to be unticked initially. This doesn't seem complicated, but it's proving to be and I'm hoping people will be able to tell me what needs to happen. I assumed it was where you define the bool property, as in: bool Property EnableCompDial = false Auto To my understanding, by setting the bool to false the toggle box should start unticked. That's not turning out to be true. Studying other MCM menus, it seems like it SHOULD be true, but it's not. To be absolutely sure, I even created a brand new character so the mod would load fresh and sure enough, toggle boxes are ticked. And now I'm getting ticked... Anyway, I'm sure there's something obvious to do here but I'm out of ideas. Help?

This sounds cool. In the Immersive Creatures Mod (which is so awesome) the modder added wolf cubs and saber kittens. !!! I just couldn't.:( It was so sad!! Thankfully, the modder lets the user stop the wee ones from spawning. That was messing with my head!