PlaceAtMe for NPC Summoning Spell

[Lanceor]

Bad idea?

My understanding that once creatures summoned this way are killed, they will be deleted when the cell resets. The problem I can think of is that although the "reset flag" is raised after three days (or manually by script), the creature references will not actually be removed until the player next visits the cell.

This means that for a cell that is visited only once, the summoned creature will forever be bloating the player's save file. Is this correct?

The reason I'd prefer not use MoveTo is that each NPC in an area would have to be a unique base object summoning a unique persistent creature (either that or I have to do some really fancy scripting).

[HeyYou]

Read the Warning part here. It will give you the workaround you need.

[Lanceor]

Yep, I know of the workaround but I was concerned about the player not entering the cell.

To delete an actor, you can move them to an interior cell the player is not in, kill them and reset the cell. When the player next enters the cell, all dead actors in the cell are deleted. Note this requires the player to actually enter the cell before actors in it will be deleted, which can restrict usefulness. recent tests seem to show that living actors are removed as well.

Hmmm... I suppose I could move them to a hidden area in somewhere like the IC Market District that the player will surely enter at some stage in the near future... thanks for the idea!

[HeyYou]

I think they also suggested moving the corpses to a holding cell, and then calling CellReset on that cell, to make 'em go away.

[Lanceor]

The player would still have to enter the holding cell for the references to disappear, even after the holding cell is reset. Don't worry, though, I'll create a hidden holding area in the Market District, and reset the market district each time the summon spell expires.

[Arthmoor]

The Market District covers more than one cell though. I think as long as you're spawning creatures or whatever in normal cells it'll be fine. That's precisely what every Oblivion gate in the game does and that's never been an issue over the long term. It might be worth making sure you're using a leveled list to spawn from though and not individual NPC/Creature records.