Hello kind people from the Bethesda forums,

I've started a new project a while back wich adds a vigilant of stendar outpost to our so much beloved Tamriel.
Everything seems to work out fine, except for one (very annoying) problem. The actors in my outdoor cell refuse to move from cell to cell.
I did all the navmesh by hand and I'm quite sure I didn't make any mistakes. Ofcourse I finalized the navmesh and checked for errors. So far, no luck.

At first I thought this to be a bug on the side of other mods. I supposed a mod must have edited the same cell but this is not the case. Because I ran the game without any other mods enabled and they still seem to refuse following the road.

Something else I've noticed is that, even though there are no navmeshes there, npcs sometimes still seem determined to walk straight through a rock. Even though they clearly should not. I'm thinking of clearing the cell completely of navmeshes and start over. But that would be a lot of work and it would be much appreciated if someone could help me find out what the problem is.

http://www.majhost.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=3455028

- Rehn

That pic is only one little section. Do you have green borders like that throughout the entire area? You may need to finalize all the cells bordering your edited cell.

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/gekkebek/Illustrator/navmeshoverview.png of my entire navmesh. It seems like every part connecting to another cell has the big green borders and I suppose it should be fine. Except, it is not..

Yeah, looks like some areas might need to be re-finalized. See where you have a green line that turns into a yellow line? Those are problem areas. Try loading all the bordering cells and finalizing them. It's usually like chasing a mouse for me, lol.

Not finalizing surrounding cells can screw up all the navmesh work in one cell? Geesh, this is gonna be quite something then... *rolls up sleeves* time to get to work.

And thanks for the help! :> Now to see if I can fix it.

Absolutely, since they're all connected.

You really only need to finalize an edited cell if you've added doors to it. With as many as you're showing here, unless you built *ALL* of those yourself, you shouldn't mess with anything more than what you personally touched.

You also haven't mentioned what version of the CK and game you're using as those are critical bits of info for diagnosing navmesh issues.

I just went about finalizing every surrounding cell of the one I've edited. As far as I am aware, I'm running the newest version of both the Creation Kit and Skyrim considering steam seems to be running updates by default. Besides that, none of the magical finalizing I've been trying seem to help one tiny bit. So I once again have no clue what's causing it...

I'm just going to be rude and give this a bump. Cause I'm really looking for some help. Anyone?

Where you have thick green lines showing on the borders, your NPCs should cross those. Where you have yellow lines, you probably don't have both the edges and the vertices exactly aligned on both sides of the border. Continue to tweak those borders that didn't turn green until they do. Sometimes they need to be exactly dead on to work and sometimes they don't. I've noticed that but can't explain why.

I try very hard not to move the mesh on the other side but to make the mesh in my modified cell match the mesh on the other side. If you can do that, you should only need to finalize the mesh on your side, not both. If you move the border mesh in a cell, you have to finalize it. If you really needed to finalize the mesh in all of the adjoining cells - even those you don't modify, where does that stop? Remember also that you have to finalize, save, exit and reload the file, enter the cell and see that there are no errors before you are done. The navmesh in that cell needs to be reloaded before you see all possible errors. When you load a cell with border problems, the CK should tell you which cells need to be re-finalized in order to work. Hopefully, that is only your modified cell.

Problem being, the area is green. But they simply refuse to cross the borders there. I've done that on almost every possible road and it's all green. Besides that, the AI seems to be acting up anyway. They insist on running straight into rocks even though there aint any navpoints there.

did you delete any of the vanilla navmeshes (look under details, if any of the navm entries are marked as deleted), and/or do you get any "navmesh needs to be refinalized"-messages on loading your cell...?
from what i understood, if a vanilla navmesh gets deleted, the transitions between this and the neighbouring navmeshes _don't_ get deleted but are still used by the game, so your "stuck" actor would be trying to move onto a nm that's just no longer there.
on encountering similar problems, i could get around them by not deleting the vanilla navmeshes, but reducing them to single triangles and putting them somewhere they didn't get in the way (like underground or anything, just away enough from any other nm so it definitely won't share any borders) and then refinalizing, the borders from neighbouring navmeshes formerly connected to them then get set correctly (maybe you can actually delete them after this, didn't try that far yet) - yes, i'm mostly aware this is just a rotten workaround and no way a solution, i'd be glad about anything better myself
(plus, the above got me rid of confused npc's and need-to-be-refinalized-messages, i'm instead getting a "potentially duplicate navmesh map" since though, but this isn't necessarily a consequence of above procedure but could very well be due to the fact the mod in question has had some encounters with tes-snip (apparently wicked) in earlier stages

I cant say I was very carefull in deleting the vanilla navmeshes. Clearled the enitre area of them, and then remade everything by hand. Like I usually do. Is there any way to bring the vanilla navmeshes back?

Also, thanks for the time you're taking to help me out. It's really appreciated!

yes, before opening your mod, click the details-button. in the list, find any navm-entries with a D (deleted) in the colum next to them (might need to rescale columns to make it visible), select those and press delete. you'll get an "i" (ignored) beside the entries, meaning the deletion-entry will be ignored and the deleted nm's back on next load (AND your handmade navmeshes, so this is gonna be quite a confusing sight (if you get lost with overlapping nm's, find one that's definitely yours, select any triangle (not vertex) and press f (flood fill) and then h (hide, ctrl-h to unhide all) so you'll remain with the vanilla ones visible


just killing time waiting until someone helps _me_ out with my procedure-problem...

Woowh, that actually solved my problem completely. Even though this is quite the silly big, it seems this solved every problem I've had so far! Everyone's crossing borders like they should and there's no more running into walls!

happy to hear so. and saves me quite some testing if it's this that causes the "duplicate navmesh map"-errors i'm getting.
did you, by any chance, also _delete_ the vanilla navmeshes after this (without any further errors of course, if), or just put them out of the way and leave them be?

I ended up deleting them on accident and it broke the navmesh immediately again. So you cant delete them, you're just gonna have to stuff them away somewhere safe.

ah yes, thx