So I'm trying to create a questline with a dragon inside a fairly good sized underground cave. I used one of the larger Dwarven ruin interior cells as my base, removed all dwemer statics and replaced the floor space with mountain Statics and then created a large underground lake which some draugr ruins rise up out of which is where the dragon is residing.

I have a bunch of collision boxes (they are planar collision boxes) ringing the outer perimeters of the cave as well as using collision planes to block off clipping through the ruins themselves. The top surfaces of the ruins have been navmeshed but I haven't navmeshed the rest of the caves just yet as I was trying to figure this issue out first.

Regardless of the collision planes the dragon still likes to fly through the walls of the cave as well as fly right through the bloody ruins themselves. Though it seems to be slightly better then when I didn't have the collision planes that might be just in my head.

Obviously I can find a way to write my way out of this situation by making the dragon a "ghost dragon" but I'd rather not do that if possible.


I'm also having a similar issue with other npcs ignoring collision boxes. I used the large nord burial chamber found in sarthal for a skeleton ambush and I wanted to perch some skeleton archers up in the area above the players head shooting down. I created a ledge up there in the upper portion of the static and put collision boxes on all the walls and as a boundry to the inner ledge but the drauger still end up falling to the floor below or into the void. Again am I missing something regarding these collision primitives?

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

If your collision boxes are set up with the proper layer, it sounds like you're trying to use translateTo on your actors. If that's the case, you need to add a trigger box scripted to move in front of your actor... which triggers a stop sequence of some kind. This box would have the proper layers to be triggered by statics, actors, landscape, etc; but presumably not by projectiles/magic/etc.

[EDIT: the reason being, is that transTo causes all actors to ignore ALL collision except land. I never found a way to move actors forcibly while maintaining colision detection.]

I don't think I'm trying to use translateTo. Currently I just placed an enc fire dragon inside my cave cell and he just flys through the walls whenever he feels like it. I'm not trying to move them forcible via scripting or anything. Is "TranslateTo" a property I Could have accidentally turned on?

I see now.. I has the Flyable Dragons mod in mind, where the movement is controlled by Player and scripted accordingly. I don't know exactly how dragons fly; but I suspect they move like normal actors - only a 'flying' flag is triggered which switches to different behavior graphs/animations. How it goes up and down, I don't really know - but it's probably hard-coded in the animations, and set to be however high off the ground unless attacking or perching/landing.

I would try this: clone a dragon actor (r-click, edit, rename editorID to something new, save/ok the actor, reopen that new actor). Then add a script which has the trigger-box crash detector assigned to it, scripted to move with the dragon - and onTrigger it forces the dragon to land, or stop whatever animation is playing (hopefully that would stop forward movement). Like I said before - it's fairly complicated if you aren't familiar with Papyrus and trigonometry.

I'd offer my services, but I'm already busy updating my mods which have been stagnant for too long; and real-life work is taking up more time than it has in the past. Sorry!

[EDIT: no, translateTo is not a property.. it's a function/command that is applied to a property (eg: objectRef or actor). Kinda like 'enable' or 'delete'.]