I am on xbox 360, and i have read topics that fast travelling can affect NPCs schedules (awake at 3am, shops not opening etc).
is this true?
i have also heard that fast traveling to the stable, then walking into the city can help prevent this. Does using the horse and cart affect this as well?

Thanks.

No, they're both designed to work with eachother.

I'm on PC and on a few occasions when I fast traveled between cities, some shops were not open, even so it was past 8 AM. At one point, a shop stayed closed the whole day. In most cases though, the owner will appear and open the shop 5 minutes later. I never thought that it might be related to fast travel though.

I fast travel a lot and this has happened only a few times, so I wouldn't be concerned about it.

I never had it happen when using the cart.

I do sometimes wonder this myself. The number of times I've fast travelled back to Whiterun, arriving at like 2 am, to find the 'Warmaiden' smithing away. She then stops and goes home as I approach.

There's the odd questionable bit of behaviour like this, but I've not seen anything REALLY odd.

I don't think the scripts are such that is a certain amount of time that passes before they do something, it is "at this time, start doing something".

I noticed one time I fast traveled to Windhelm and walked over the area where the craftsmen are. They were all walking home at the end of their day. I then zapped myself somewhere else (I had forgotten something I needed) and then came back. Well, it was several hours later but they were still walking home from their shops.

So, I don't think it is necessarily fast traveling that does this, it is traveling to another cell before the NPCs can run their current script and then coming back. However, after a day, everyone was back where they belonged.

I don`t Fast Travel, but I have noticed this effect sometimes when I sleep or Wait. If I sleep in the middle of the day wake up at 2am then go out, people are still sitting in the tavern\walking and only then get up to go to bed.

It`s like they say, "Oh the Player has just slept and it`s now 6 hours later, we must do something different!"
Makes it feel like the world revolves around the player.

It`s really the Devs fault, they haven`t fine tuned the Fast travel\wait\Sleep with what people should do by the time you wake up.

That's because it's resource intensive to do correctly. The only straight-forward way to do it is to run all the NPC scripts all the time. Ideally you want to run all the AI in the world all the time. That way you'd have a neat little world simulation going on that the player could interact with. Very cool, but it would svck up CPU resources like crazy. There aren't too many games that do this unless the intent is to simulate a world, like most Maxis games.

With this in mind, I wonder how the game deals correctly with wandering NPCs like M'aiq. It doesn't seem you have to enter any cell where he is walking before he remembers to progress to the next one. Now I feel like looking up how the travellign NPCs' behaviour works.

ok so it seems to me that the ai scripts are turned off when you are not in the area (make sense) and turn back on when you get close. perhaps fast traveling gets you closer, quicker (i guess you could say) so that you see the scripts kick in.

as long as its not a lasting issue, i may start to use fast travel a little bit.

anytime i am going somewhere new, i always walk it, never know what you may find.

Thanks.