A) Evidently, it allows new NavMeshes to work, at least. =/
B) No, it doesn't. See http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=7504 on the WS. Its ESM flag is ticked. It's the extension that gets changed by Steam. You have to save, ticking the flag, right before uploading. Agreed, however, that the extension change is problematic.

No, it’s a certainly that Beth does not want that. However, as far as I can tell, there are only two possibilities:

• They are unwilling to fix the problem. (unlikely)
  
• They are UNABLE to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, the more I see the more discouraged I get. Not because I have anything against Beth. I truly believe they don’t like this crap any more than we do. However, we must at least consider the possibility that this cannot be fixed in the version of the CK approved for public use. Consider the evidence in another thread that the CK is actually the GECK with a makeover for Skyrim (No surprise there IMO). Now understand this issue was in both Fallout 3 & New Vegas and was not fixed for either of those editors. So I wonder if it’s something they cannot figure out how to fix, or for licensing reasons, or internal company secrets or whatever, they cannot release an editor that fixes the issue.

Of course, I could be totally wrong, in fact I hope and pray I am, as the release of so much potentially awesome content hinges on this bug. I wonder what the veterans like JustinOther and Arthmoor think about this quandary?

If you make enough noise this should get fixed. Go take a look at the PS3 technical issues board right now. Aside from a couple people with really bizarre problems ("I'm level 7 and I have a 33 mb save file") most people are happy now.

Adapt your modding plans so that your first efforts do not involve NPCs that need to wander around. simulate them keeping a schedule by using scripts that relocate them to where they need to be at different times of the day. When BGS fixes this problem, you can then modify your mod with a fully functional navmesh. Your NPCs will wander about.

or just don't publish on steam workshop for the time being. you can publish an esm on the nexus and it should mostly work fine.

Joel Burgess said in another thread that they are working on updates for the Creation Kit based on what the Elder Scrolls modding community is reporting. So if I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about it at the moment. The worst that could happen is that one of the major mod-breaking bugs could turn out to be irreparable, like you said, but I think that's highly unlikely for one reason I can think of: Being the developers, they should know about all the in's and out's and inner workings of their game and game engine, or anything that they release. Otherwise, what help would they be if a patch was desperately needed due to some severe issue?

Well, I just started modding and like many, or at least some here, it does take a little wind out of my sail. I hope they fix this, and considering the effort Bethesda has expended with the tutorials and wkiki page and Steam, I think it’s safe to say they are committed to growing the community and getting this fixed.

I'd consider this far more unlikely. How could they be unable to fix it? Other than reverting to path grids like we had in Oblivion.

It's a really sick situation. The only known workaround, which is hackish on the best of days, is totally incompatible with publication on the Workshop. If I have been coming off as bitter about this, I am, because the bug has already resulted in Open Cities Skyrim becoming the first of many casualties of it. Even after JustinOther tried to help fix it as best he could.

I really don't want to see Skyrim be forced to follow the same ugly road as Fallout 3 mods and be relegated to having to use the MasterUpdate function. Chaos at its finest because that turns us all into ESM-like files which is a nightmare for load order management. That's assuming Skyrim even uses the ONAM records that made that possible.

I love path grids....so simple...so reliable in comparison. So that would be awesome!

But if enough of us explain what a problem we are all having with it, then I am sure Bethesda will fix or at the least provide a simple and useable workaround. In the meantime, I am not diving too far into my Unique Taverns mod because of this bug. In fact this bug has sapped some of my modding drive and I even considered going back to modding Oblivion.

I can't look at their code but fromt eh way this bug seems to be occuring, my first thought is that this is NOT a CK issue. This appears to be a game issue with how it loads data. If it works fine one time, and then the next it fails, it's not a fault of how the CK is saving the data because clearly the data is saved fine. This is a game issue with loading data. For some reason the navmesh is being unloaded permanently when the player travels far enough away. It does seem odd that the rest of the data is being loaded fine, I would expect it all to boink out of existence.

All that said, this should not be an issue that they can't fix. Of course, I can't see their codebase and I know from experiance how tricky finding bugs can be. Our best hope is to keep making a ruckus. Harrass them on twitter guys, take it to kotaku or other big sites, THAT is how you make them listen. Make it affect sales.

No, it's definitely originating in the CK. If you edit a vanilla navmesh, you're going to soon find that the CK has deleted the original NAVM form and substituted a duplicate with a form ID set to your own mod. That's why it doesn't just affect new navmeshes. The CK's behavior is the primary trigger for the problem, but yes, I do agree that it is ALSO a game issue that has to be fixed before any of it will work right.

Actually, bioxx's observation seems correct. You seem when you mess with the vanilla navmesh, it becomes part of the mod you have active. The entire navmesh is a single resource. Even if you alter one small part of it, the whole thing becomes altered. Just liken if you alter one element associated with an actor object, the entire object is altered.

The problem lies with how the game processes the data that is loaded. The navmesh doesn't really go away whe you travel out of range of it. You can return to an area where the bug presents itself, save the game, reload, and it works fine.

It seems to me that what is happening is that validation for unmodded navmeshes is set to occur every time a cell is loaded, but validation for modded navmeshes only occurs once per cell per session.

I am no programer. However, I know enough that one number off in a mountain of code can cause things like this. How many programers bash their heads on their keyboard trying to find needles in electronig haystacks like this.

The more we examine the behavior, narrowing down when the bug occurs, perhaps it will make it easier to narrow it down in the code.

But the glitch occurs in the game. Restarting the game clears the glitch until it happens again. So something inside the game code is wrong, not the CK

It isn't though. His observation is only partially correct.

If you modify a vanilla navmesh in the CK, you will note that at some point, I can't pinpoint where, but you'll end up with a split somewhere in how it handles the form. It will change to one that's assigned to your mod, and if you examine the details screen in your plugin data you'll begin to see where NAVM forms are being deleted that shouldn't be. This is the portion of the issue that causes modified vanilla namveshes to break, because of the form ID. This does not require running the game to see happen, so it's definitely a CK issue.

Once that's happened, then yes, the observation that newly added navmesh forms break once per cell per session and this includes the vanilla ones the CK broke while you were editing.

Technically speaking, there are two distinct navmesh bugs in play here. One the CK causes, one the game has had since Fallout 3. Only the one within the CK can be mitigated easily by assigning an editor ID to all navmesh forms listed in the cell you're working on. Which obviously doesn't help if the cell you're working on hasn't got any navmesh forms.

I was sort of trying to be nice to Bethesda and give them the benefit of the doubt I guess, lol. So if they are able to fix it, I'm just wondering why it hasn't been fixed before now. I mean, if it's symptomatic of the same bugs in FO3 & NV, this is nothing new, but same old, same old. I just don't understand their 4 years of unwillingness to fix it if this the case. I guess it's all speculation at this point.



I totally feel your pain, seriously feel it myself. I'm not a great modder, but I feel what I do understand and know how to do I can do pretty well. And for at least one project I have planned, the navmesh is crucial to my mod. I'm not going to start a 3 month project only to get that deep into it and have to half ass it to get it to sometimes work. I just hope they get it sorted out not only for our sake, but for theirs as well. Skyrim is great, but IMO it really needs more interesting content and more quests that have some substance. In other words, it needs a lot of huge epic mods, lol! Thanks Arthmoor, I respect your opinion, as well as many others posting here.

To be honest I'm not 100% familiar with the way the file formats work so I can't contest your observation on weather or not the ck bug is in fact a bug or if it is intentional on their part and just failing to execute properly on the game side. If we've identified that there are 2 bugs at fault here and not just one then that's progress I say!

If they didn't run into it themselves during development, then its possible the complaints during Fallout 3 were... I don't want to say ignored, but forgotten. The game is huge, and there are a lot of existing bugs that we may not even know about that they have tracked in their bug database, which then have to be prioritized when working on patches (and not all the bugs we report may make it to their bug database if they don't have the time to verify it).

In addition, the bugs modders would prioritize may not be the same that the developers prioritize. A bug that may seem minor to users and modders may in fact be a ticking time bomb to those who know the cause. Though I'd like to think, at least this time around with how much they're pushing the modding angle, they'd have a closer ear to the problems here than in previous games.

But even then, it takes time to track down and fix bugs, and then to test it all to make sure nothing else broke because of the fix. It's not necessarily as simple as "I guess I'll fix the navmesh bug today after lunch."

I agree there appears to be two bugs here - the old runtime bug which could be gotten around by esmifying the plugin, and a new one caused by the CK producing a flawed plugin. If you edit a vanilla navmesh and the mod index of the override is changed to that of the plugin - that's a serious structural error. What you end up with probably in-game is two un-connected navmeshes sandwiched on top of each other, each with their own conflicting NAVI records there to confuse the engine and break pathing. This definitely needs to be fixed.

And if those two navmeshes have the same data, they likely are cancelling each other out.

It seems to me that there are some fundamental changes to how data is handled between ESM and ESP this go around. Maybe the changes are intended to allow for a lot more to be done with the CK, but the way they were done presents a lot of new ways to mess something up if the modder isn't double-careful. An example of that is how scripts are no longer ESP-specific. If you mod a vanilla script and it gets compiled, it is altered for good if you didn't back up the original, and those changes persist whether the mod they were intended for is active or not.

I don't know...

I do know that there are a lot of awesome mods that can be accomplished even with the navmesh bug. Continueing to rant about the issue will not help get it fixed any faster. For now we should simply accept that this part of design is broken and proceed with other parts. For my part I have put up statements about the bug on the video tutorial list I maintain here and on the Wiki, in the written tutorial itself on the Wiki, and in the comments on the video tutorial BGS put on Youtube. Several have sent messages to Gstaff about it. And I will go ahead ant reveal that I notified Joel about it as well. THEY KNOW. WE KNOW and ANYONE WHO READS THE NAVMESH TUTORIAL, VISITS MY VIDEO TUTORIAL LIST, OR VISITS THE LIST ON THE WIKI WILL KNOW.

The direction this thread is beginning to go is one that leads to a "Let's rip BGS a new one!" situation. That will help NOBODY.

They posted yesterday that they are paying attention to the community and they are working on fixing what they can, and that they will continue to make updates for both the developers and the modders.

That's the official statement from them. I suggest that we take them at their word on it, let them work the problems and find the solutions. And in the meantime, let us make what mods we can make. Any release notes we release with them should include the list of known bugs with the game and a statement that we do everything we can to work around them. There's nothing WE can do about this issue. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but when I face an issue I can do nothing about, I simply adapt to it and ride it out, hoping for the best. Worst case scenario being that BGS cannot fix this issue, community modding for anything other than stat changes dies out. Neither BGS nor this community wants that to happen. So God willing, it WON'T happen.

The CK tends to delete the vanilla NavMeshes upon editing them if not given an EditorID, then replaces them with isolated versions is the problem. They won't end up staggered (not by a single plugin anyhow), but in the event another plugin edits even a nearby cell, its NavMeshes, and NAVI could end up referencing dead ends.

Say I expand Breezehome in Whiterun and don't even touch the NavMesh outside, then I load a mod which moves the smelter next door and the author has aptly reworked the NavMesh so NPCs aren't walking into it in its new location yet the editor pulled the switcharoo on them; my NavMesh/NAVI/DOOR REFR in Breezehome will end up referencing a [00] NavMesh deleted by the smelter plugin.

Agreed. Nobody does their best work with a fire lit under their ass.

I asked Gstaff about this and they said:

"Our team is aware of it and reviewing it."

so...... not the most comprehensive response, but at least they know about it?

An acknowledgement is a good thing. At least we know they know and they're at least looking at it.

I think that's excellent actually. Honestly they'd probably have a lot less people spamming them with questions about bugs if they sent out a single acknowledgement about each (serious) bug that is asked about just to know they haven't missed it and are working on it. It also puts our minds as modders comparitively at ease because we don't have to worry that our complaints are just dissapearing into cyberspace never to be addressed.

Good, we got a response. That bodes well for some kind of a fix.

Is this going to pose problems for Bethesda's own dlc ESPs? Or is my memory hazy and they just update the Skyrim esm.

I'd imagine it would be a thornarrow in their sideknee too, but that only increases the likelihood of this getting fixed. Odds are Skyrim's DLCs will be ESMs like the Fallouts' though. Shivering Isles was merged into Oblivion.ESM by Beth, the plugin empty just there for autoloading of the associated BSAs. For the Fallouts, an ESM could successfully override another ESM's placed stuff which was not the case in Oblivion (ground vanishes).