I am hoping someone with scripting knowledge can figure this out as I am stumped.

I have an interior cell that is connected to another interior cell that is connected to the Tamriel Worldspace.

In this interior cell I have all manner of insect critter spawns. If you coc the cell, the critters spawn correctly. However, if you enter the cell from a door, the critters do not spawn. I also tried connecting the interior cell to the exterior worldspace with no luck.

I built a player home before where I made an indoor cavern using a worldspace, and the critters spawned correctly. I'd rather not redo my entire navmesh just for some stupid butterflies.

Anyone have any ideas?

I'm surprised no one else has encountered this bug?

I checked to see if it was a mod conflict, nope. It's not.

Got the same "bug" now... but my critters spawned correctly once (without COC). Fishes in pond still spawn. Bees, Dragonflies, Moth and the rest ist missing!

Maybe critter spawning depents on time/weater.. ??
Had no time to verify this...

butterflies only spawn in the day by default. its coded in the CritterMoth script

I know SOME insect-critters are 'fixed' by placing the marker over blue navMesh (tri's flagged as water). If I moved those critters a couple feet away, over regular (land) navMesh, they wouldn't spawn (though I never tried the coc.. only through doors). Move em back, they work again. This was for dragonflies and 'random' insects I think.

I'm fairly sure I got fireflies and butterflies to spawn properly, with only the butterflies being frozen on their placed spots (literally.. no anim or anything). I think I need to define something to tell the butterflies to fly (or where), so I wasn't worried about it... I haven't tried placing them over water (but I doubt that would be the case, as in Vanilla... b-flies are everywhere).

[EDIT: I know fish need to be placed over 'water navMesh'... I found this out because my mod's fish weren't spawning one day. I discovered that running a 'selective recast auto-gen' of the cell's navMesh BROKE all the water/preferrd data (and who knows what else). I was able to go back and re-assign it water navMesh, and remove the places it flagged that SHOULDN'T have.. and it worked fine. I eventually reverted to a previous version of the mod, to avoid other data which may have been destroyed during that episode.]

i have fish, torchbugs, moths and all such manner of creature spawning all properly with absolutely no navmesh near them

the fish dont even need to be in water volume. they can spawn in mid air


critters are moveable statics, they are not actors, they are not affected in any way by navmesh

Then that makes me wonder why it worked here, but not over there.... strange. I know about the actor/static thing... but having just breezed over critters, I didn't look too much into them; I just assumed there was some kind of patrol or linkage to some marker needed to get em working properly. (Skyrim and its marker-obsession... sheesh)

How do you get fish/etc to spawn wherever? You're talking about the 'randoms' correct? (not the salmon/slaughterfish) The torchbugs and moths/butterflies I got to spawn anywhere (though the latter don't move). It was only the pond-fish markers and the insect markers I had spawning issues with... both fixed as stated.

it might have to do with the glitches with activator objects (since the spawners are classed as activators).

ever since fiddling with mannequins and the strange behavior of the activator boxes that depend on position/angle etc.... i just as a rule of thumb alwasy put my activator objects at very random non-snapped angles (decimal float values) and they all work exactly where i place them



slaughterfish, i think are actual actors that need patrol data and navmesh (not 100% sure i havent messed with those). the salmon (at least the "fake" riften fishery salmon) are just plain pre-animated objects you can drop anywhere and they swim according to their pre-determined animations/splines like the BirdOfPrey objects


for fish spawns (the 5 random pondfish) all i did was drop the spawner down in my aquarium (so that they would spawn in mid-air, since the aquarium doesnt have a physical water volume) and i had to set the leash bounds so that they didnt spawn somewhere clipped or hidden behind other geometry.

Good idea to give them the same rotation like rack & mannequin activators!

Will try this asap!

Turning seems to did the trick... all citters now spawning allways and anywhere!

I feel like i've missed something. I can't get the insect spawner to work at all in the first place. I can't find any tutorials on the matter either. Is there something I need to do besides place the spawner in my cell? And to be clear, it is the activator critterSpawnInsects_Many right?

Yeah, that should work... I just threw mine into the worldspace and bam, I get insects ingame. Don't change the script or anything and it should work. In fact, that was the entire point of the whole script and activator setup. They wanted to be able to script complex insect activity once, then from then on out have it be drag and drop so that the level designers were motivated to use it more often.

sounds easy enough, but unfortunately i don't get any critters when i place the activator in my cell. Is it because I'm using an interior? Is there something I must do to the cell in order for the script to function?

The spawns are used in a few vanilla interiors. Check the Use Data and find a spawn in an interior. Then check the script to see if anything unique must be done to make it work.

I haven't tried using them in exterior worldSpaces yet; but when I tried to put them in my player-home interior, I had to place them over water-flagged navMesh. Don't ask me why, but I'm positive this was the case for me... I moved it back over plain navMesh, no dice, return it over water navMesh, works fine... did it all again to make sure I wasn't trippin b's, same results.

Why this would be the case for interiors and not exteriors is beyond me...

May have found out something relevant about this, I have an exterior worldspace, pre navmesh with the land insect spawners no issue at all, When I changed the climate from Skyrim to Karthspire they all vanished from game....

It could be that messing around with your climate or worldspace window has killed them?

strangest thing. I've tried copying the critterSpawnInsectsMany from the arch mages quarters cell and paste it into my moded cell but got no results. I tried dropping one from the object list and didnt get any results. I fiddled with with the scripts like I've read some people suggest.

Nada.

Lastly, I put a critterSpawnFirefly24x7 from the object list into my cell and then copied one from the snaplegcave01 cell and pasted it into my cell. When I fired up the game and tested out my cell I found that not only was the one from snaplegcave01 working, but so was the one I put into my cell from the object list. And I didnt change the scripting on either of them this time.

As far as I have seen, all the critter spawns should be based on either time of day, or ambient lighting level. I've never used a copied and pasted spawner though as I only use low light spawners from the object list in my dungeons, since dungeons are typically low-light environments.

when I playtest my level, regardless of the time of day, the spawner will not spawn bugs. I've looked at the script and seen the fEndSpawnTime and fStartSpawnTime values, which are set to times of day for the nocturnal and diurnal bugs. When I playtest and wait for those specific times, nothing happens.

I remember in a different post that Amythest Deceiver said something about the fLeash values that may have an effect on it, but I don't really know what to do with them.

If it is the case that time of day is what's causing your problem, you may have to wait outside that area (like across the world, so the cell isn't loaded). Wait until whatever time then return.... it may be that the spawn code only happens at certain events which may not be triggered if waiting in the area itself (kind like respawning containers I think).

that's a good point. I haven't connected my cell to any other worldspace yet. I may do that next so the next time I playtest the mod, can give that a try.

I do vaguely recall that my critter spawners didn't work initially when I had to coc into my cell, so you guys are probably onto something