1 - (NAVMESH and ENABLE PARENTS) I'm building a mine which gets enabled in stages. I've heard it's not a good idea to have a boatload of stuff enabling off of the same parent, so I have three parents for the first stage, and I enable them concurrently in a fragment attached to a quest stage. Do I really need separate parents for the same stage?

That's not my important question - what's important is that the first enabled stage puts scaffolding in an exterior cell, and I had to alter the navmesh so folks could go on it. So how do I keep NPCs from wanting to go on this airborne navmesh (before the mine gets enabled)? Can I just enable/disable a collison plane at the base of the scaffold? I thought about disabling and enabling the navmesh (there isn't anything critical under scaffold, so NPCs avoiding it would make no difference), but I don't even know if that's possible.

(The area I'm talking about is the back corner of Largashbur Orc Stronghold, near the bedrolls. NPCs don't even go to that area before the middle of The Cursed Tribe quest, and my mod starts directly after that quest ends, so this may be something I just skip.)

2 - (DIALOGUE IDLES) I'm playing with dialogue idles to make my intro scene more interesting, and I'm learning all about xmarkerheadings, locreftypes, idlemarkers, all that. In his intro, the NPC talks about killing a bear, and I stuck in an attack idle (pa_1HMKillMoveShortA) so he can simulate the kill - that fires without a hitch and looks great. The problem is that the NPC gets stuck with his shoulders hunched and his hands up like he's grabbing something. No matter what I do, I can't get him out of that pose (new idle marker with the attack and another idle stacked in, um, some other stuff, even put it in a package as an end idle). He continues the scene dialogue, but won't do any other idles. Can anyone point me to a solution?

3 - (SCENES) I've pretty much figured out there isn't a way to get the Player to have dialogue in a scene, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. So what I did was break the scene down into many mini-scenes, and have the continuation based on scene-stage-dependent INTs (that keep track of what parts have been done), the NPC location, and the proximity of the player. I have all the dialogue conditioned to these variables, and the first parts are working. It just seems like an awful lot of work, and I just want to know if I'm over-complicating things (I tend to do that).

All I am trying to do is give the player an introductory tour that explains how the mine got there. The player meets the NPC, and if the player follows him, gets part of the story at one exterior location, part at another, part at another, and finishes in an interior cell. The 'tour' variables are allowing me to stop/continue it at any point, with a slight change in dialogue for subsequent run-throughs. I've got all my dialogue in place (except the ending, which I am changing), so now I'm just trying to 'dress it up' a bit with idles, and I am looking at triggerboxes to eliminate some forcegreets.

4 - (QUEST ALIASES) The CK mentions that designating an alias as a forced reference should be used sparingly, so I was wondering if it makes any difference to designate the alias a different way. Specifically, by choosing FIND MATCHING REFERENCE and then setting the condition to GetIsReference. Doesn't this do exactly the same thing as a forced reference?

Also re: aliases, how important is it for my aliases to have unique names? What I mean is, my quest abbreviation is LGBM01, so I put that before all of my alias NPC names. Is that necessary or desireable? I'm just lazy, I hate typing the same thing over and over, especially if I don't have to do it. (If you knew how many times I have to rewrite stuff to get it to work, you'd know what I meant!)


Any and all pointers, 'best-practices' etc would be helpful. I've got about 30 CKWiki pages permanently opened, I go through every tutorial I can find, search the web, and I still have questions. Sometimes, yes, I DO need a sign.

Thanks for looking!

1. I'm also making a mine that is built in stages (along with an entire city that is built in stages as well). So I'm using a lot of enable parents. I don't think there's any limit to how many children a parent can have - at least not that I've heard of. In New Vegas I had about 50-60 slot machines enabled to a single parent and never any issues.

The navmesh is something that I've put a lot of thought of - It's nowhere near as dynamic as enable parents and such. That means your navmesh will have to be set once and can't be changed for the duration of the mod. What I do is have the navmesh for the finished product so to say. When there are no objects/statics, the people might be walking weird - such as walking around the empty space where a structure will soon be. However I'm having the navmesh issue but that's another thing. Having an obstruction plane will stop them from physically walking onto the structure but they will still try to. So the NPCs will be walking into an invisible wall like a mime.


2. Can you give him another idle marker in another line of dialogue? Or look for the OnEnd idle box and change that.. IIRC there is a OnStart, During and OnEnd idle marker package. Sounds like the one set under OnEnd will continue past the dialogue.

3. I used ForceGreet package in a scene to involve the player in a direct dialogue window with one of the NPCs. So dialogue during a scene is possible

4. I think using UniqueReference is the best way to assign an NPC to an alias. I have a lot of AI package problems with this method (probably related to the navmesh bug). But the dialouge works fine. I shouln't think using force reference will be that bad if you're using it sparingly and for a single NPC only. I wouldn't use this method if I'm going to be dynamically changing the actor in the alias.

1 - Thanks!

2 - The problem was that after he hit this pose, he would not do any other idles. He would walk to the correct spot and say the correct dialogue, but was stuck in this pose even after the scene ended. Even if I put in additional idles, he never did them. Haven't tried the OnEnd idle yet, didn't even think about it. Thanks!

3 - Yay!

4 - What I meant was for non-NPCs - i.e. statics, critters, etc.

Thanks for your help!

If you right click on the NavMesh in the cell view windows, you can set an ID, an enable parent, a multibound and a linked ref.

Edit : but, it doesn't seem to be working.