Couldn't think of how to word the title but I have been working some on designing the moving castle from Howl's Moving Castle. Basically, I am wondering if anybody knows how to make a group of objects (the exterior of the castle) be invisible until a certain activator makes them visible? I want to have various locations all of skyrim where the exterior of the castle would be placed but only 1 instance of the castle would be visible at a time creating the effect that the castle moves/migrates around. I hope I explained that some-what coherently. Thanks!

For static objects, the enable/disable flag makes them visible/invisible. So if you have castle A and castle B, you can make the castle "move" from A to B by disabling all the castle A objects and enabling all the castle B objects. Don't know if its the best way, but it should work.

You can to make it "initial disable" just right-click on objects and will find "initial disable" or through a script

Take a look at how Beth implemented the furniture sets in the player houses. If you assign all the castle 1 pieces to an x-marker parent. When you enable or disable that one parent, all the children pieces will do the same. It will make your life saner Take a look at the khajit caravans for a good example of how to do this based on a schedule.

Thank you all very much for your replies! This sounds like an awesome idea. However, is there a way to mass select/reference all the objects to an xmarker instead of individually? I have the exterior of the castle built up a lot with so many pieces it would take a while to reference each one to the marker. Haven't played around with the CK since morrowind, so im sorry if I ask stupid questions.

You should be able to create all the links for the first castle and then be able to copy the whole thing to put in the other places. The copies should have the same associations with their copied parents. At least that's how the bookcases copy (thank Azura!) There is probably a way to select multiple pieces at once and assign them to a parent. You might try selecting in the object list and dragging to the linked tab on your parent object. If that doesn't work, I do know that the link can be established either way, so you can keep the parent window open to the linked tab as you select the other pieces one by one in the object window. It might take some time now, but it will save you time in the long run.

If you make all the objects you want to "group" together, the "children" of and x marker (double click the object and the click parents and the click on the choose parent and the your x marker sry for bad description), then all the children will get disable/enabled when the x-marker gets disabled/enabled

btw you will get problems with this, since navmesh can't be turned on /turned off, so npc's will still walk around the castle even though its not there

+1 concur with enable parent/xmarker


on top of that if you want your castle to "move", you can set all the exteriors of CastleA to enable parent of the x-marker, and all of the exterior assets of CastleB to the SAME x-marker but hit the Set Enable State to Opposite of Parent checkbox.

this way you can "flick" the x-marker on/off and it will alternate enable/disable of both castles using the same marker.

Thanks for pointing that out. Luckily, the only parts I will have to worry about (only parts that touch the ground) are the 4 mechanical chicken legs that support/move the castle so . I was thinking I could just leave the navmesh alone and use collision markers (which are also disabled when the parent is right?) to make it so that npcs don't get tangled in the legs. I may not even need that since the ground level footprint is so low.

To everybody: thank you so much for your help! I've been working this whole mod out theoretically in my head while I build the castle, but now I can finally start working on the core tricks/features of the mod. Y'all have been incredibly helpful and, considering this was my first post/experience with this forum, I am very impressed.

Edit: Is there anyway link the interior door to the active exterior door only? Or what would be a way to only have a player exit the interior and only show up at the active location?

Edit #2: I found out that I could link my entire exterior castle to an xmarker in one reference by selecting everything and right-clicking the selected in the cell view. After then selecting 'set enable parent' and referencing the x-marker it referenced everything at once.... saved me about and hour of individually referencing

i don't think so. what i would do, is duplicate the door in the interior so you have 2 on top of each other. then use another xmarker inside the interior to do the switch between them (set one enable parent, the other enable parent with opposite state)

then when you call your castle teleport function, flip the x-marker on both the interior and exterior