During my opening scene if a butterfly or bee or some other bug touches one of the characters they go flying away, sometimes so far away they can't be seen.

I know there's probably not anything I can do about this other than deleting the critter spawner, but does anyone know of a work around regarding this?

Thanks!

The insects are translated along splines that, as far as I know, don't use physics or collision detection or anything. Meaning there's nothing you can do.

Remove, or move the spawn father away, I guess.

Thanks Alexander

But...what are splines?

It sounds like Math. I wouldn't trust it.

A spline is a mathematical way to plot a smooth curve.

In this case it's just a line in the games 3D space that the butterflies follow.

Things from SimCity.

They get reticulated during load screens, if memory serves.

words cannot describe the awesomeness of that reference

Change the buttefly's path to a normal distribution over your character's head.

How would one accomplish that?

It wouldn't have anything to do with that silly math stuff, would it

y + 1 / (σ * (2π)^0,5) * e^{-((x + μ) / (2*σ))}

Y is the height of your character, μ is his or her position and σ is thick-headnedness

That's not math

That's the name of an enemy's ship in Star Trek

See! SEE! I knew there would be Math. *shudder*

Kidding aside.. like DocClox was hinting at it's a mathematical way to move things along a pseudo-natural path. As an example....

For immersion's sake new Actors are placed outside of the player's field of vision. That Actor now needs to get around whatever obstacles are in the way to approach the player. The game engine then provides the spline formula with "Go to point A, then point B, then point C, then point D" with point D being right in front of the player. The formula then returns a relatively smooth path to follow that will get the Actor from point A to D.

Without this path the Actor would look very robotic. They'd move in three very straight lines (A->B, B->C, C->D) and turn at harsh angles. All this would kill immersion.

Splines work in 3d space very naturally so they're a perfect fit for aerial creatures that have no navmesh to guide them. If you're feeling adventurous you could even figure out a way to flit them about yourself as Bethesda has provided a http://www.creationkit.com/SplineTranslateTo_-_ObjectReference function.