CLAIM: City Planning and AI

[Koniption]

Hi Ibsen,

I'm not totally sure about your pathgrids question, but I think that the Paatru will be able to find their way to dry land, due to my observations I made when I was working on getting fish to actually swim around on their own:

In my fish experiment, I made fish swim around (sort of), without making them seek out underwater rocks in order to make them move. The fish did move, but they always moved towards shore, then back to their original spawn marker position underwater.

I found that the fish were moving towards the closest pathgrids on land, nearest their spawn marker, when I looked in the CS at the pathgrid locations. So they indeed were trying to go from water to dry land and back again.

If you set a pathgrid on the stair ramp of the bubble houses, the Paatru will most likley navigate towards it, and then back out into the water to activate the door that leads to the giant pool of water the house is in/under. If you want the Paatru to swim around for a while in the submerged part of the house, make that individual's AI seek out an item or object in the first floor (like a rock under the water, on first floor), then set their exploration radius to be a good number, and set the time for them to start swimming and how long they should swim around near that object.

Keep in mind there are two different "location" selections for the explore radius: the radius from a spawn marker, and the radius from a directly placed NPC in the render window (I forget the exact terms for these two selections, but they are under one of the AI sections). If you select the "location" for spawn marker, but you've manually placed that NPC, the NPC might not swim around the object and explore like they are supposed to. I think I came across this issue with the fish experiment of mine. So for manually placed NPC's, select the other "location" selection that is not for spawn markers.

Forgive me if you already knew most of this AI stuff. Better safe than sorry.

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

I must have missed this before but yes, this is useful. Thanks!

[llamaranger]

on a similar note, you can always just manually set up pathgrids for the water and then allow the NPC to swim while exploring....

x


edd

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Do pathgrids work okay under water? I haven't tried that because I thought it might send things screwy. The nodes always tend to 'ground' themselves when you add them but they can easily be lifted up off solid surfaces.

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
Do pathgrids work okay under water? I haven't tried that because I thought it might send things screwy. The nodes always tend to 'ground' themselves when you add them but they can easily be lifted up off solid surfaces.

I'm not sure. I remember (again, vaguely), that using pathgrids underwater can impact FPS and game performance, and that is why the more recent "making fish travel" mods don't use pathgrids, but rather have the fish seek out existing vanilla rocks that are used underwater. By using vanilla rocks, you don't have to add bunches of pathgrids underwater. Adding stuff like that tends to increase filesize, anyway, in the esp. So instead of add, just adapt what is already there.

I do remember hearing that the water part of Oblivion impacts performance more than land. So I don't think pathgrids should be added underwater, because water already complicates itself. But if the pathgrids are used in water that is in an interior cell, I think you should be ok.

It's kind of funny (random thought) - flying creatures can't travel up and down in the sky automatically to reach higher or lower areas when they move forward, but for some reason the underwater creatures can travel higher and lower in the water to reach higher or lower rocks (if their AI is set to seek those rocks out).

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Cheers. I'm going to go without pathgrids for now and see how it works.

In the meantime, I just finished Burrulululuh's Larvae Lounge, Pugglukhlugrukh's Pod and Grokhmurgokh's Shiny Things which is all of the egg houses. So I just need to finish three more of the buger houses. Hopefully, the buger houses won't take too long to do....and the biggest egg house is now complete.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

I think my next task should be to polish off the interiors for Go-Ja Morgoa which I've been wanting to do for some time now. Here are the city planning maps I'll be using. I'm sure whether to upload these as claims or not because I intend to get straight on with them. If anyone wants to do one then let me know.

FYI, Go-Ja-Morgoa is a meeting point for tribes, originally intended to fend off incursions from the western lands. There are therefore two barracks at present, one for the intensely committed An-Xileel and one for the smaller Ix-Kuth-Ta'an. The Ka'Pura may also be present at the clans-meet.

The two shaman huts at the bottom are mini-claims since I copied them over from Pholmolo. The flamehut needs the most work so that we can get some sort of appropriate shrine sorted (this may benefit from an original model).

[Deeza]

I think you should go for it and do them yourself, Ibsen. Also, great that you worked in the backstory from those books I wrote all that time ago (being razed to the ground once would tend to cause a militaristic outlook).

One minor detail, as far as I know the An-Xileel aren't really a tribe, they're more of a political/religious grouping of fanatical Argonians from all over BM. That doesn't stop them having a barracks of course, just thought you might want to know that. I suspect that since they plan to overthrow the Empire, and are hostile even to fellow Argonians who tolerate foreigners, they will be quite secretive about their true agenda even among other tribals. Also I wouldn't be surprised if they killed any non-argonians who enter their buildings on sight.

Also, there is a local subtribe called the Go-Ja, who originally founded the settlement and will still be present in the area.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

I might change those barracks to Go-Ja barracks then. I'd prefer us to meet the An-Xileel further into BM like their city of origin (which was Lilmoth, was it not?). In the meantime, I just finished the Ix-Kuth-Ta'an barracks now and am in the process of adding AIs.

[Deeza]

Great news, and good call on having the An-Xileel deeper into the marsh. They need to be hard to find and mysterious - even 20 years into the future when they rule Black Marsh with an iron fist, people know hardly anything about them. Their base of operations is never mentioned, but I think we should go for Helstrom.