Yesterday, I encountered an interesting bug involving Delphine. She tried to make the Steadfast Dwarven Spider a member of the Blades. It was slightly hilarious watching her march up to the spider and administer the oath to a mute automaton. Lucky I had just saved, so I stopped Delphine from usurping my loyal mechanical follower and reloaded. … then she tried to usurp my dog. Sigh.

Anyway, today’s topic is Navmeshes. This isn’t a tutorial though, so much as a rant.

I remember doing routing in levels I had made for Oblivion. They often took a long time and was very fiddly and irritating in some respects. Or so I thought. I take back everything I may have ever said about Oblivion’s pathfinding system as the past several days have been filled with me trying to get reacquainted with creating levels after dabbling around with it when the CK first came out.

Damn the navmeshing system. Damn it to the Eternal Deadlands!

I’ve spent three days trying to tweak and improve the navmesh in this little farm mod I made for my own use. If it isn’t sunburst style inefficient meshing problems because of the large expanse I’m trying to cover, it’s the autogenerator placing vertices floating up in the air.

On top of it all, I can’t seem to get my followers to actually use the trap door, or the trap door to get a green triangle in front of it so they can. It’s been a frustrating, irritating project.

And the damn thing is only one room. One. Room. With about 60 pots of soil to grow alchemy ingredients in. I thought about releasing it for some few moments while building it. At least, I did until I started the navmeshing! For some inexplicable reason, I can deal with importing and exporting the super-fiddly nif files and edit them in Blender, but can’t do a flippin’ navmesh to save my life.

Criminy.

I’m half tempted to just let the followers float around in midair for no reason and walk all over the top of my potted plants… they’re resilient plants, right? Canis root is a stubby kind of bush anyway. Maybe it’ll prick the bottom of their feet.

AND THEN. And then, I discover that there’s been a navmesh bug in the game with ESP files where the NPCs will stop moving around after you leave, and has apparently been since the navmesh system started being used back with Fallout.

I have no idea how to convert to an ESM file (yet).

I’m having some serious doubts on starting my big mod, the Kenzeft Project… it needs custom levels for the quest line.

At this point, AAAGH. I need something to go right! For once! Just once!