Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Making a new sign, however, was far more trouble than I expected.
I guess I need to read up on that after a quick visit to dad's.

It's a bit annoying that there are no "general" signs for taverns. Only for general goods and for alchemists...

Decided to test my little Karthwasten in-game before proceeding... a few things definitely need fixing and when it comes to that dragon... uhm... I do hope the goats killed it? It attacked as I arrived through fast travel (kind of testing the tutorial marker but apparently I didn't set it to be available for travel, only visible on the map - not that it needs to be as Karthwasten already is, once you've visited) - Anyway, I went straight into my tavern to hi... I mean, to check out the interior... I should probably rotate the interior door so it doesn't bang you in the face when you want to enter... or maybe remove it entirely. Not sure. If I owned a tavern I'd want a door between my living quarters and the drunken patrons...

ANYWAY, when I got back out there wasn't a person in sight, yet the dragon lay dead on the ground... The only living things nearby were two goats and two chicken... (not mine)

Oh dang I forgot to check out the interior of the farm before closing it again. And come to think of it, it must have autosaved when I entered and exited the tavern. I wasn't planning on saving my visit.

Edit: started it up again and the farm seems to work. The door markers for travelling between cells don't put you down where the marker actually is, in the CK, but it seems they still work like they should when you're in the game... 

Today I am trying to "optimize the lighting" in lesson #4...

Apparently when you use some sort of "IR" view in the CK, Pinkish is too many lights, while bright green is too few (and the darkest colours, blue and purple, means it's good). So how can I have green and pink in the same places!?  
(Probably something to do with the detail of the meshes, less detailed meshes tend to show the same light over a larger area... hence the large building shows one light while objects right next to the walls show another...)

 

Note to self:
Exterior navmesh edits might be easier if you do them right after you changed the terrain so you know what changes you made and what "holes" in the navmesh should probably go where.

Another note:
Save more often because CK shuts down every time you finish a particularly finicky bit...


I was hoping to finish one of the exterior cells before bedtime but seeing as it's past 3 am I guess I failed.
Apparently one should change as little as possible and only delete faces if absolutely necessary. But the existing navmesh is so crappy I have to make more changes, to be able to make changes where I made changes to the terrain. (But I'm careful not to change any of the cell edge vertices as they need to line up with the vertices in adjoining cells!)

PS - for the lighting I opted for too few rather than too many lights to avoid flickering. Hopefully the ambient light will be enough to not make it pitch black inside. It wasn't when I tested the mod yesterday, but that was daytime... No wonder people's screenshots of their modded interiors are often so dark you can't see anything.

Charlotte wrote:

But the existing navmesh is so crappy I have to make more changes

 

That area with the hills just north of Karthwasten is terrible for companions. They always have to take a different path from the one I take which results in them disappearing and then reappearing later from a different direction.

*Finishes 1st exterior navmesh*
*clicks the "find triangles" button as that's the only "check" I've been taught how to do*
"Found 10 problematic triangles. Delete All?"


Why doesn't the tutorial mention anything about how to FIX problems with the navmesh? They just say to check it and then finalize once there are no more errors. Well, thanks for nothing
I don't want to delete stuff without knowing where it is - but I can't find anything on how to find those particular ten triangles. (10 were "serious" or something, priority maybe... which implies there are more, smaller, errors, too...) And some posts/guides say to fix it in SSEedit, but again, not really HOW. I hate that with tutorials.

I don't know anything about this but...
select triangle by index?  

But again... I don't know anything about this.

youtube

I did find an old page with broken images and broken English too... But it helped explain. Apparently I should select "No, do not delete all" and then "Go to next error/triangle". And then check again, since all the triangle indexes change when you change something. Anyway turned out that fixing one triangle often fixed two, so I didn't have to correct 10 errors. Then THAT tutorial proceeded to say something like "while you're at it, you should check this and that too" and then went on to not explain how.

Anyway, first exterior cell navmesh is now error free and finalized. Second has been started. It should be easier, because I did considerably fewer changes to the terrain and only added one building, but... It still feels overwhelming already.

Youtube!

I finally caved and tried to watch a youtube video on how to create a specific type of NPC and... I can barely catch what he's saying (his English is fine but he's got a bit of a dialect I can't place and can't quite catch) and I definitely can't see what the text on his screen says and he keeps waving his mouse pointer around and saying "that's not important" and then he mumbles something I can't hear and says "you definitely don't want to do that"...

I have no idea what I'm doing! * I've looked through a gazillion of the ready made AI packages in the kit, and most seem "empty" which means I have no idea what they actually make a character do.

*Almost. I did create 5 NPC characters (just deciding on names took a while...) and started adding some AI packages so my tavern owners should have a sleeping and eating schedule but not a working one... And the farmers have nothing so far.

Edit:
"Oh and you have to set the location, which you can see how to do in another video"