Can I switch out road nifs without breaking navmesh?

[Mookeylama]

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/107544?tab=description

 

been using that mod lately and it really adds alot, for so little. with it, the wilderness feels much more natural and the small outpost towns feel realistic. sorta like the old west towns where main street was nothing but a muddy  mess and needed planks to walk on.

but on the flip side, it makes areas around larger cities feel very odd without cobbled ways. so i was gonna try my hand at doing,...something lol. thought maybe using his replacer textures as the main, and then a plugin to switch road chunks that use alternate texture sets or something. they'd be the same nifs but different form ids. but i once read something about it being bad to mess w/ road meshes because it could break navm. but i think that was along the lines of, don't use Jaxon's positioner to move a road 100 yards away ect.

so just wondering if i could screw up navmesh pathing by switching roads w  alt textues? thanks

[Grey Cloud]

Messing with meshes might be an issue but swapping out textures shouldn't be.

Many of the landscape/environment overhauls are just textures.

 

A few months ago I used a lot of the ideas from this and I've not seen any problems.

 

https://skyrimscandal.blogspot.com/p/retexture.html?zx=ad2c1249afc85cc8

[RW311]

navmesh is created using base object collision data for almost everything so to change the road you have to change that base object - but if you only replace it with duplicate taht is changing nothing more than the texture set, and as long as you don't move its postion you could cancel the navmesh prompt from ck. Since nothing is really changing but ref id and that doesn't matter in the navmesh only the collision mesh data is important for ai and again that hasn't changed because it's still using the same nif.

 

All you can do is try , go in an area and replace some then grab a follower to test it out, my guess is it won't make any difference to the ai but can't be sure without doing it.

[Grey Cloud]

3 hours ago, RW311 said:

navmesh is created using base object collision data for almost everything so to change the road you have to change that base object

I think you are getting hold of the wrong of the stick here. He doesn't want to change the road as in moving it or re-routing it. He just wants to retexture it. At least that is my reading of the situation.

[Mookeylama]

yep just change tex. and i remembered that i'd been using Tamriel Reloaded for years and it does just the sorta thing i'm wanting lol, so i just copied what it does to roads. i must say it looks pretty good. the smaller hamlets now look much better to me. a nice muddy Deadwood appearance. seems like the huge municipal roadworks department of skyrim public services aren't milking the clock as much as in the past haha

 

i do wonder tho...over the years i've moved a few road chunks down on the z axis just a very few units. like 2.0 ect. just down, not right left or angles. u know the kind where the straight edge just isn't down enough.  i do wonder if i maybe shouldn't have done that. tho navm seems fine. i think uskp usleep does it sometimes. 

anyway, thanks all!

[Scrab]

The collision of an object is independent of the Navmesh and vice versa, the Navmesh is just another layer you put above/below an object that is intended to be walkable, removing, adding or changing the collision on navmeshed areas (exchanging one model with another) doesnt corrupt or cause any harm to the navmesh per se, as to navmesh, collision is merely a tool used to properly define/anchor its position during its creation and during its creation only

 

Collision comes into play when you are talking about the actual pathing of an NPC. Navmesh tells an NPC where they are allowed to walk, collision tells them where they actually can walk (though not as reliable as one might wish at times), meaning putting a mountain on the road will cause NPC to look for a different way as the game wont be able to find a navmesh layer near the collision of this mountain object (- in theory. In Praxis that doesnt always work, causing NPC to get stuck in a wall, "moving" through the object and snapping back to the path once they "moved through" the object - that happens constantly, even in the vanilla game)

With this in mind, its actually a-ok to replace the entire road object, as long as the new objects doesnt heavily alter the height level of the area where its used

 

Completely changing the road paths doesnt break the navmesh either, but the NPC will partially ignore the new roads and continue using the old ones as "roads" dont exist for NPC per se, what we consider a road is just flagged navmesh for NPC (=> preferred pathing)

 

On 5/11/2021 at 2:04 PM, Mookeylama said:

 i do wonder if i maybe shouldn't have done that. tho navm seems fine. i think uskp usleep does it sometimes. 

anyway, thanks all!

..Hence, changing the height of an object by a few units wouldnt cause issues if the navmesh was layed out properly in the beginning

An NPC is placed on top of a collision and from that position will look ~50 units (to the hip of an average NPC) above and below that collision for navmesh, if it finds navmesh, it will continue walking, otherwise it will be "lost", unable to move

The distances for navmesh to be detected for water flagged navmesh may vary and those 50 units are just a vague estimation. I never did any excessive testing in that regard