NPCs following a scripted path don't walk smoothly.

[maanfall]

I have a very weird problem, where if a scene requires NPCs to move somewhere, they never do it smoothly. For example:

- Following Hadvar in Helgen Keep, and after the cave through the road to Riverwood, he runs a variable amount of distance, and then stops in place and stands still for 10-30 seconds, before running again.

I thought this was maybe a problem with the notoriously buggy entire intro questchain of Skyrim, but playing through more of the main quest chain it happened again:

-After freeing Arvel in Black Falls Barrow (the dude in spider nets), he should run off immediately, but for me he stands still for 5 seconds, starts running through the dungeon and randomly stops again long before his 'vanilla skyrim' end point.

-Later, after there's notice of the dragon attack at the watchtower, Irileth should start running to the Watchtower, but she also behaves the same way: randomly stopping in whiterun, or on the road to the watchtower.

I'm certain there are many other scripted movements in my game that will exhibit this problem, but I wanted to fix it now while I only have 1 hour into a new save.

 

Reloading saves doesn't fix it, it just means they stop at other random times. My first thought was obviously that I have some very bad cases of script lag, but from what I know I don't have many script intensive mods active. Still, I tested using Elephant's Script Latency Tester and my latency never went above 80ms no matter where I went. From what I heard 80ms is the standard latency as well in skyrim. Inspecting my saves in ReSaver during the quests following of Hadvar or while following Irileth through Whiterun show only active skyrim scripts, or in whiterun things like schlongs of skyrim or aroused updates, but nothing that stands out. Furthermore I have no mods at all that add a ton of extra NPCs like populated skyrim so I would assume it can't be those two mods doing this.

I also thought that since I add a ton of city/village overhauls, it may be some weird navmesh issue, but I have nothing that directly alters the exterior landscape except simply bigger trees, and that should at most result in NPCs bumping into the trees, not randomly stopping on the road.

 

I hope anyone can help me identify what causes this problem; if there is some random mod that somehow edits NPC AI packages that I don't know about or some random sexlab mod that has an interaction that I don't know about, I've attached my mod list and load order.

modlist.txt loadorder.txt

[MadMansGun]

i'm betting it's SOS, because CF has the same sort of problem with creatures, when a actor is hit with a update scan it interrupts there behaviors/packages, Eg:

 

if the update time is set too low/fast in CF's mcm then Paarthurnax will start taking flight and landing non stop.

i can also see it effect there head tracking, they stop looking at me whenever the update scan fires.

 

also the giant's aggro warning animation starts bugging out (the animation restarts endlessly).

 

 

[maanfall]

Hmm, my problem can't be just on SOS.

 

I did a quick test with most of my mods enabled + SOS, but I disabled all sexlab ones, and the problem is much less noticable: Hadvar only stopped once and instantly kept going again on the way to Riverwood, instead of stopping 6-7 times with >10s breaks. I'm just gonna keep testing tomorrow by activating those previously disabled mods one by one to see when it happens. Who knows which mod has some wonky interaction (or multiple).

[anjenthedog]

I always figured it was some sort way-point idle, possibly randomized in occurrence to avoid being pattern-recognized by players

 

By way-point idle (not a real technical term afaik), I mean that the path a quest author has drawn for the NPC, to lead you to the cave/house/ruin/etc, has stopping points along the path. and (at a guess), there's some code-based roll-of-the-dice, and if it hits, the NPC executes some animation or behavioral sequence subroutine, maybe even a primitive AI-like route finder routine, to impart a sense of sentience.

 

Could be totally wrong though

 

 

[traison]

17 hours ago, maanfall said:

Hmm, my problem can't be just on SOS.

 

It could be any mod using similar systems. What system is this? Not sure, I'd guess packages or something Papyrus related.

 

And speaking of Papyrus, whats your script performance looking like? Your 5-10 second delays smell like Papyrus latency. Arvel starting to run after getting released from the web seems like a good place to switch quest stages - stages can have script fragments:

 

MS13 "The Golden Claw", stage 15 "Cut Arvel down" -> stage 35 "Retrieve the Golden Claw" runs Fragment_8  from QF_MS13_00039645.psc, and this may not be the only thing that executes when he is released.

 

Papyrus Profiler

 

If theres a performance problem, consider getting rid of bloated mods. If that's not an option, get Papyrus Tweaks, disable tweaks you don't need and set iMaxOpsPerFrame to 2,000. I currently have mine at 10,000. Keep in mind however that you do yourself a disservice by increasing this value just to make room for more bloat - make sure you understand why you're increasing this value.

 

Edit: Maybe worth clarifying, I'm not saying MadMansGun is wrong. They know what they're talking about. I'm just trying to come up with some other plausible theory here.

Edited May 8 by traison

[maanfall]

Hmm I had hoped Papyrus Tweaks would have fixed it, but it didn't. The script latency test still shows a 75-85 average ms throughout my playthrough, and Papyrus profiler shows me this (using the advar run as an example):

(timed order)

(left heavy)

, where I cut advar loose, he then waited for 15 seconds in that spot before running, stopping halfway through again for 5 seconds before running to the end of his scripted run.

I also added a papyrus log from the entire run of hadvar to riverwood. The scripts most called are the vanilla skyrim ones, which I already 'optimized' using the necessary mods.

 

I even tried seeing if i completely disable almost all modded script calls: disable SL aroused, disable the creature cloak from creature framework, disable the cloaking spell from XPMSE, but the problem still persists.

Alvar run.log run to riverwood.log

Edited May 9 by maanfall

[anjenthedog]

50 minutes ago, maanfall said:

75-85 msec

That's where my game idles. Seems normal to me.

[maanfall]

Well, took some time but I found the culprit, it wasn't a SexLab mod like i thought, it was Immersive Wenches. I have no idea why, what setting the mod has does to make this change or even how it does it.. Even disabling everything like dialogues or wench scenes doesn't help, or reverting to the 'no quests' edition that is still downloadable.

 

Removing the mod instantly fixes every weird random stopping all npcs do when walking. Which is a shame because I was using the mod for the Deadly Wenches.

 

Since I haven't found any mention of my problem on their nexus page I assume its just some incredibly obscure interaction with another mod that I can't find in xEdit. Skyrim's gotta Skyrim I suppose..

Edited May 12 by maanfall