Complete stumper still. Nobody has any other ideas?

Just to toss out my own experiences with this for the rest of you:

- I've had multiple instances of things going strange inside Faregyl itself with the NRB legion guys, at random locations. Some days, they offroad behind the inn for no apparent reason. I've seen them walk backwards down the NRB road and the vanilla road both. Pretty sure a couple of these were pre-console use with a fresh save, but I may be wrong about that.

- Had some fun watching Hildara Mothril in front of the Inn of Ill Omen one time. She stood there, tried to mount her horse, finally did, and then I talked to her. When I end, she starts trying to get on the horse again. She does, and starts riding away, whereupon I waited for an hour. When I come back, she's back where she was, trying to mount the horse again. I did the wait thing a couple more times to the same results, then went inside the inn and waited for about a day. Lo and behold, when I came out again, she was still doing it. This one was a few quicksaves in, and I had been using the console like it was going out of style.

No idea what it all means, but hopefully somebody can make some sense of it.

I've managed to further narrow things down to the issue affecting the horse itself rather than a combination of one and its rider. Get the guards to dismount by resisting arrest, then shoot their horses until the horses want to chase you. They'll get stuck in the same pattern. Seems limited to black horses and bay horses. I got the other people off their chestnut horses and those were turning and pursuing me just fine once I started fights with them.

Arthmoor, I want to offer my help in testing this, if you think I can be of help. I'm preparing my installation, tweaking and installing mods... it's a new char still undeveloped and with no 'mod crust' on the savegame yet... maybe I could spot something? I don't known if I could be of help, to be honest... but it's worth a try

PM sent.

Blacks and Bays? This is really weird. Ok, but I'm running Slof's, so not all the guards are riding Blacks... If they're from Anvil, they'll be riding Whites... I'll have to see which city rides Chestnuts with Slof's and see what happens.

In your tests, did the riders engage the crime dialogue with you once they caught you (when riding Chestnuts), or can you not replicate this in your game, Arthmoor?

Hey Arthmoor, I been doing some tests in the area near Faregyl Inn, where the road goes upwards up the hill. There's a long stretch of narrow road there. Luckily, I caught an Imperial Guard riding a brown horse uphill, and shot them from behind.

It displayed the problem you described for a bit, though he never was trapped in the backward-forward much long. Sometimes, at first he dismounts for a bit, then hops to the horse again and starts moving backwards, like searching for a turn around point, and depending on the spot they were, sometimes it took long than others before they can at last turn around and chase me. I'm hoping this is similar enough to what you described

After that I did a 'tpg' in the console to check that area... there's seem to be a long chain of blue nodes linked together forming a single line, upward the hill, but no branching nodes from them to the sides. The pathgrid is correct per-se, but maybe horses require more links than two-legged walkers to turn around? Maybe that could be the problem? If I shot a walking ward when following those nodes, he immediately turnaround on spot, but maybe horses require at least one link more to turn around? Just shooting in the dark here, I know near nothing about path grids, just trying to describe what I see there, and trying to extrapolate a possible cause from it. I'll try to catch a screenshot of the place (I tried to catch screenies while testing but I'm running with AA so I have to disable it before the game lets me take screenies, meh!)

Just ignore this if you already considered this and discarded as a cause.

So. This horse thing. Racked my brain over it for a few days now. Turns out to be about the stupidest thing ever. The Abomb counter. The character's Abomb counter only showed 37% according to Wrye Bash, but I'd tried everything else I could think of. Imagine the dumbfounded look on my face when I load the game and the rider saunters out of Faregyl as though there's never been a problem. Followed by his two escorts, who also act as though nothing was ever wrong. W T F ?

If someone's keeping track of things the Abomb counter can hose up without explanation, add this to the list, wouldya?

@Leandro, andalaybay, Dwip, Hanaisse, thanks for the help on this one, but it does appear to be well and truly solved. I had considered path grids, but since people on horseback were getting stuck in places with plentiful nodes, it was easily dismissed. Abomb counter. Who the hell would have guessed that?

Hey, I'm glad it was solved! I liked the looks of things in Faregyl, now I cannot wait until it's released!

I had those screenies uploaded, but the forum software lagged quite a bit and wouldn't let me edit my post. But I'm glad they're not needed now

Cheers! :celebration:

What makes even less sense is that it's solved for every character. And I only reset the Abomb on one of them. Double WTF. And even stranger oddity that I can't explain is that one of my other guys went to Faregyl and saw a huge stream of NPCs filing out of the city. About half from Shezrie's Towns, the other half from Stalhrim Village. There should be no way for them to be anywhere near Faregyl, yet there they all were. Something clearly got straightened out here somewhere but I couldn't possibly tell you what. I'm just glad it's all sorted and I don't have to hold up the mod because of this.

But why would that affect me? I don't have an abomb problem. Do you think that it got built into the plugin somehow? I can test this on my brand-spanking-new game if you want. Mind you, I'd better figure out why it's crashing when I fast travel first :frown:

Well you said that they aren't having many problems with moving toward you, right? Just with the crime stuff? Crime and arrest was never broken for me and Dwip and Hanaisse never mentioned it as an issue either.

At 37% I wasn't supposed to be having Abomb problems either. That fixed it for the one guy. What still bothers me is that the others who didn't get that fixed also behave as though nothing was wrong now.

Is it possible that heavy use of tcl messes with whatever the Abomb thing does?

But crime stuff isn't broken for me if Faregyl isn't loaded... I have used tcl, but I wouldn't call it heavy. I had an abomb problem earlier in my game and fixed it - I might need to fix it again. The game is over 400 hrs long!

So I guess I could load up Faregyl again, fix the abomb and see what it does...

Tested again. Even after resetting the abomb counter, the guard doesn't try to arrest me when he catches up with me. He seems to try to, but it doesn't proceed and I'm greated with "How are you champion?" or some such line. Once I remove Faregyl, the crime script kicks in normally, even when we're both on horseback. If I resist arrest and kill the guard, I get the good ol' beware of your crimes speech for the Crusader's relics. I'm the divine crusader too But as I said, none of that prevents the usual crime dialogue if I don't have Faregyl loaded.

I don't know why I'm having the problem and you aren't, so it might be something to tuck away and see if anybody else reports a similar issue.

This Abomb thing, I've heard of it but thought it only affects save games about 200hrs old? My save games are maybe 4 hrs old. Anyway I believe to reset abomb counter you need to use some Wrye Bash feature on your save games, is that right? Then I can try it and see if my horse hopping and sinking problems disappear

Yes, in Wrye Bash, go to the saves tab. Right click on the save that's affected by the problem and select "Repair Abomb". It will tell you how far along the counter is and ask if you want to go ahead with it. It doesn't hurt anything to reset it early and might just fix something like it did for me

SkyRanger mentioned a thread back or so that OSR will likely cause people to reach the ABomb problem much earlier than usual due to the way it works with ticks, but I assumed that meant that the counter would go up faster, not that you'd meet the problem faster than the counter counted. In any case, if you're using OSR you should be keeping a closer eye on your ABomb than you used to need to. Of course, it may be completely urnelated to OSR in this specific case.

Vac

Interesting about OSR.

Is there any danger in using the ABomb fix too often/early?

Is there another method than Bash to address the ABomb problem? I recall an alternative but forgot where.

Not that I know of.I think there's an alternative (older) utility on Nexus, but it makes a renamed copy of the save which means you'll lose all your OBSE co-save data if you don't rename it to match. Not sure if it's got any more serious issues; I've never used it myself.

Vac

Interesting. That's not a symptom of Abomb that I've ever heard of. It still doesn't explain why I wasn't even able to reproduce the odd behaviour last time I tested. Also, just to be clear, all the odd behaviour I've seen had nothing to do with crime, it was just me hanging out in front of the Inn and observing that. Weird.

I haven't been back to Faregyl since my last post but I'll try to find some time today to do more observing. If it happens again I'll try the Abomb fix to confirm.

Perhaps you could try the crime thing too because it appears that nobody but me is experiencing this issue. I was zapping a legion soldier on horseback to get him to chase me to Faregyl since I don't have other mods loaded that introduce mounted NPC's to that area. As a side effect I discovered that the crime processing mechanism is broken when Faregyl is loaded. You don't have to be in Faregyl for this to happen. When the soldier rides up to you and catches you, instead of starting the "your crime spree is over" speech, he just pushes his horse into your character for a few seconds and then turns and greets you normally. Once I remove Faregyl from my LO, the process works normally.

I just removed bloat and reset my abomb, it did "help" but did not completely solve the issue.

I noticed the horseman stop and turns tword any nearby dead bodies when they are suppose to be galloping full speed to their destination, that is a check box right? I will undo this in the horse and rider tabs in the CS and see if that solve that.

But I am also having other REALLY strange issues that may be normal because in 5 years (er ....more than that 8 ...11 years? Wow it has been a long time...) of moding Oblivion I have never until now done ANYTHING with horses in this game.

Issues:

Rider often seems to lose their horse if I am not in the same cell. I see them ruining up the road instead of riding their horse. Back tracking I see no dead horse, I see NO horse at all as if it did not enable with the parent rider.

Stops often near dead bodies

Will not stay on the road, often deviates into short cuts through the hills instead of following the blue grid path.

I have to solve these issues or my players may mis their ONE chance to ambush the rider in my mod.

I suppose I will need to set up a series of marker along the road and have AI packages to steer them from one to the other, and use a complicated script to make them enable near the closest marker that is not in the players LOS.

:banghead: do I really need to do this just to get the rider to ride on ONE stinking road to their destination ON their horse?

Well that would explain everything then. I wonder why it only affected horses though. Usually the Abomb thing messes up fires, flames, those firefly things, and a few other things that would have given it away. The irony is that my usual testing guy has the most time under OSR out of all my characters. I guess I spend too much time modding this game



That's the corpse check flag on the horses. The UOP fixes that.



I see that on occasion too, but they're usually legion patrols who dismounted at some point to chase something into the woods. More often than not though, I come upon them partway through their route and they're mounting the horse in order to continue on to their destination. I don't know of anything that fixes this particular issue.



Almost certainly the road record issue. Blue path nodes are meaningless over long distances. If an NPC is pathing to anywhere that would require you to load the cell into memory, it uses the underlying ROAD record to do so instead. The vanilla record is terrible and often leads to NPCs wandering well off the roads, and in Skingrad they'll even go so far as to leap from the castle bridge. The UOP also fixes this issue as of 3.2.0, with further refinement of the record in the UOP Supplementals.

what is UOP ? will this UOP thing fix it in my mod or will this need to be used by all my mod players as a prerequisite to playing my mod?

Also, I checked the box on both the horse and the rider to not check corpse. But they still stop galloping, turn toward the dead body and ride over them then continue on at full gallop.

To check this I disabled the dead body, and sure enough the rider and horse did not stop and did ride on through at full gallop! :brokencomputer:

So there is some other mechanics. maybe the RESPONSIBILITY setting in the AI?

UOP = http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5296. Just about everyone will be using it. Anyone who isn't is routinely advised to do so because it fixes tons more than just horses stopping to check corpses. Everything from quest breaking bugs to rocks floating above the surface. The http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27710 are also highly encouraged for fixing stuff the UOP never got to.

In the case of your riders, you also need to uncheck that box from the NPC if you don't want them stopping to check bodies.