I've finally figured out what was causing some of the most hard-to-track errors I've come across while modding for Morrowind. It was empty meshes.

Morrowind does not seem to be able to handle .nif files with no objects in them correctly. I've been using such meshes on occasion, and they have the habit of producing some nasty errors simply because they do not have correct position values in the game engine.

As an example, I used to assign empty meshes to activators which I would place in the game world from a script and have them cast a spell on the player or an NPC. This always produced the following error:


Another common problem was when I tried to return or alter the position of an object with an empty mesh assigned to it, it would sometimes crash the game.

The same problems occur with meshes that only have a single vertex in them. In my experience, you need at least one polygon in a mesh to avoid similar issues.

So what's the solution? Use a mesh that has one simple object in it which is hidden and has no collision. You can alter those flags easily in NifSkope.

Uhm, you script pretty well si I'm guessing you're modding for some time... so why exactly were you using empty meshes when there are already markers in the game that could be used for that? Like those red ones used for sound?

I don't know, I've never used those. Do I have a doh moment coming up?

Edit: Well, doh indeed. I guess I've been using my own empty meshes because I figured they couldn't cause any problems. And how wrong I was. Well, thanks for the heads up Chaka. Funny (or sad) thing is I've been using that mesh since 2002.

Don't worry. I too mod since 2002 and I learned few of the most beginner's stuff only recently.