Everyone knows that the best way to fight dirty with warrior class NPCs is to climb the nearest rock and make swiss cheese out of them with arrows/ singe their eyebrows with fireballs.

I hereby make a humble request to the great modders of this forum - please find a way to make these bad guys be able to climb some rocks and follow us. Even the animals can do it - I know that wild boars will climb rocks and hunt you down, so NPCs should also be able to do this...

P.S. - If this has already been done, please forgive my ignorance and point me in the right direction as well...

Probably possible, but I guess we'll find out. I vote yes

Duke Patrick has added the ability for NPCs to climb steep slopes to his Combat Archery mod.

Skycaptain has added jumping over obstacles and onto rocks to Deadly Reflex 6 (unreleased at the moment) and made the jumping test module available for download in one of the recent Deadly Reflex 6 threads.

That's great, I didn't even think it possible.
But than again...those are the Duke and the Captain...

Would be great to have a stand-alone mod which featured this though, for those not making use of DR or DPCA

i could see how it would work, make a jump animation that play on them if they are in combat, using a movement animation and are staying in the same play. the jumping animation would be made for them to jump up and forwards hopefully onto of whatever is blocking them.

Well, it does play a little funky sometimes apparently, and it has to make very careful use of "setallreachable" which is a dangerous command.

The test module that Skycaptain posted was a stand-alone, though. It didn't require any version of Deadly Reflex installed to work, I think, but the final product will likely be more refined.

Would it be possible for them to avoid hazards in this way?
As long as we won't get Counterstrike like gatherings of frantically hopping Npc's...

It´s a bit problematic, for a couple of reasons. I haven´t touched that esp since it was out for testing, but I guess it worked ok. In any case the problems are:


1. Detecting WHEN to jump. Any simple check for player´s z-cordinate VS NPC´s z-cordinate will just cause unwanted jumping in many situations.

So mostly you would want them to jump when they are running against an object. It´s just that they wont do that most of the time unless "setallreachable" is set.


2. This is a bit fuzzy, but here´s how I remember it: the animations cannot carry the actor to a position that´s not visible to them. In other words, using only an animation played manually, an NPC jumping over a ledge will reset to a position before the ledge. A rule of thumb would be that the NPC needs line of sigh to the landing position.

This is not the REAL reason of course, but helps to understand the problem. Something about how Oblivion safe guards their position in the world. So without "setpos" (which in turn allows jumping through ceilings) it wont work well.

So I understand that it is possible for them to jump with your module, but it will not be a refined jump and will not happen always - is that right skycaptain?

I have tried Skycaptain's test NPCs jump mod, and it works pretty well. The problem is, sometimes when enemies get close to you, they will jump. So to prevent this, the NPC must take longer to jump over obstacles.

Cool - is there a link that I can download and install skycaptain's test NPCs jump mod from?

err. necro bump? Is there a link that I can download and install skycaptain's test NPCs jump mod from?

Sorry, I assumed someone else would have it.

This link appears to still be active: http://www.4shared.com/file/141230766/51bd7ef0/NPCJumpBeta4.html

No idea how pleased SkyCaptain is with this version, though.