I have a problem with the great halls of the city castles... I want them to be non-public. In vanilla Oblivion, they're tagged as Public Areas, which means that you can be there as long as you want, even during the night. I thought it would be more realistic if you had to leave as soon as the night guards start with their duty. It would also be more balanced, because at night there is nobody there except the guards, and they stand around somewhere near the entrance, so that you can easily steal anything in the great hall without getting caught. Castles are supposed to be more difficult to break into and steal from...

Anyway, what I did was to uncheck the "Public Area" tag. Then I changed the AI package of the guards that are there during the day so that they unlock the doors while on duty (the night guards already have a package that locks the doors). Since they belong to the Castle faction and the cell belongs to that faction, I thought this would mean that the castle would be accessible during the day - just like a merchant's shop.
That didn't work out, however. Entering the great hall is now always considered trespassing.

What did I miss? As far as I know, none of the other NPCs inside the castle have any packages that make them lock the doors when they're in the great hall, so I'm a little bit puzzled.

Does the cell have an Owner NPC? Or a Owner Faction?

;)

The main entrance door is also owned by the castle faction.

Edit: Strangely, the guards also don't seem to lock any door even if I tell them too. It seems like none of the lock/unlock flags are even working here.

Ah I missed that.

I don't know why they won't lock the door but that may very well be the issue here.

Ok basic silly question. If you want them public in the day and private at night, wouldn't a quest script with tests for time of day and SetCellOwnership calls work?

Okay yeah, I guess I do have a brute force failsafe
But usually, these things are handled by the game pretty nicely. All I want is the great hall of a castle to behave like the ground floor of a usual Imperial City residence. Certain people are there - it's opened. Certain people aren't there - it's locked.

Okay, I'll bump this thread one time, if nobody has a solution, I'll just drop the idea.

In that case, I'll just assume it must be some limitation that when too many people are entering and leaving an area, the "cell isn't private if doors aren't locked" thing doesn't work. Or something.