Anybody have any tips/suggestions for dealing with path nodes? I'm creating a fairly large world space and the automatic path node generation is somewhat less than ideal. I find I'm spending a lot of time correcting bad auto-pathing...to the point of thinking I should just do it all by hand!

The generator seems to have a lot of difficulty pathing around large rocks and trees and in order to create realistic paths I have to delete many generated 'orphans', push and pull the ones I don't delete and add many additional ones to 'glue' isolated grids together. I'm not talking about paths on roads and around buildings, I'm already doing those by hand, just the nodes in the wilderness.

Is there a performance drain for having too many path nodes? Will the AI spend a lot more time making decisions about where to go if a node has a lot of connections? In other words, should I try to keep it sparse and just sketch out the most likely paths or can I get detailed and put in a lot of interesting side paths?

I know that there is a limit of path nodes per exterior cell, IIRC it is 255. I think it is called inter-grid connections, so it may not be path nodes but connection lines between nodes. At least you will get an error if you have more connections than that. I'm also pretty sure that the more nodes you have, the higher the performance drain since actors have to choose the best path between all the possible ones.

I don't think you need an incredibly detailed path grid. In close combat actors will ignore path nodes anyway and if not in combat I don't see a problem if they use a path that is not 100% perfect.

You shouldn't be too concerned about how close things wander to rocks, trees, and such unless you specifically want things to wander between them. If this isn't somewhere near a town or other place where you're going to be having many actors move through, you're usually best just leaving it to the automatic generation and just touching up the really bad spots later. Keep in mind however that if using a .esm, once the pathgrid for a cell is part of the .esm, it cannot be easily edited due to how the resulting .esp tends to duplicate nodes (causing the "inter-grid connections" error), and therefore would need to remove the pathgrid from all those cells being worked on, save, then generate from scratch, hoping that any bordering cells are still far enough below the limit (since the edges are connected to eachother). If it's all an .esp, this is a non-issue.

Thanks to both for the feedback.

I've started pruning away some of the excess nodes (I think I got a little carried away--I should know better than to work on stuff like this when I'm tired) and have just been touching up the generated nodes as needed.

The reason why I've been concerned about wilderness path nodes is because hunting (and being hunted) in the wilderness is a big part of the mod, so I want actors to move through the wilderness intelligently and come out in surprising places, moving between rocks and such where the player won't necessarily see them.

Is there a limit to how far apart nodes can be placed? I recall reading about a limit somewhere but I can't remember where. I've been using the generated nodes as a guide, but I assume there is some leeway.

@Vagrant0: Thanks for the tip about modifying path nodes in an .esm. I'm still doing everything as a plugin atm, but I foresee a master in the mod's future. I'll have to keep that in mind.