Animals Swim (Sort of) (by JaySerpa)

[TechAngel85]

Discussion topic:
Animals Swim (Sort of) by JaySerpa
Wiki Link

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This has always bothered me. Glad to see it's bothered someone else!

Evaluated for 2.2.0 and determined this needs a bit of QA before it's ready for Step

[CorneliusC]

Essential! Instant install ... Thank you.

Edited November 20, 2022 by CorneliusC

[Kattmandu]

Meeko, the dog follower, was following me through some water and I was just thinking, why is Meeko walking on the bottom instead of swimming?  LOL

[z929669]

A worthy consideration. Please install into 09-Fixes and let us know if issues. I will do the same.

[TadasTalalas]

For me this mod acting weird, some animals run on the bottom, some like running on the surface, some properly swimming.

[CorneliusC]

2 hours ago, tadastalalas said:

For me this mod acting weird, some animals run on the bottom, some like running on the surface, some properly swimming.

Like tadastalalas i just walked to Lake Inalta and chased several deer and elk into the lake. For the most part this mod works (Sort of), i had the same weirdness tadastalalas described, the more you watch the animal behaviour, the more akward it gets. Elk/Deer still walk or run (or trying to) while being held afloat by the spell, sometimes the spell fails and they sink to the bottom, to be lifted up again after a second or two, sometimes there are still hooves sounds to be heard while the animal is in the water ...

The esp itself, which delivers the floating spell, is without conflict and the effect, while akward at times, might still be preferable to vanilla ...

 

[Kattmandu]

I'm having the same hit or miss functionality of this mod as tadastalalas and CorneliusC.  It's better than vanilla but far from perfect.

 

Edited December 4, 2022 by Kattmandu

[ButchDiavolo]

To add to the choir... I was in Ivarstead looking for Rayna's remains and I spotted several rabbits grazing on the bottom of the river nearby. I have seen the larger animals swim though, but I didn't really pay much attention to it to see if they sank or not.

[Eliian]

This mod is not quite there for me. The hit or miss aspect bothers me too much. I would rather have all animals be derpy swimmers lol. 

[TechAngel85]

I'm curious if the mod would work more consistently if constructed, traditionally, without the use of SPID.

[z929669]

9 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

I'm curious if the mod would work more consistently if constructed, traditionally, without the use of SPID.

There's an idea.

I like th direction of the mod, but if it increases odd behavior that would not otherwise happen (rabbits grazing on the lake bottom?!?), then it needs some tweaks.

[Mousetick]

15 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

I'm curious if the mod would work more consistently if constructed, traditionally, without the use of SPID.

Not really. The "swim" behavior is provided by a spell attached to each animal. SPID is used to distribute the spell to all animal NPCs in the game (vanilla or modded), that's all it does.

What would be some of the "traditional" alternatives to SPID?

• Using a cloak spell on the player to distribute the spell to animals within a certain radius. Very bad approach*.
• Making a giant patch plugin that overwrites every single vanilla animal NPC. Recipe for conflicts and compatibility issues. Would not work on modded animals without more patches.
• Putting the list of animal NPCs in a FormList in a plugin and running a Papyrus script at game start to distribute the spell to each element in the list. Again would not work on mod-added animals.
• Running a dynamic patcher (xEdit script, Synthesis, ...) on the load order to generate a plugin that adds the spell to each animal NPC. Too many moving parts. Out of reach of most users.

The issues with this mod lie in the "swim" behavior, by that point SPID has done its job long ago and is not used anymore.

Think about how Vokrii Perks for NPCs, or Odin Spells for NPCs work. This is no different.

(*) Examples: Footprints, Fizzle, XPMSSE, ...

[CorneliusC]

23 hours ago, Eliian said:

This mod is not quite there for me. The hit or miss aspect bothers me too much. I would rather have all animals be derpy swimmers lol. 

I am leaning towards this argument. Too much akwardness (and this is at times more akward than vanilla) equals too much attention. Will be de-installing this later ...

Edited December 5, 2022 by CorneliusC

[z929669]

1 hour ago, Mousetick said:

Not really. The "swim" behavior is provided by a spell attached to each animal. SPID is used to distribute the spell to all animal NPCs in the game (vanilla or modded), that's all it does.

What would be some of the "traditional" alternatives to SPID?

• Using a cloak spell on the player to distribute the spell to animals within a certain radius. Very bad approach*.
• Making a giant patch plugin that overwrites every single vanilla animal NPC. Recipe for conflicts and compatibility issues. Would not work on modded animals without more patches.
• Putting the list of animal NPCs in a FormList in a plugin and running a Papyrus script at game start to distribute the spell to each element in the list. Again would not work on mod-added animals.
• Running a dynamic patcher (xEdit script, Synthesis, ...) on the load order to generate a plugin that adds the spell to each animal NPC. Too many moving parts. Out of reach of most users.

The issues with this mod lie in the "swim" behavior, by that point SPID has done its job long ago and is not used anymore.

Think about how Vokrii Perks for NPCs, or Odin Spells for NPCs work. This is no different.

(*) Examples: Footprints, Fizzle, XPMSSE, ...

Nice, comprehensive analysis, as usual. Thanks for taking the time.

[TechAngel85]

8 hours ago, Mousetick said:

Not really. The "swim" behavior is provided by a spell attached to each animal. SPID is used to distribute the spell to all animal NPCs in the game (vanilla or modded), that's all it does.

What would be some of the "traditional" alternatives to SPID?

• Making a giant patch plugin that overwrites every single vanilla animal NPC. Recipe for conflicts and compatibility issues. Would not work on modded animals without more patches.

This one is the traditional approach. Apply it to the actor reference, itself, via plugin. Yeah, there is compatibility issues, but those same issues exist with SPID. The only reason they aren't prevalent is because it's not as widely used...yet. You could also set up it up apply via script with keyword that could be applied to modded animals.

Anywho, the whole point is not to argue the approach to just to test how well SPID is working (basically injection) vs the game's programmed way of grabbing it from a plugin and applying it. Basically, I'm curious as to the limits of SPID and if it can be over used to the point of it just failing or missing stuff. I don't just trust things are going to work as expected when they are doing something unexpected (like injecting records at runtime).