Invisible yet Clickable Creatures

[Wids]

So by now, we've all seen that Bioware bug where for some reason, a creature doesn't render.  So you have a creature name running around without a model to click on, so you can't attack it, cast spells at it, pick its pockets, whatever.  But the creature can attack you just fine and well.  So all you can do is move around like a breakdancing epileptic with ADD and hope that your character somehow decides to start counterattacking the invisible beastie...that or you hide behind a summon.  Summons can attack those randomly non-rendered critters without any problem, since they don't need to click on anything.

But this bug is not that bug.

In this case, the creature isn't rendering or appearing, yet it is clickable.  Like this moose.  I clicked on its unseen body, and Shetani sneaked up and started chopping at it.  So the creature's rendering, yet I may not have the resources on my end to view what is being rendered.

Would I have to re-download and re-install something in order to see the moose (and a few other creatures with the same problem), and if so, what?  Or might this be more along the lines of a graphics card issue, a Windows 10 issue or something else?

Thank you.

[justicedragon]

I know there's an occasional bug with this, where like 1/200 creatures will just spawn in invisible; my question though: Deer, Rabbits, etc "Flee" when they spot players and once they get a certain distance away or to the edge of the area they disappear. Since this is a moose, could that be the case? That it was fleeing and got caught in combat as it was "poofing" away?

[Wids]

Aug 24, 2017 1:34:41 GMT -5 justicedragon said:

I know there's an occasional bug with this, where like 1/200 creatures will just spawn in invisible; my question though: Deer, Rabbits, etc "Flee" when they spot players and once they get a certain distance away or to the edge of the area they disappear. Since this is a moose, could that be the case? That it was fleeing and got caught in combat as it was "poofing" away?

No, because I never saw the moose's appearance to begin with.  The moose also didn't see Ashanti until she started attacking it, so it never had a chance to flee.  And the moose was invisible (but still clickable) all the while.

The same thing happened with a moose which appeared around Minock's Hole, only Ashanti just started pelting the invisible moose with arrows from long range.  The moose charged her.  So like bears and bison, it seems that moose would rather attack than flee into the bushes.

(It also seems that cooking moose meat results in venison stew.  But moose aren't deer.  Is that right?    )

[Wids]

The saga of the elusive Canadian moose continues!  

Huh.  It turns out that moose meat is indeed called venison!  Who knew?  

[kalbaern]

Sept 20, 2017 7:12:29 GMT -5 Wids said:

Huh.  It turns out that moose meat is indeed called venison!  Who knew?  

I did?

They are a member of the same family as deer.

In most European Countries they are called "Elk" and not "Moose".

Early settlers in the Eastern US encountered what we call Elk here and never having seen either animal before, attributed the name "Elk" based on having vaguely heard of some type of large antlered and tasty creature called an Elk in Nordic and Germanic countries. The word "moose" hails from several forms of the word "mos" used by Northeastern Native American tribes.

While moose are normally docile and secretive creatures, when cornered, they often become aggressive. World Wide, the moose is second only to the hippo in the numbers of persons injured each year from contact with them.

[Wids]

Well, I knew that moose are cousins of deer. But I kind of figured that there would be another name for their meat, for some reason. But then, as I recall from my years in Montana, elk meat is called venison too. So moose venison makes sense.

It's kind of like how bears are said to be related to pigs (even though they're really not), so bear meat is sometimes called "pork" just like pig meat is. Bears are cousins to seals, though. What is seal meat called?  

As for moose injuring or killing people, how many of those incidents are caused by accidental road collisions?  A moose's bulk is at just the right height to smash straight through a compact's windshield on impact, which is often what happens.  Eek.  

[Wids]

Also, as I just discovered, it gets worse when a player's Druid uses Wild Shape to transform into a moose:

1)  The druid-cum-moose becomes invisible.
2)  The player can't highlight or click on the druid-moose (so using the radial menu to cancel the Wild Shape becomes impossible; you have to use the Quickslots.  You did set up Quickslots for your five Wild Shape forms, right?).
3)  The camera doesn't follow the druid when the druid-moose moves.  So it's easy to wander off-camera and get lost.
4)  Cancelling the Wild Shape results in a crash to the desktop (or at least it does for me).  


So Druids?  You might want to avoid shapeshifting into moose until Uncle Kalbaern says that it's okay.  Thank you.  

[Wids]

Well, I made the carrion crawlers visible simply by updating my NWN client to the latest version of CEP. 

The moose, however, are still invisible yet clickable.  And if Maralah shapeshifts to a moose, it still crashes my game client. 

[kalbaern]

Is this still an issue for you? Everyone else can see the moose in game.

If it's still an ongoing issue, try updating both (savfron_creature) and (savfron_top) haks from our hak list. Those are the only two that might affect you seeing moose.

[kalbaern]

OK ... I did some testing. Apparently it is CEP 2.65 that is the issue. It breaks more than a few things that are found in CEP 2.4 which is what we use here. So to see the moose, you'll need to do one of two things depending on where else you might play.

A) Keep two hak folders on your desktop. Then copy the contents over your existing haks in NWN depending where you play.

B) Copy your NWN folder to another partition, drive or just your desktop, then reinstall CEP 2.4 in one version, overwriting everything prompted for and use a separate shortcut to launch the game when playing here.





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I just played around in the toolset some. There are some tilesets that also get changed/broken from CEP 2.4 to CEP 2.65 or 2.6+. When we convert over to EE, these issues will go away as I am dropping the CEP as a requirement. We'll still use many CEP features, but I'll be cherry picking them and dropping into our own dedicated haks instead. This goes the same with stuff from Project Q. Both hak sets are too prone to inconsistencies as the projects get dropped, picked up by others, dropped again, picked up once more, etc... and backwards compatibility is too often broken.