Items/enemies "levitating" after moving geometry

[Shalval]

I am not sure I could find the proper keywords to verify if this was already discussed, but I suspect it has been, since I have encountered this on separate occasions today (and I am suspecting I have encountered this phenomenon back in classic, though it has been years):



This guy on the left is levitating after I moved the bridge part using a lever. The poor lad fell to his "death" after I shot two arrows at him.

Earlier I had the same situation with a loot pile that was on the moving part, though of course I could not make that one drop

Things not moving together with the geometry might be too much of an edge case to justify grappling with the necessary checks, and it is not a big deal (i.e. there is no risk for a quest object to stand there) so I guess this thread is just for reference?

[Interkarma]

I don't believe enemies have support for moving platforms yet. For the "levitating", their movement loop (including gravity) is disabled for performance reasons until player wakes them up somehow. You look quite close there, so maybe he just hasn't detected you, or you're just outside of the awareness radius. Shooting him with some arrows sounds like it did the trick through. Agree they could benefit from moving platform support and maybe decouple gravity from general movement loop.

Loot piles will move with platforms if the game data links them together in action records. They aren't always linked though, so it's really inconsistent. And player-dropped loot piles aren't linked to anything, they just spawn on top of whatever you're standing on. This is a harder one to solve as loot piles aren't physical objects, and possibly not worth simulating for performance reasons just to solve this edge case.

[Shalval]

Thanks for the explanations! I think my spellsword has accidentally turned very adept at being stealthy over the course of all this dungeon crawling, so I imagine it allowed me to see this little quirk.

For the loot pile, I do not remember if they are fixed, but if that's the case, the same bridge structure in Castle Wayrest's dungeon is where I saw that happen.

And player-dropped loot piles aren't linked to anything, they just spawn on top of whatever you're standing on. This is a harder one to solve as loot piles aren't physical objects, and possibly not worth simulating for performance reasons just to solve this edge case.

And here I thought I was pointing at real edge cases . Yeah I think a player would have to go out of their way to have this happen AND somehow be unable to reach their loot pile again, so it's safe to ignore to my limited understanding.