What is M'aiq's AI?

[MasterworkStone]

I believe he walks around skyrim randomly, some people believes he's a random encounter.

 

The encounter thing doesn't make sense to me, because then it'd be more likely to see him.

I can go the entire game without seeing him, which leads me to believe he's walking around skyrim at random, and I'm just not in the same location as him.

 

I know it's possible for an NPC to do this, I have a custom follower who does this, he spawns at the abandoned alchemist's shack and walks around because if I find him in one save I can teleport to him in skyrim in another and he's just walking around.

I can coc to M'aiq's holding cell and not find him there, however on a fresh character he's there

 

I want to know if M'aiq just wanders around skyrim or if he's just a random encounter.

[Reek]

He just appears. Never travels.

[Emberheart]

Mai'q is a random encounter.

 

You do not seem to understand the coding, or atleast the handling of random encounters does not make sense to you. That makes it very hard to explain how his appearing in front of you behaves, if you look at how this game handles encounters (or for that matter how encounters work) all wrong. Here's an attempt to clear it up though. :-)

 

I do a lot of Skyrim editing, I also script a bit, he does appear among the random encounters. The fact you did not run into him depends on:

 

• Other encounter priority - some encounters can take priority, such as when you get level 20 and a specific quest encounter is triggered, or civil war encounters if the civil war is unresolved.
• Local encounter priority - some areas have exclusive NPC encounters, native to that area, which take priority over random spawns.
• Dragon timer encounter - when enough time passes, you get a dragon instead of anything else. Flee the dragon and you get a dragon again. These stand alone from dragon town encounters, meaning it may occur that you fight up to 4 dragons at once, one from a town attack, one from an encounter, one from a nearby word wall which is drawn to help the other dragons by faction allignment, one from a dragon mount that has been recently revived.
• Random number generator - it rolls the proverbal dice to see what you get. Other things spawn for you too, like Thalmor, the companions taking on wild animals, bandits, and so on.
• Bugged - Earlier versions of Skyrim were full of bugs. Savegames originating from these versions may inexplicably have Mai'q or another NPC bugged so that he cannot respawn. Unless you know how to mess with script variables, etc, it may be impossible to restore him for an encounter.

He is a random encounter. The best way to see this for yourself is to get the Creation Kit (back-up your Skyrim folder prior to getting that) and to just play around with all the coding, scripting and encounter settings. It'll show how spawns, why he sometimes doesn't spawn and where he may spawn. :-) M'aiq's holding cell is just there for the start of the game. Bethesda is quite lazy and tends to throw NPC's into all kinds of other waiting cells, if not outright despawning him for a while.

 

Random branch node = WERoadQuest (the quest branch for random road encounters) > Random quest node = WERoadQuestNode (the node used for random available quests) > Quest = WE35 (the code for Mai'q's quest found amongst many other random road encounter quests).

Trigger > GetEventData GetIsID, Keyword, Keyword: 'WERoadStart' == 1.0000 | Run on Subject. (Begin quest when something with the keyword WERoadStart is encountered).

 

WERoadStart is a keyword used by many invisible checkpoints/waypoints spread across Skyrim. If you step near or into such a point, a road trigger is started. A good way to play with this, is to go to Mor Khazgur, head out of the gate, then follow the road out of the gate and turn left when it forks. You'll see a ridge on your right and a darker spot on the road. Inside this spot a WERoadStart waypoint is coincidentally placed. Save your game before walking over the spot, then load it. You can see how random encounters appear here and how sometimes an encounter is excluded because other encounters have taken priority.

[winny257]

you have Morrowind or Oblivion played? also because was "M'aiq the Liar" always been there there. even in these games he came random.

if he would not more coming, then I would be very disappointed, I like him very.

 

Morrowind

http://images.uesp.net/thumb/3/3a/MW-npc-M%27Aiq_the_Liar.jpg/600px-MW-npc-M%27Aiq_the_Liar.jpg

 

Oblivion

http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130512220855/elderscrolls/images/0/03/M'aiq_the_Liar_Oblivion.png

 

Skyrim

http://media.ign.com/games/image/article/121/1212782/M'aiq_the_Liar1_1321553954.jpg