This is a short and sweet guide as to basically what I did to the vanilla collision, but using Salty Slaughterfish (SSE Version) as a new start to show that this can be done with ANY sea life mod that has a similar issue. Salty Slaughterfish SSE can be downloaded here: Salty Slaughterfish SSE
If you have never used NifScope, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the tool on some basic level with it before making ANY modifications to files and when you do make changes, DO NOT JUST SAVE OVER THE ORIGINAL. Back up the original by copying it to a safe directory and then do whatever you want. If you screw something up, you can copy-paste the original back into your working directory and overwrite the faulty one. It's just a good, safe practice.
So, once you have the skeleton model open in NifScope and have the collision visible, you can click on the little "capsule" collisions by clicking somewhere on it where the mesh intersects with itself. Just click around on it until you light up the right one, and make the highlighted changes:
Next, you will obviously need to move back one collision mesh and make the following alterations to its settings:
Lastly, this is a superfluous change, but I just had to alter the diameter of the head collision to better wrap the fish's head. Whatever you do, do NOT make the capsule here longer or you will make it harder for the slaughterfish to attack:
And that is really it! The collision does not seem to have the same effect with this skeleton, but with the back raised so high, it does make the Slaughterfish like to linger further under the water when not in direct combat, striking from below like an ambush predator!!! That said, the larger fish will still have their dorsal fin sticking out of the water, but the remainder of their gills and their mouth.nostrils stay under, so it is still more immersive than the standard Salty Slaughterfish alone. This is also completely compatible with "Gar-ish Slaughterfish" for slimmer slaughterfish models and it is pretty amazing to see all 3 things merged together, even with the minor shortcomings.
A final note, the level that the water can go down to seems to be roughly at a location around 20% up from the center to the top of the tallest (dorsal) collision mesh. Tweaking this and the protrusion from the bottom to find a shape that "looks nice" will help push the fish down, but the protrusion from the bottom keeps them from being pushed right through the ground when spawning in more shallow water, so bear that in mind if you want to tweak this more.
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