David Brasher

Are your dialog info conditions correct on your custom dialog? They need to point to the proper NPC, voicetype, faction, race, gender, whatever. Did you create your custom dialog properly? There is a common bug where custom dialog will not work in the .wav + .lip format. It has to be converted to .fuz format with unfuzer first.

What is with that torture chamber in Fort Dawnguard in the vanilla DLC? That shouldn't be there. It ought to be removed. I thought that the Dawnguard were supposed to be good guys. I guess they are just like the Silver Hand. maybe when I get done killing the vampires, I should go kill the Dawnguard to return justice and righteousness to the land.

The best practices way to install mods is one at a time with a couple of hours of play-testing before the next mod gets installed. If you install multiple mods all at one time, then trouble has a way of finding you. littleork has the likeliest answer.

Just Say "No" to Mods! Play the game for a few days without any mods to see what it is like. Then you will know what sort of mods you want. Some mods make the game worse rather than better. It would be a shame if you installed mods like that and suffered with the game forever after without knowing how good the game can be without those mods installed.

I like standalone items. If I were building a mod like this, I would make it so the new weapon with the new textures and the edited stats existed alongside the vanilla one and everything else. I am not sure if I understand the situation completely. Am I correct in thinking that this is a vanilla Skyrim weapon being edited by unmastered patches? (Save for Skyrim.esm.) The stats are not much of an issue. You can just copy the stats from your edited weapon to the one with the new texture. I think you should do it this way: Skyrim.esm Mod With Many Weapon Edits.esp Mod With One Unique Weapon with New Meshes and Textures and Cloned Stats.esp If you put your one-weapon mod before your many weapon mod in your load order, it will be totally overridden and you won't even know it is there. So you don't want to do that.

Skyrim does not currently have good mod merging software like Oblivion has. You are pretty much stuck with labor intensive manual merging in the CK. Here is the page on the wiki: Mod Merging. What is the nature of your mod? Different kinds of mods are easier or harder to merge. Like if you were building an armor mod, it would be really easy to merge your two pieces of the mod. If you were building a dungeon mod, it would be harder. If you were building a quest mod, it might really stink trying to merge the two pieces.

Dawnguard is pretty glitchy. I wasn't actually able to play it until like my third or forth attempt. This was several unhappy days after buying the game. Usually if you buy a new game, you can just install it and start playing on the very first day.

People request this over and over. There are numerous threads about it. The Elders Scrolls games are hard-coded to be single player with only one playable character per savegame. It is such that it would probably be more effective to scrap Skyrim and build a new video game than it would be to try to make Skyrim do what you are thinking of. Some games like Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, or Knights of the Old Republic are designed to do something like what you describe, but those games are programmed in a totally different fashion. It is sort of like if you own bicycle but decide that you don't want a human powered vehicle, you want something to make toast instead. You are going to have one tough time turning your bicycle into an electric toaster.

Have you verified integrity on your game and on the CK? You may need to download data to repair corruption. Did you set your properties correctly before attempting to compile?

This statement is most certainly false. I have written a number of repeating quests for Oblivion without ever using the equivalent to the stop() command, and I have written one repeating quest for Skyrim which does not use it. It may be that the format or recipe you are using to write your quest does indeed require it, but there are other formats or recipes in existence and which can be created. So if you are getting any custom quest dialog at all, then it is not the bad alias thing. If you can't get your quest to start, then try "Start Game Enabled." If you don't want to do that, then build in some more redundancies like writing one or two quests which run scripts to start your quest. Depending on how things are set up, maybe a trigger box would be a good thing to use to start your quest. You might consider having two quests with dialog. The dialog in one would always be available, and the dialog in the other would only be available after the quest started. The first quest would have result scripts on dialog or on stages to start the second. Triple check your conditions on your dialog infos. Make sure the first dialog entry is in the top level of a branch. Make sure your quest stages are right. make sure your scripts are attached. Check the properties on your scripts. Perform some experiments which drastically simplify your scripts. For example, if you have a script that has conditions, try disabling all the conditions so that there is nothing to stop the script from running. If it still won't run, then this tells you that something major is wrong with your code, triggers, host, design parameters, or something else.

If you have a missing master, the game will act this way. Have you properly installed the mod according to its instructions and installed any and all files that it depends on?

Regent == a particular sort of ruler Reagent == an alchemical substance

This is part of the fun of the game. It will be so much sweeter this way when you finally find a good spear. It might even change the way you play the game and make it so you go out hunting bandits just for the sake of finding one whose spear you can take.

One of the toughest parts of Skyrim is Papyrus and aliases and radiant AI. So if I were you, I would design the repeating quest so that it does not use a single alias and does not use the radiant AI system. Your product would likely not come out as nicely as the repeating quests in vanilla Skyrim, and would require more repetitive work, but it would be production work and not research and development work/debugging - headbanging on wall - hating life kind of work. You should check your quest "Start Game Enabled" and redo your conditions accordingly. What you do is make it so nothing ever happens in your quest until you talk to the quest-giver and accept the quest. I am not sure how your aliases are, but if you make one tiny error on one alias, then you have broken your whole quest and none of your dialog will ever display. I would not advise the use of stop() for a repeating quest. It seems to me that the command stops the computer from processing the subject evermore. Not sure how the Dark brotherhood quest you speak of got around this. If you don't know either, then you are not safe using this command. It might be wise to not use quest stages. You could use variables instead. Quest stages go up and never down. This makes them pretty poor for repeated things. It is like a one-way street. But variables can go up and down as much as you want them to.

This is the same thing the game does when you have a missing master. Have you added or removed any mods lately? Have you maybe even unintentionally clicked on something and made an accidental change to your load order? One type of missing master is when the mod is there, but it is positioned after the mod that refers to it rather than before. Another type that could occur by accident is a missing master that is present, but deactivated. An arcane type of missing master is when the master list load order of one of your mods uses a different load order for masters than you are using. This one does not usually cause Skyrim to fail to start, but it most certainly can.

If the mod uses Dawnguard crossbows, it would be considered piracy to use them in a mod unless the mod is such that the user cannot make it work unless Dawnguard is installed and activated. So Dawnguard crossbows can only be used in mods that require Dawnguard. Now if a modeler/3D animator were to build a custom crossbow, it could used anyplace the author allowed. But building a crossbow is so hard that it has seldom ever been done for Oblivion or Skyrim.

The leading cause of custom dialog not being available is an incorrectly set alias. It will break and disable the entire quest. Bad aliases often results from building quest marker flags wrong on even the simplest of quests. I assume that you already have your quest set to "Start Game Enabled" and do not have any quest conditions that are not met? I assume that you do not have any conditions on the first dialog infos that cannot be met, and that the GetIsID or whatever you are using points to the correct actor(s)? I assume that you have a fast and powerful computer. The slightest bit of lag is enough to prevent custom dialog from being available on a random basis.

And not only does the navmesh of the new room have to be finalized, but the navmesh of the cell the load door teleports to has to be finalized.

The simple answer is don't use custom body mods. That is not the answer you are looking for. There are so many body mods, and each one of them is likely to have this problem and require a fix specific to that mod. The underlying cause of this type of problem is that the dark face bug occurs when the facegen data for an actor is not present in the right directories or was never even created to begin with. I know more about this issue with NPCs than I do with the player character. If you could examine your body mod and others, and the base game, you could figure out how facegen data is handled for player characters, then you could generate facegen data for the race you are having issues with. This gets one more layer of complication because of vampirism. There are two versions of most races. Vampire and not. You are having trouble with the facegen data for the vampire version of the race with your custom body mod. If you could create those meshes and textures using the CK and place them in the proper directories, the issue might be solved.

It took me more than three attempts to finally get Dawnguard working. It is not a reliable piece of software. It is not for the casual gamer but for the modder who likes to tinker and solve problems. On my third attempt to get Dawnguard working, Durak asked me to go the fort. When I got there, Durak and everyone attacked me and the quest was broken because the quest-giver would not stop attacking me long enough to give me the quest. On my machine, I was able to fix this by deactivating Dawnguard and making a clean save and starting the quest over again.

For certain manual mod merging operations, it is useful to have all the FormIDs in a mod renumbered to prevent things like overwriting and form bashing errors. Is there a tool to perform this function for Skyrim mods yet?

If the only thing that motivates you to mod is participating in a competition, maybe you should organize a competition. I am sure that lots of people would volunteer to be judges for it.

Are you like a 3-D animator or something who can create new animations? Part of your mod idea would require that, and it is a pretty rare skill among Skyrim modders. You might want to revise that part of your mod idea. Perhaps you could take the mod Mercy and edit it into the mod you describe.

My impression is that the kind and generous folks at Bethesda packaged and sold Dawnguard to us such that the scripts cannot be viewed and edited. It is not set up the way that Skyrim was. There has been talk of using special software to hack into the compiled scripts in order to rebuild the source scripts so that Dawnguard scripting can be analyzed and edited.

In many cases, you can only use one overhaul mod. An overhaul mod is designed to make very extensive changes, and if you use more than one, you will overwrite most of the things you wanted to change, but not all of them, and the game world will be rather odd and erratic. It looks as if you have a great many mods all editing the leveled lists. Here are some of them: Skyrim Scaling Stopper.esp Cloaks.esp JSwordsDistributionBalancePlugin.esp Omegared99-WeaponSets.esp WVExpansion.esp hothtrooper44_ArmorCompilation.esp Morrowloot.esp SkyTEST-RealisticAnimals&Predators.esp ImmersiveArmorsNPCsNoHelmets.esp You did not read and follow the installation instructions of Skyrim Scaling Stopper in the readme file at all. That mod requires a very specific load order depending on which files you use with it. You have Skyrim Scaling Stopper so early in your load order that it is doubtful whether or not it is doing anything that can be noticed in your game. Here is one of the example load orders in the documentation for Skyrim Scaling Stopper: Many of the files you use are things that can be used with Skyrim Scaling Stopper if the instructions are followed. Many of the things are not compatible though, and would need to be removed or placed early in the load order where they would be overwritten. Alternately, if you knew exactly what a mod was editing and the change was localized and highly directed, then you might be able to load it after Skyrim Scaling Stopper to overwrite one particular part of that overhaul.