simtam

Yes, Open Civil War and For the Stormcloak's are incompatible. Sorry I've added it to the incompatibility list in mod description just now. If you're looking for persuading Balgruuf to join the Stormcloaks, I'll point you to a Skyrim Classic mod https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/90233

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And where in Bruma are the best places to start, in your opinion? Is there a Bruma county map that you could pin them on? Or, better yet - what are some existing Alternate Start (extensions) which start in Bruma and you would like to see them updated with the whole carriage-to-Helgen shebang?

For the BGS_Logo.bik, there is "No bethesda intro" mod https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/20020/ which replaces Data\Video\BGS_Logo.bik with an empty file. Similarly, I have also replaced Data/music/special/mus_maintheme.xwm by something more appropriate for starting the game many times a day, which you will have to do to test your mod, should you decide to create an alternate start on your own. See for example https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/2101 If you want to create a mod for starting somewhere else, but don't want to make it dependent on LAL alternate start plugin, then I've got this for you https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/93619, see example Eldergleam S.M.O.K. start demonstrated there. On the other hand, an alternate start mod will have to include the character creation menu, and fix many a thing arising by skipping Helgen. Unless you are doing a total conversion mod set in entirely different world, that's a lot of things. Compared to that, making an extension custom start mod is much simpler. However if you really want to make an alternate start mod, there is more than one way to do it: (a) add to Skyrim.ini [General] section SStartingCell=... - supposedly it's equivalent to "coc ..." console command used at the game menu. Not sure if there is an equivalent of "cow ..., x,y" command, but your mod can rename any cell and make it something unique, if you want to start in "Wilderness" cell. (b) hijack the default game start flow, that is, start quest MQ101. Not outright delete it, but replace with something of your own. Note that a lot of stages of vanilla MQ101 quest, including the start-up stage 0, have multiple variants of the quest fragment, conditionally on the value of the global MQQuickStart, so pay attention to that. Most of alternate start mods do (b), of course - the (a) is used by https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/91030

It's a feature. It's used for example for some dragon dialogue during the dragon battles, you will see them in subtitles even if you are far away to hear it If your mod needs to convey something to player in subtitles, perhaps start it with a Debug.MessageBox("Please enable subtitles in the menu, otherwise this mod will not make much sense!") and hope for your audience forgiving this 'ruination of immersion'.

Legendary Main Quest Expansion covers all those dungeons. Not sure how the folks from the "Project Paarthurnax" are faring today. I myself will be releasing content slowly, and in chunks. The first chunk won't even go beyond "Act I", that is, becoming Dragonborn. And the highlight of it - an immersive investigation what happened in Helgen... So you see, there's lot of ideas to work on.

Interesting angle. And you say, Hjaalmarch? I'm currently fleshing out a small Stonehills quest, vaguely slavic. In a way. E.g. certain NPC is looking for a family member named "Kendrick", or "Kendrik", and you suggest it should be "Kendryk", do I get that right?

UPDATE 2019-12-30 Seems the Dragonborn's War is not worked on, guest comments from last two months are awaiting approval, and the site has a message "The mod you are trying to view has ceased development and consequently been archived." On the plus side, I'm going to tackle kicking asses both imperials and stormcloaks next year.

Yeah, Warzones is not a cut content mod, so it's entirely different idea as far as civil war mods are concerned. And Civil War Overhaul was removed without ever being ported to Skyrim SE, but where's a will, there's a way, and pretty much nobody wanted to work on a new mod in a saturated niche. Then again, civil war overlaps the main quest a little, and with the author of CWO leaving the scene, supporting a compatibility patch between an upcoming Main Quest mod and the "removed" CWO would be a murky area. So I've made my own replacement (Open Civil War)

There is also what I call the Arthmoor's Persistence Test, which is simpler to perform: "let's change the object position in Creation Kit and make a mod that would change this object position if started new game. Does installing this mod mid-playthrough changes this object position, or not?" because usually when an object is loaded and live in the game, mod changes are ignored. But there are various exceptions https://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/4250-skyrim-levels-of-persistence/ It's worth knowing, because it impacts how mod updates should be installed on active games - for example "it's recommended to make a save in some unrelated interior cell". Also, similar thing can happen with changes to forms that are not object references. For example, changes to quest alias definitions won't take any effect if the quest is already alive (important when modding quests that aren't "Run Once").

To be 100% sure, it would be best to have one case when the alias is filled and one case when it is not. Otherwise I can't rule out that the methodology is wrong for some reason. BTW, do you even look up "Persistent" flags for those object references in TES5Edit? Creation Kit automatically add those to various objects referenced directly from your mod. They end up in "Persistent cell", under a Worldspace or Interior Cell. As you can see, the base game has a lot of persistent objects, so there's no point in worrying about performance of a small number of additional persistent references. Anyway, if your quest aliases weren't working when set to a unique character, it's likely due to some other reason.

Consider the alias type "Find Matching Reference". By adding conditions you can narrow it down to filling a specific object reference. It won't find stuff that is not loaded in memory. It has a flag "In Loaded Area", and since everything in loaded area is loaded, you have to uncheck this flag and make sure you are far away enough so that the object you want to fill this alias with is not loaded if it's not persistent. That's how you can test if an object is persistent or not, and verify which interpretation of documentation is correct. There's a performance overhead with having things loaded in memory, and maybe NPCs behave differently if they are still loaded while in unloaded area? Not sure about the last one.

it must be in the quest alias tab in creation kit

Consider two suggestions (A) replicate the topic of General Tullius, so that he ask explicitly, depending on the value stored in SonsMinorHold "Dragonborn, which hold should we demand: Riften or Dawnstar" or "Dragonborn, which hold should we demand: Riften or Winterhold" (B) another suggestion is to duplicate the follow-up option that has "Alias.Cap=SonsMinorHold" and tweak it to "Alias.Cap=SonsMinorHold2", and add a fragment script that swaps the choice of first and second hold. Feel free to pursue (B). Combined with OCW it explodes in required changes, so I will attempt (A) for the time being (new lines for generals, if voice splicing will allow it, and a new lore book explaining the negotiations in terms of de iure/de facto claims system familiar from Crusaders Kings 2 - the elephant in the room is the first claim to Markarth/Riften, if that city already switched sides...). There are more quests to Season Unending than MQ302. I don't know their names by heart, but they both start with "MQ302", so you can find them in Creation Kit in the Object Window by selecting "Quests" and entering MQ302 in the search input field. One is to handle filling aliases, the other one is also interesting, developers testing quest form. Perhaps what you need is a user friendly wrapper for the latter?

Registered to Discord now - same name as username here.

If your use case does not require it, better stick to a simple and maintainable, natural approach. On the other hand, I have an alternate start mod extension framework without master dependencies. If I wanted to add a LAL-like Mara statue with extensible dialogue, I probably would have to add a lot of script fragments to the responses, and maybe even use walk-away topics or some additional script to detect conversation end? I don't know, I'm going to skip the statue feautre, and ask custom start scenarios to present the options by e.g. reading a book, be configured with buttons and levers, and selected by activation.

They are at the end of the list, their names start with WIShared...

If you can settle for a less then perfect responses, the vanilla generic shared options are quite sufficient.

Naturally, the dependency would be the other way round. You can do it like this: [Work Hard.esp] "I'm looking for work" "I'd like to serve drinks""Placeholder 1 to be replaced in a mod" condition TRUEGlobal = 0"Placeholder 2 to be replaced in a mod" condition TRUEGlobal = 0"Placeholder 3 to be replaced in a mod" condition TRUEGlobal = 0...[Hunt Bandits.esp] - masters: ..., Work Hard.esp [overrides Placeholder 1 from Work Hard.esp] "I'd like to hunt bandits" If you don't want to be limited by the number of placeholders, you can redesign your dialogue so that you won't use LinkTo - all options will be toplevel branches, and all topic infos have precisely the right conditions to be available exactly when they should be. If you do that, as a bonus you won't have to add a master dependency.

It wouldn't be incombatible with Helgen Reborn. Worst case, you'd have to install Helgen Reborn after Helgen is destroyed @themadcowmad: What old alternate start mod was that ? I thought undestroyed Helgen alternate start mods were not a thing until this year.