nerdofprey

That is good info, thanks. I feel like there's a lot of interesting stuff that could be done that way, but I'd worry a little about overloading my mod with scripted events. I wonder if it would work to set the quest to activate based on this "invisible tracker" method. It would just need to be applied to my NPC instead of the player, which would be easier anyway.

The AlertToCombat thing is basically the workaround I'm using for my werewolf dialogue... It does allow NPC's to react to different creatures/races in combat situations, but non-combat has been a real challenge. I'm not afraid of adding quests; this mod already has four of them set up. I'm curious how you would go about using an alias in this way, though. Like if a person/creatuire/object is in the cell, it fills an alias, then the NPC reacts to the alias? That definitely sounds like it could work, but I have limited experience dealing with aliases, and I'm not sure exactly how to set up a quest to make this work.

I posted about this a few days ago in the "quick questions, quick answers" thread but no quick answer has materialized... I'm updating a follower mod and I'm trying to add more situational chatter lines, and I'm tearing my hair out trying to set dialogue conditions that don't seem to exist. All I want is for my character to react to nearby things. I'll start with a specific example: I want her to say a line of dialogue if she sees a werewolf. So far I've found conditions functions for: - Her target being a werewolf (GetIsRace, run on target) Problem: An NPC doesn't necessarily "target" any nearby actors with any reliability. In testing, this has not worked at all. - Seeing a specific werewolf (GetLineOfSight, specific reference in a specific cell) Problem: Even if I went through and painstakingly added every existing werewolf reference ID as a possible condition, it wouldn't work on random spawns, mod-added werewolves, or anything else that wasn't already manually placed in the vanilla game world. - X amount of dead werewolves in the cell Problem: I want her to react to ALIVE werewolves! This is not the first stumbling block of this nature I've run into. I tried making random chatter that fires if children are nearby, if bees are nearby... and the list goes on. But the game does not seem to be set up for NPC's to react to the presence of like... categories of things. Almost every condition function is geared toward specific references, and the precious few that go by base ID's just don't seem to align with what I'm trying to do. I'm hoping there's some condition function I've overlooked that does exactly this. Failing that, I'm hoping there is some kind of workaround or "cheat" to accomplish roughly the same thing. I've heard Inigo react to spiders and Vilja react to bandits, so I know something like this is possible... but I think those are set up as combat dialogue? Combat doesn't cover every situation I'd like to explore. Like my character is not likely to enter combat with children...

There are good tutorials out there, but there's one crucial thing you have to know up front: For custom dialogue, you don't select audio files from within the Creation Kit. It's not like a piece of armor where you name the file anything you want and then select that file. For dialogue, you have to have a very specific folder structure in place, and after you create a new line of dialogue, the CK will generate a file name. You have to rename your audio file so it has that exact file name in that exact location, and then the game can find it. Under Data/Sound/Voice you need to create a folder with the name of your plugin, including the file extension, like MyCoolMod.esp. Inside that, there has to be a folder with your character's voice type, for example malenord. Inside that, you put your audio file, which can be named so it's easy to find, like greetings.wav or whatever. Then after you create the line of dialogue in the CK, it will spit out a long complicated filename, and you have to rename your sound file so it has THAT file name. ​This is a video tutorial series that helped me a lot; very clear step-by-step instructions:

I just mean look at how it's made in the CK, make a copy of it and start messing with the values, find where it's pointing to a texture and replace it... It's sort of trial and error.

A .tri file is not a head mesh, it's the file that controls how the head mesh is affected when you mess with the shape of the face to customize a character.

Re-reading that, a couple things come to mind; #1 the CK loves to throw error messages but a lot of the time you can ignore them. Is this an issue that crashes the program or otherwise prevents you from working, or is the CK blowing smoke? #2 I'm guessing the mod author used an edited FemaleHeadRaces.tri to build the mod, but that it was not necessary to package that with the mod to release it. A lot of the times changes have to be made to vanilla files to create a mod that can be undone afterward... for example, after head meshes have been exported, you're done with the edited .tri files, and the user won't need them. If the CK is not working without that file, you can try contacting the author to request a copy of it.

I don't have a ton of experience with imagespace modifiers but I know there are a lot of effects like this in the game and in other mods. One of the most extreme ones is the effect when you read an elder scroll; it not only has distortion but it uses a specific texture overlay. If I were trying to do something similar I'd start by reverse-engineering that effect.

Make sure that the save you're using to test is outside the cell and that the cell has been reset. Otherwise you might see objects that were saved in your save game even after you deleted them in the CK.

Is it possible to set a dialogue condition for a base object to be nearby, rather than a specific reference? Like for an NPC to react when there's a butterfly, or a silver ore node, or a type of weapon lying around? I feel like this should be an obvious thing, but every way I've come at it, I've hit a wall. Every condition seems to be about a specific object/actor reference or a specific cell. Am I missing something?

May be obvious, but does TKAA have a .bsa archive? If so, did you extract all the files from the TKAA mod archive? The CK has a lot of trouble working with .bsa archives, and will usually tell you the files are missing.

I'm not saying this is the problem (it's probably not) but really for anyone dealing with similar issues it's food for thought: I just recently released my first extensive quest mod, and one of the things that took a long time to hammer out was anticipating the weird choices players would make that would break my quests. After months of testing, I determined that everything worked flawlessly if I did all the steps in the right order, but unfortunately I left way too much wiggle room for people to try to do stuff out of order. I got SO MANY reports of quest stages not working, NPCs not appearing, all manner of awful problems, and I was tearing my hair out figuring out why I couldn't reproduce the issues on my end. Finally I figured out that players were not doing the steps in the correct order... because the quest stages outlined in the journal, or indicated by quest markers, were simply not holding their hands and connecting the dots for them the way they should. It would be easy to say this was simply user error, but that's not really fair. The problem was mine. I had not made the steps clear enough, or built in enough contingencies for unusual player decisions. I had assumed things would be obvious that were not obvious. Eventually I went in and reworked the quest stages such that they provide a lot of hand-holding. I wasn't super happy that I had to do that, but the "bug reports" regarding quest stages have slowed to a trickle. Just to name some examples: My quest has a rescue scene where you break an NPC out of jail. For the quest to progress, the player has to free the NPC and then talk to her. A lot of people just freed her and left without having that conversation, and the entire quest would break at that point. There was also an important scene that would happen as the player was about to exit the room. A lot of people were using mods that let them fast travel from indoor locations, and they would never walk to the exit, the scene wouldn't happen, and the entire quest would break. After people left the building, there was a conversation available that would start a new quest objective. This didn't have conditions set that required the previous steps to be complete. Anybody that skipped the steps I mentioned before - didn't talk to the NPC, fast traveled out of the room - would still get this next quest objective and THINK they were doing it right, but the quest would be permanently broken at that point, because the previous stages couldn't be done out of order. Now the quest stages don't go "free the person, escape," they go "free the person, talk to the person, walk out of the room, talk to her outside the room." And so on from there. I've only had one person who got it wrong after that, and I can now safely say "user error." Again, I'm not saying this is the problem with YOUR mod, and it's probably not. But these were valuable lessons, and I figured it would be worthwhile to share with other modders working on quests... Players are wily, and they might make "interesting" choices.

I'm not sure about the specifics of that, but it probably is scripted somewhere in the mage guild quest. Rather than tinker with the quest and try to prevent it, if I really wanted her around past that point I would probably create a duplicate of her that gets enabled when the quest is over. You could even go a step farther and make a duplicate of the base actor, rather than just another reference in the game world; that would let you create new AI packages and stuff too, even make her a follower, without the risk of breaking the vanilla NPC. None of that would even be very complicated, you would just have to decide when and how she poofs into existence, and make sure you don't end up with two of her at once.

You only need to create unique armors (you can just copy existing ones if you want) and uncheck the "playable" check box on the base armor item. The game has several armors like this already, like the un-lootable copy of the daedric set that dremora usually wear.

GetDead absolutely works, it must just be something about how you set it up. Did you try having it run on the specific in-game reference of the NPC instead of an alias?

All the workarounds discussed so far involve removing your own ability to add most facetints to your NPC's, and that's not fun. The real cause of this is using HD tintmask textures. They look pretty when you're creating your player character, but the CK can't use them. THE ACTUAL FIX to this is, before you load the CK: Go to textures/actors/character/character assets, find the folder named "tintmasks," and remove or rename it. When you load the CK, it will default to the vanilla tintmasks and they will work flawlessly! If you still want to use HD tintmasks on your player character, you can restore that folder after you're done modding. Personally, I deleted that s.o.b. and never looked back... because I do a lot of NPC modding, and the difference in game is barely even noticeable. If you really, really, really, reallyreally want your HD facetints on an NPC, you can use RaceMenu to create the appearance you want in-game, export it, then use that texture file to replace the one the CK generated. Or you can use something like Photoshop or GIMP to open your facegen texture, scale it up and add detail.

The very simple answer to your original question is: Set your pre-following dialogue branch to be "blocking." It does what it sounds like, blocks their other dialogue until it's over, including "follow me."

I actually posted a thread explaining this a while ago: CLICK Making a non-vanilla follower is a LOT easier than people tend to think it is. You do need to manually create all the other follower functions like opening their inventory to trade, telling them to wait or do a favor, but that stuff really isn't hard to do either. It's all one-line script fragments. If you just want the dialogue to recruit them on the vanilla framework the same as the "follow me, I need your help" line... Add this fragment to the dialogue: (pDialogueFollower as DialogueFollowerScript).SetFollower(akspeaker) And add this property to the script that's generated: Property Name - pDialogueFollower Type - Quest Value - DialogueFollower

I was able to work around this issue for a few days by using incognito mode to log in, but as of today that has also stopped working. Even after opening the site in incognito mode and then forcibly disabling ssl, such that chrome puts a big red crossed-out https on the url to show me how unsafe I am being, this issue is persisting.

Same issue here, definitely new today. As others have said, disabling the https everywhere plugin logs me out and prevents me from logging back in.

You can't do that in the CK. You can create a unique head mesh that's larger - which might be possible if you enlarge the mesh in ECE and export it, then use Nif Merge to overwrite your facegen mesh - or you can make a custom race with a unique skeleton and scale up the skeleton's head node.

Nif Merge is necessary if you want to design your character in the game using RaceMenu and then apply that look to a character you make in the CK. You can always just design your character directly in the CK, though, and it will work fine. I do that for most characters. You're strictly limited to vanilla sliders though. If you want a more unique-looking character then RaceMenu certainly opens up a lot more options. As for missing eyes... Sometimes with Nif Merge you have to specifically tell it which part is which before you hit merge. Each head shape has a little drop-down menu where you can tell it, this is hair, this is teeth, this is eyes. Usually it can detect those things automatically but it might be a good idea to go through it manually since it seems to be messing up. I mean, you seem to be saying that you previewed the mesh in Nifskope and it had eyes? And I'm guessing the CK's vanilla head mesh also has eyes. So there must be some mismatch in their nodes or whatever, something where the head parts aren't being recognized as eyes by the game engine. That is likely to be an issue with Nif Merge settings, but it could be something with custom head parts in the CK, like if you created unique eyes for your NPC. By the way, a little tip... It is never really necessary to create unique eyes in the CK for your character. You can just give them vanilla eyes and then redirect the textures in the head mesh after you export it. Saves a lot of time.

Hard to say exactly what steps you missed without knowing what steps you took, but I am guessing based on the pictures that you are trying to transfer the face from a player character to an NPC? There are a lot of steps involved, but among them is exporting a head mesh from the game and then overwriting your CK-generated facegen files with that. The basic steps are laid out here. This assumes you've got RaceMenu installed. Note that there is a basic vanilla game function for exporting faces from the game and importing them in the CK - the "SPF" method - but this only transfers vanilla game features and will completely ignore any changes you made using something like RaceMenu or CME. I still find SPF useful for quickly matching NPC skin tones to custom facegen files, but to use your custom in-game face you will need to use Nif Merge to replace the head mesh.

One thing that is easy to overlook - but really important - is any conditions that check quest stages have to be switched from "subject" to "player." Otherwise it will be checking to see if the NPC has done the quest. Quests / stages only apply to the player. If you accidentally set a package condition that an NPC has done a quest stage, you're disabling the whole package because that will never happen.

I had a mod update go sour on me once and I'm pretty sure the plugin got corrupted somehow. Like I hadn't made any changes that should have caused the crazy stuff that was happening. I rolled back to the stable version and completely redid my work, exactly the same way as far as I know, and never had problems again. Whatever the cause, it might ultimately take less time to redo your work than to endlessly troubleshoot a potentially unfixable issue. What you're describing could be caused by a bugged mesh, though. Have you tried dumping all your meshes in a test cell or anything?