SSE NPC dialogue not working - this is driving me nuts!

[dafydd99]

I have a small village in my mod with a handful of NPCs, and have just added an innkeeper. I've created a separate voice type and dialogue quests for each of the NPCs, to contain their idle/hello/goodbye etc as well as additional dialogue options for that character - there's a condition at the 'quest dialogue conditions' which specifies their voicetype. The original characters seem to work fine, but I can't get a peep out of the innkeeper. Changing his voice type to the blacksmith's brings in the blacksmith dialogue, so it doesn't appear to be the npc actor at fault, but perhaps something with the dialogue quest. No errors appear in the creaion kit log or the ingame log.

 

I followed darkfox127's dialogue tutorial with a new npc, voice type and dialogue quest but couldn't get that to work either.

 

All these dialogue quests are 'start game enabled' and a hex dump shows their Form Ids do appear in the seq file (created by sseedit).

 

Only thing I can think is I made two additional non-dialogue quests inbetween the dialogue quests, that somehow caused a problem, but even after deleting them there's no change.

 

Anyone any thoughts as to what I'm missing? I'm using CK64 with fixes rev. 1948737.

 

Edit: adding an additional line to blacksmith's dialogue works fine, so I'm not reaching a limit on number of spoken lines or anything - though I have 'unfuzzed' lip and wav files. Wav files confirmed to be 16bit 44.1khz monos recorded from the CK.

 

Thanks in advance for any help - dafydd99

[dafydd99]

Okay - well after working on another quest for a while, I'd had a few autosaves piled up, and apparently what is happening is these later dialogue quests are only getting properly started when loading a save AFTER the mod has been introduced, ie one with some aspects of the mod already baked in. Very odd bug this - not sure if it's a creation kit thing or just a skyrim engine issue. If anyone has any ideas of ways to work my way around this, it would be good to know!

[scorrp10]

The bib big question is - is it because the dialogue quest you made for innkeeper is not being started - or because the quest simply fails to start on its own. I.e. if you add a Debug.Notification("Starting quest X") fragment to stage 0 of quest, and then use 'startquest' console command - do you get the notification? Cause I recently had an issue where a quest I am working on was not starting, and I thought something was wrong with the started method. But then I noticed that quest would not start even via console commands. Finally, I noticed that somehow, in the course of changing this quest, I cleared one of its alias assignments. As a result, quest would just not start - silently - with no mention of the error in the log. Once I restored the alias reference, everything worked again.

 

Now if you are able to start this quest manually - and get confirmation that it is running - then I guess something is wrong with starting mechanism. Personally, I prefer not to rely on the 'Start Game Enabled' flag much. Say, you can set up a wrapper quest that uses a StoryManager Location Event, and have Stage 0 fragment of that quest run a function that launches all the other dialogue quests. And that function can also verify that quests have indeed started. (By checking the Start() function return value)

[dafydd99]

Thanks scorrp10 - definitely worth me investigating that, though currently away from creation kit (afck!).

 

These quests however are purely dialogue quests, so don't have any stages or aliases. The same is true for the ones that work first time. I think there may be a console command though to check if a quest is running or not - and if not certainly a papyrus command which might help us track down the problem. Or perhaps a 'fake' stage 0 with 'start up stage' ticked might help avoid this issue.

 

What is peculiar is they ARE being 'acitvated' after a savegame with the mod referenced is loaded - so somehow there's a difference between the first and last ones. Or possibly a 'max number of new start game enabled' quests can be added to a game inbetween loads?. The order in the seq file doesn't mane a difference as I modified them to check, but possibly it's about the ordered ID, so a lower number would be started first.

[dafydd99]

Well - seems they ARE running. The startup stage script has been run, as I've added debug.trace() line to a script on the start up stage. It's just not adding dialogue to the actors.

 

Tried stopping, resetting and starting the quest, and the trace was written again, so the scripts ran a second time. Still no dialogue. But again, on reloading a save after the mod installed - works fine. Very strange this!

[dafydd99]

Okay - followed your advice scorrp10, and made the quest a non 'start game enabled'. Pulled a lever to 'start' it - and that worked fine, with dialgoue attached. Therefore it seems that 'start game enabled' quests do potentially have some kind of bug or limitation in them, at least when it comes to dialogue.

 

Thanks for you help in this, scorrp10 - at the very least we have a workaround! Cheers - dafydd99