SSE Weird actor idle dialogue bug?

[dafydd99]

I have a couple of NPCs with start game enabled quests. They have one or more idle lines. On occasions these play fine, but on others you can approach the NPC to talk to them, and the subtitles of an idle will appear along with the dialogue menu, though the NPC doesn't attempt to speak the line.

 

When this is happening, the dialogue options are locked out. In some cases you can close dialogue and re-open it and the subtitle is gone and all works well, other times it won't go away.

 

Does anyone have any experience of this, and better yet a work around? It's possible I've set up something wrong in the idles, but I can't think what.

 

Thanks in advance for any advice - dafydd99

[dafydd99]

In another in my series of answering my own questions, I'll point out that I didn't have a standard 'hello' dialogue for this NPC. Having added one, I've not yet seen that problem again, though it's possible the issues are unconnected. Another NPC has the same problem WITH a hello, but for some reason that one clears.

 

Edit: Okay, yes I'm pretty certain this is the issue. To initiate dialogue with an NPC without issue they MUST have 'hello' dialogue available, covering whatever situation/state the NPC is currently in - otherwise odd and intermittent problems can occur!

[PeterMartyr]

99.9999% of the time a bug is user error.. no joke... but perhaps just perhaps the game engine was busy elsewhere and had not gotten around to evaluating that particular NPC, and on other occasion it had so it worked fine? Do not forget unless specifically stated code is synchronous not asynchronous. So maybe just maybe there was no problem it amount to shite happens. OR another NPC was nearby that had a higher priority so your poor NPC was lower on the implementation queue etc etc but bug highly unlikely way more it just shite happens.... a lot of authors use a very high priority to make sure their mod work.. but guess just what this f*#@ up the game making game quests unplayable. Then those mod authors being stupid call it a Game Bug.. NO the code ran they intended with their mod getting priority over the game... making quest lines unfinishable. Set your priority to something reasonable and get over it if gets overlooked..

 

Bottom line there is hundreds of are legitimate reasons why it didn't get implemented, but a game bug highly unlikely. Here a weird one a Cosmic Ray hit your CPU or RAM at exactly the right moment.. no joke it can happen. it happen to the James Webb Space Telescope satellite at the Lagrange Point... NASA had to reboot the entire satellite. HEHEHE This just flips a bit from 0 to 1 and the damage is done. It happens on Earth tooo. Have a nice day BTW to fix these thing you reboot device from the non-volatile memory...

 

So sometimes, just sometimes, when something weird happen and reboot fixes it, now you know why.

[dafydd99]

Thanks PeterMartyr!

 

Actually I was more thinking the bug was in my mod rather than the game's engine! What I was hunting for was a workaround.

 

But it does point out a challenge we have when modding. For nearly all of us, the engine is black box. We send it instructions and something happens. Unfortunately we don't have a formal specification of that black box and have to assume its behaviour. In this case I mistakenly assumed that opening dialogue wouldn't require a 'hello' idle, and that it was optional. However this we have discovered appears to not be true, there must be at least one hello dialogue available for the actor in every situation where the player might initiate conversation with them. Presumably Bethesda told its developers that hellos were necessary, but afaik we were never told this. This issue occurs because without sticking to an unpublished set of requirements of use, the engine can behave irratically - in this case it returns the subtitle of an unrelated piece of dialogue, and freezes in place if a 'hello' is not available. You could certainly say this was not defensively coded - but whether or not it's a bug is for the reader to decide!

 

Cheers - dafydd99

[PeterMartyr]

Are you trying to do a force greeting where NPC approach the player and starts the dialogue?

 

 

Skyrim Creation Kit Tutorial - Force Greet packages basics

 

 

you might also need to brush up on Reference Alias too, but you can add Force Greet package directly to the actor. but most would use an alias.

[dafydd99]

Ah thanks for the info. No this is just regular dialogue - the player approaches and opens conversation. It's definitely because I was missing a 'hello' for the actor to use - I was adding dialogue line by line and came across the problem. Fortunately with the 'hello' the issue is solved!