Strange dialogue bug

[csbx]

1 hour ago, PeterMartyr said:

FormID change, that should never happen, yeah it changes combined with the load order, but the mod formID should be the same..

this what I mean the load order is 00 to FF ( 2 characters) and and the mod form ID is 000800 or 000D62 (depending) to FFFFFF (6 characters)

the quest is 000D63 for example and the only master is Skyrim

now the quest is 01000D63 in the load order (both combined so 8 characters) now we add DC and DB

it is 03000D63 all four  game dlc's and  mod combined and still 8 characters

but if you remove the load order, it should be the same, and the formID 6 characters not 8 characters remains the same, 000D63, are you saying those 6 characters are changing? cos yeah that is major problem

Sorry - yes, I should be more clear.

The quest ID was 02xxxxxx and then all I did was add DLC as masters and now the quest ID is 05xxxxxx. This seems to be expected behavior. I suppose when we say 'quest ID' most people are only thinking of the last 6 digits..?

But no--the pertinent portion (last 6) is indeed the same. 

Because it's the only change to the quest I see between versions (first is fine, second has bug), I'm speculating the 02 -> 05 change might be relevant to the bug.

Note: the quest we're talking about is start game enabled and starts up NORMALLY. ONLY the dialogue is affected.

Save - reload fixes it. But it's still a bug.

I also want to add - I'm always starting a new game when testing.

Edited August 9 by csbx

[PeterMartyr]

@csbx very important, are you aware of the time stamp issue regarding how the Skyrim creation kit loads its data, with multiple masters, it does not use the load order

[csbx]

58 minutes ago, PeterMartyr said:

@csbx very important, are you aware of the time stamp issue regarding how the Skyrim creation kit loads its data, with multiple masters, it does not use the load order

 

I hadn't heard of it until you mentioned it. Looking at SSEEDIT, the order of masters loaded (dawn,hearth,dragonb) seems fine.

But if that did get screwed up because of gremlins etc., why would that stop dialogue from my mod from starting up ? The dialogue isn't contingent on any aspect of the DLCs. The quest with the dialogue starts up fine, checked via sqv. It's only the dialogue that's affected.

Edited August 9 by csbx

[csbx]

2 hours ago, xkkmEl said:

My experience has been that if you add a master to a running game, the new master gets inserted in the middle of the load order, after the already loaded masters, but before all the esps.  Thus, all the esps have their mod id byte increased by one.  Conversely, removing a master (or converting it to an esp) changes the load order.

The game engine knows how to deal with that, mostly; when you save and load, all these formId changes are fixed as long as the forms and other referenced objects are defined and referenced in esm or esp files.  Where it breaks is where the formIds are stored by an skse plugin outside of the game engine; StorageUtil and JContainers won't adapt and keep referring to the old formId references, which no longer work.

Actually, the mod id renumbering is visible in MO2 before reloading the game after adding/removing the master, so it could be that the behavior I have experienced is an MO2 thing more than a game engine thing.

When you say "all these formid changes are fixed" do you mean 'corrected' or 'static' ?

If you mean 'corrected' - yeah, that's what seems to be happening. Dialogue with quest formid starting with 02xxxxxx is now 05xxxxxx after adding DLC masters doesn't work even on new game. But if you save-reload, it 'fixes'.  That's exactly my situation.

I really want to say it's a seq problem that tells the game to look for 02xxxxxx quest (with dialogue) instead of 05xxxxxx, but surely it's only looking at the last 6 digits. And anyway, the seq works fine for the start-enabled quest because it's running..

fuh....

Edited August 9 by csbx

[xkkmEl]

I indeed meant "corrected".

The mechanism is transparent and happens when you 1st load a save with a modified load order.

I really don't know whether you are correct or not in blaming it for the dialogue issue.  The reason I am unsure is specifically because I have experienced it (dialogues not starting) and I never ever change the load order on a running save; I use JContainers extensively and it craps out royally on mod order changes.

[csbx]

30 minutes ago, xkkmEl said:

I indeed meant "corrected".

The mechanism is transparent and happens when you 1st load a save with a modified load order.

I really don't know whether you are correct or not in blaming it for the dialogue issue.  The reason I am unsure is specifically because I have experienced it (dialogues not starting) and I never ever change the load order on a running save; I use JContainers extensively and it craps out royally on mod order changes.

Yep - I don't know either. But the ID is the only thing that differs between the working version and the non-working one.

Just to be clear, I start a new game for the comparisons. There's nothing baked into a save being loaded up.

[csbx]

After some testing, here's what I find:

with working version(v1), which only has Update as master, if I add one dlc as master => bug returns

with v1, if I first remove update as master and add dragonborn, v2 works fine. But if I add dawnguard => bug returns

with v1, if I remove update as master and add dawnguard, v2 works fine. But if I add dragonborn or hearthfires => bug returns.

What this looks like is, if I maintain the same number of DLC masters, ie. 1, things are great. I can add any of them and it's fine.

But if I have > 1 DLCs listed as masters, I get the dialogue bug.

[csbx]

One more test done: renaming the .esp and .bsa of my bugged version results in a version without the dialogue bug. Of course, voice files get broken  Of course I had to rename the voice folder to match the new .esp, but regardless, the dialogue worked immediately.

What's up with that ?

Is this a meta-data problem with LOOT or MO2 'remembering' something about my mod (re masters e.g.) by its esp name and then when a different version with the same esp name is loaded, Loot OR MO2 is erring somehow ?

Edited August 10 by csbx

[csbx]

I wanted to come back to update the thread with my solution to the problem. First, let's recap the problem:

1) start enabled quest has dialogue that is assigned to vanilla npc - dialogue works beautifully.
2) change nothing about mod other than add dragonborn (or other dlc) as master to my mod
3) now 'dialogue bug' is present in mod. It manifests in this way: none of my added dialogue options appears for npc even after starting new game.
4) If the player saves, re-loads. Then the dialogue topics appear

My solution to this problem was to:

1) make the quest associated with the added dialogue NOT start enabled
2) make a new 'helper' quest that is start-enabled. Have startup stage of this helper quest start() the quest associated with the dialogue.
3) boom - everything works beautifully.

 

Edited August 22 by csbx