Sudden, bizarre, unique sound problem - No npc dialogue at all.

[Dahveed]

*SOLVED* This was caused by a mod called "babe hair" of all things. How the hell does a hair mod remove an entire section of audio from a game??????

 

I'm about to pull my hair out over this.

 

I have over 100 hours of gameplay on my character and never had a problem like this.

 

Basically it's as though no NPC dialogue files are being loaded... at all. If I have subtitles turned on I can see them, but there is no audio.

 

Now I know about the "center speaker" surround sound channel fix - people have reported that by adjusting their sound settings from 5.1 or 7 to 2 channels, basically downgrading their sound, the

audio is then audible again. However in my case this doesn't apply since I have 2 channels to begin with.

 

Furthermore my problem is different: I have seen youtube vids of the problem which is fixed by the method above, and you can actually see that the game is playing the lip files, is actually loading the audio in-game, but is just not audible because of a missing speaker.

 

However in my case the audio isn't even being loaded. The npc lips don't even move, as though the file wasn't loaded at all. If I turn off subtitles completely, when I interact with NPCs nothing happens at all: the game zooms in, all the dialogue options appear, but when I click on them the NPCs do nothing and the game immediately skips ahead to the next dialogue window.

 

 

For me this started happening after I tried to install "Better Cities", uploaded by Ismelda on the Nexus. I posted about it in the comments but the mod authour assures me it has nothing to do with his/her mod. This seems strange to me as I had over 100 hours of play without this issue, then *bam* I install this mod and all dialogue is wiped out. I then uninstalled the mod immediately, of course, but the problem still persists.

 

This is driving me batshit crazy since I seem to be the only human being in history to whom this has happened, therefore I cannot find a fix anywhere online. I have tried resetting my oblivion.ini file, verifying game cache through steam, messing around with windows audio, I optimized the voices-1 and voices-2 bsa files, enabled archive invalidation, tried disabling mods etc. I am at wit's end here.

 

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. This problem is completely unexpected and random and I have no idea what to do.

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited May 28, 2014 by Dahveed