Quest dialog stops appearing after changes to quest.

[Aragorn58]

  On 9/19/2015 at 8:19 AM, primem0ver said:

 

  On 9/19/2015 at 6:53 AM, sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE said:

Edit: the quest dialogue/topic/Info have any stage conditions set on them?

Yes but the stage is set correctly. And again... the conditions don't matter. Again: When I create a new topic branch in the same quest it doesn't work even without conditions. Remember that if NO conditions exist on a topic branch/response that any player you click on in the game should have that topic branch (as long as they don't have a preset blocking/exclusion topic). No one has the topic branch on them at all. If I create a NEW quest and add the same condition-less topic branch, it works fine as long as recreate the SEQ file.

 

Ultimately the above fact suggests one thing (at least to me). Something about the quest itself is fried. Not the dialogue... NO dialogue works in the quest at all. If I put the same dialogue in a DIFFERENT quest (new or old), it works fine. IF there are no conditions on the dialogue, ALL players display the option.

 

However, if I remove the conditions from ANY dialogue in the quest in question... it will still not appear. No dialogue from the quest works at all. Hence my conclusion. It is something wrong with the quest. Not the dialogue.

 

Are you sure that the other things you said AREN'T related to my problem? Because honestly that is the only explanation I can think of. I also assumed that might be the case but so far I haven't been able to find the records of the old properties in TesVEdit. (I tried looking before I even started this discussion to see if there was something I could delete that didn't belong).

 

I had a similar issue with a mod after I packed it into a bsa. I don't know if this is relevant to your problem, but worth a shot. Look in your data/sound/voices folder and look for a file named for your esp. Temporarily move the file out to your desktop and try running your quest and see if the dialogue returns. It did for me. I don't have any technical reasons for it not working correctly after I removed it but it worked.

 

EDIT: I should add that this was unvoiced dialogue, only recorded silence.

Edited September 19, 2015 by Aragorn58

[primem0ver]

  On 9/19/2015 at 3:28 PM, Aragorn58 said:

I had a similar issue with a mod after I packed it into a bsa. I don't know if this is relevant to your problem, but worth a shot. Look in your data/sound/voices folder and look for a file named for your esp. Temporarily move the file out to your desktop and try running your quest and see if the dialogue returns. It did for me. I don't have any technical reasons for it not working correctly after I removed it but it worked.

 

EDIT: I should add that this was unvoiced dialogue, only recorded silence.

 

 

Hmmm interesting. However I haven't recorded any dialogue. I use the addon that makes this unnecessary and I haven't looked for someone to do the dialogue for me yet (there are only 2 new characters and they are both female... I am male). I don't have a sound folder in my mod or in the override folder (for Mod Organizer).

 

Here is an interesting fact:

I found that I can move a dialogue branch from one quest to another. If I do this, the dialogue works. All I have to do is move the dialogue from the "broken" quest to another quest and it works. It SOUNDS like an SEQ problem but it isn't because I added another dialogue to a brand new quest and recreated the SEQ yet the old lines I created before still don't show while the new dialogue (and moved dialogue) does.

 

Bottom line, this confirms my suspicion that it is something about the quest itself that is creating the issue. I guess I will have to recreate the entire quest again unless someone has the answer.

[primem0ver]

Here is another interesting fact:

 

I just took a look at the SEQ file in a hex editor. The SEQ file is just a list of form id's for quests in the mod that should be active from the beginning. There is NOTHiNG else in this file at all. I remember reading that somewhere so the SEQ file has nothing to do with this problem.

[Aragorn58]

  On 9/19/2015 at 7:19 PM, primem0ver said:

 

  On 9/19/2015 at 3:28 PM, Aragorn58 said:

I had a similar issue with a mod after I packed it into a bsa. I don't know if this is relevant to your problem, but worth a shot. Look in your data/sound/voices folder and look for a file named for your esp. Temporarily move the file out to your desktop and try running your quest and see if the dialogue returns. It did for me. I don't have any technical reasons for it not working correctly after I removed it but it worked.

 

EDIT: I should add that this was unvoiced dialogue, only recorded silence.

Hmmm interesting. However I haven't recorded any dialogue. I use the addon that makes this unnecessary and I haven't looked for someone to do the dialogue for me yet (there are only 2 new characters and they are both female... I am male). I don't have a sound folder in my mod or in the override folder (for Mod Organizer).

 

Here is an interesting fact:

I found that I can move a dialogue branch from one quest to another. If I do this, the dialogue works. All I have to do is move the dialogue from the "broken" quest to another quest and it works. It SOUNDS like an SEQ problem but it isn't because I added another dialogue to a brand new quest and recreated the SEQ yet the old lines I created before still don't show while the new dialogue (and moved dialogue) does.

 

Bottom line, this confirms my suspicion that it is something about the quest itself that is creating the issue. I guess I will have to recreate the entire quest again unless someone has the answer.

 

I use FUS-RO-DOH also and I still had the issue until I moved the above mentioned file. Do you have a backup of your esp from before you changed the quest? Maybe you could look at that and compare it to the changes and see if something did not get overwritten or placed out of order somehow.

[sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE]

The seq may not be related to your problem..
I have had similar to your problem as in I created a dialogue for my own mod, created a SEQ and it worked great.

Later I edited my mod adding more dialogue didn't regenerate the SEQ and it still worked great.

Later again add just one more line of dialogue and stuff became intermittent.
eg: Dialogue that worked fine from earlier didn't show, when and if it did show it wouldn't do what it was meant to, the new 1 line never showed at all.

So I do a crc/sha1/md5 on the original SEQ (using Hash Tab context menu hashing).

Then i generate a new SEQ file, yep the Hash is different for the new generated seq.

Still not convinced there's a diff..

So I generate another seq without changing the dialogue, yep the new against the last new seq were the same.

So if your changing dialogue and generate a new seq then the hash is different..
Means some byte in the seq changes when editing an existing dialogue.

Edited September 19, 2015 by sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE

[primem0ver]

All a checksum tells you is that the file has changed in some way (as you noted).

 

Have you actually looked at the contents of the SEQ file in a hex editor? I have. It is easy since the file is only 4n bytes long where n = the number of quests in your mod that are marked as startgame enabled. I literally compared the numbers in the hex editor to the form numbers of my quests in TesVEdit. They were exactly the same (keeping in mind that with the SEQ file you must read the values in little endian byte order). There IS NO DATA regarding dialogue in an SEQ file. As I said before it is simply a list of form ids for start enabled quests.

 

Just to check your theory I performed the same experiment you did to see what happened. I added a single line of dialogue to my fried quest. I then generated a new SEQ file and compared the data to the old one. There was no difference in the data put into the SEQ file. The same 6 form ids were listed (which match the 6 start game enabled quests in my mod). However, the ORDER in which the quest form ids were listed had changed. Apparently the dialogue does affect the order in which the items are listed somehow but it doesn't change the data in the file itself. Perhaps the dialogue data is used to sort the quest ids in the SEQ file.

Edited September 19, 2015 by primem0ver

[sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE]

I'd say your pretty close to the mark.
Never bothered byte reading the seq, but knew something was changing due to the checksum doesn't match after editing some dialogue.

I edit dialogue in any of my own mods existing Start Game Enabled Quests and yep generating a new seq has a different checksum.
Be it the same bytes shuffled representing the load order of the of Start Game Enabled Quests, but the order of the bytes is not the same.

Also editing the dialogue doesn't seem consistent to the seq checksum change at times.

As I said, edit my own dialogue and not regen a new seq and things can be fine, but at some point if I edit again my dialogue does not work properly or work at all until I regen my seq.

All this seems irreverent to the problem your having, as you've already covered what the seq is doing and it isn't resolving your problem.

 

I base what I say not from reading but hands on.

MHIYH (My Home Is Your Home) rewrite I did, I released 4.0...

I updated to 4.1 adding more dialogue, yep until I regened the seq my dialogue was broken.

I updated to 4.2 adding more dialogue, yep broken dialogue till I regened my seq..

Updated to 4.3 changing dialogue worked but was intermittent and quirky until I regened my seq.

 

So nowdays if I edit/modify/add dialogue to any of my own mods I regen a seq without even querying or thinking about it.

Edited September 20, 2015 by sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE