[LE] Requiring Information: Story Manager - how it works and how not

[Tasheni]

Dear community,
after spending a whole night once more to get things to work, there are several questions about the story manager. I want to describe my experience with it and would appreciate, if you tell me yours. I'm working now since nearly two years on this companion mod without experience in modding - never did it before. I want to make it as much lively as possible, but the control of actions or dialog gets me crazy.

First question is, how much quests is the sm able to handle? Under ActorDialogEvent I have branch nodes set as stacked, under this random quest nodes and the quests added. For testing, I have set no conditions. Some quests are running, some not. One day, all are running fine, the next day not a single one. Perhaps they are too many? I think, for now are some thirty quests in it.

Second question: If I'm using in addition the ActorHelloEvents, will the events run both parallel? I have in this events dialog lines covered into a scene for greeting randomly npcs, when they near. These greetings fire, but now not a single scene from the ActorDialogEvents anymore. Is it, because it is not possible to start more than one scene at the same time?

I raised the priority of the quests to 60 or 70 (normal is 50). First, it seems to work fine, all my scenes from ActorDialogEvent fire, but suddenly no hellos from the misc tab were said anymore. I setted all back to normal values, but it was the same. Only solution was to get back to a previous save.
I did it again several times, with different results: Sometimes not a single scene was running, sometimes all but no hellos, and at least hellos are said combined with raised priority of the scenes, but not from all npcs. What the hell, is that? How can I make sure, that scenes were played properly without crashing the actor hellos?

I have experienced, that also scenes from the market place in Whiterun were not working anymore, so it's not only my mod, who is affected.

I deleted the ActorHelloEvents. Scenes were playing as expected mostly. So I started to give the conditions. I looked at other quests and at several companion mods to learn, how to do this right. But mostly the conditions prevent a scene from fireing. I looked at Inigo companion and was really surprised, how much conditions he was using and tried a few ones in exactly the same way. Scenes were not playing. :sad:

Question: Is it safe to raise the priority of quests or in the misc tab for single dialog lines?
Is there something that prevents the game from proving the conditions?
My dialogs under DialogTab for player dialog or misc tab for random chatter work all fine with several conditions set. But not scenes, that are managed by the story manager.

I could start all quests and scenes via scripts, but that would contain in a very heavily scripted mod. Until now I'm using scripts only for things like open inventory, follow, showe me, or to change clothes, use spells for teleporting and resetting AI.

For ActorDialogEvents in the Inigo mod there are never checkboxes for shares event checked and the branch node is at the bottom of all events. I tried both: With boxes checked and at the top, without checking it and at the bottom. It seems, there is no difference.

As I am making mistakes sometimes, please be sure, that I know how to make scenes and dialog and what is necessary to do. So we must not talk about seq and cleaning and start new game. I'm working very careful and most of the time is testing, because I want exactly to know, what is happening in which situation.

I appreciate your thoughts and would be very happy, if you take time for this, as it will not only help me, but many other, that are working on high quality companions. These things are too sparely covered in tutorials.

Excuse me for bad english :smile: Greetings, Tasheni

 

Edit: That's what I found out so far:

 

Results are only for the ActorDialogEvent and ActorHelloEvent

 

Quests, that are attached to the storymanager break the dialog in anyway, if the quests are altered. No hellos from people, sometimes only if you activate them, but mostly this was not possible. This happens several times, I was testing. When I removed the quests from the story manager, I could alter them without having trouble.

 

Increasing the priority of the quests, that are managed by the story manager will result in not playing these quests and also the vanilla quests, p.e. at the marketplace in Whiterun. When I restored the original value of the priority, all was playing fine.

 

If I attach a follower to an ActorHelloEvent, quests from the ActorDialogEvent he's attached to will not start anymore.

 

This was tested without condition to any of the quests. Possibly if one quest have the condition of another location, the different event may start. Please post your experiences. I'm thankful for that.

Edited December 18, 2016 by Tasheni