A Quest Builder's Reference

[Cynster]

Purpose: Mainly for myself to keep track of all of the new things I learn while Quest Building and have a reference to go back to if I forget - I was keeping it in a notepad, but I thought it would be much more useful shared with the community

 

Note: Additions are very welcome! The only thing I don't want to see is people putting others down because something is "easy". If the easy stuff is important enough for one person to post it, there will be a percentage of people who will find that information useful. Also - I'm not writing this as a most complete list of things to do or know, it's not a tutorial (there are plenty of those out there), but feel free to post tutorials too if you want. It's meant as scrap paper for quest builders to look back at and find solutions to problems that other people have had and post their own. I will be posting a lot of scripts because scripts are a huge part of quest building - not meant to teach anyone papyrus, but just snippets to use in quests.

 

I learn a lot by looking at main quests and the scripts inside! Here are some interesting pieces for your quest fragments

 

 

Move NPC to marker

Alias_MG01OnmundAlias.GetReference().Moveto(MG01OnmundClassMarker)

 

Play a Visual Effect at an NPC reference

pNocturnalBirdLeft.Play(Alias_NocturnalAlias.GetActorRef(),-1)

 

Set Outfit

Alias_BrynjolfAlias.GetActorRef().SetOutfit(kmyQuest.pTG09BrynOutfit,false)

 

Enable actor

Alias_NocturnalAlias.GetActorRef().Enable()

Disable actor

Alias_NocturnalAlias.GetActorRef().Disable()

 

remove perk

Game.GetPlayer().RemovePerk(pTGSkeletonKeyPerk)

 

Play an animation (opening a cave door)

pBlockerDoor.PlayAnimation("Open")

 

Wait before proceeding to the next script

utility.Wait(1)

 

Disable player controls

Game.DisablePlayerControls(false,true,false,false,true,false,false,false)

 

Traps

The Quest Corruption Bug - I have had this nasty bug destroy quests again and again - and it seems like it occurs when messing with the Dialogue Views, like major overhaul stuff. If your quest giver NPC will not talk to you, it might be this bug and the only solution I have found was to completely redo the quest. It took me about 3 hours each time this happened - BUT it's much faster than 15 hours building your quest without a reference to look back at, so don't delete it right away - keep yours as a reference and then when you are sure the new one works, delete the old one. Also - iteratively save! And date! I keep a backups folder and save every time I make a change big enough that I need to test it in game. Every time it works in game, I add the esp to the backups folder. I do scripts and voices at every major point too (not iteratively like the esps)

 

What you need in your mod folder

Esp file

Sounds > Voices > ModName.esp folder

Scripts and Sources (within the scripts folder) - I uninstall all of my mods before quest building so I have a fresh Scripts folder - with the 1.6 update (I think) there are some main quest scripts in the folder for some reason - Keep track of dates to separate your stuff from the main stuff, when in doubt, copy it over, and you can go into preferences and prefix your fragment scripts to a recognizable name for new scripts. :)

 

 

Feel free to add anything - Like I said this is mainly for me, self thoughts, but I thought it would be more useful to other people to have somewhere to look for the stuff we found once ago and forgot today.

[David Brasher]

The biggest trap I have found in quest building is that if you mess up one single alias, then the whole quest is broken -- there will be no quest dialog available ever. Rather than rebuilding your whole quest, with or without the old copy to refer to, just set some of your aliases to optional, or delete them. repeat as necessary. When you find the bad alias and make it optional or delete it, the dialog in the quest will work just fine again. You can then figure out how to rebuild this small portion of your quest rather than the whole thing.

[gasti89]

Check out this thread http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/696167-how-to-add-quest-after-player-sleeps-in-bed/

 

I know that for scripting pros it's a easy thing, but i think it'll really help beginners.

 

Also, i think many people would like to start a quest by sleeping, and i don't know why but Beth didn't create a Story Manager event for sleeping (plus it's not possible to add a new event to it apart from the ones you find in the event dropdown when creating a new node)

[Cynster]

Thank you both for the useful information! :D

 

@David Brasher - :armscrossed: maybe -that- was the issue with my quest... Thanks for that tip!

[icecreamassassin]

Yeah another issue related to David's comment is when you have an Alias in the game but you have it disabled until the quest stage hits and you want to enable it, you must make sure that the alias has the "allowed disabled" or if it's a corpse that you have you need the "allow dead" checked as well. Those are a couple more conditions that will prevent the quest from loading up properly