[LE] DialogueFollower quest, bugs in CK?

[Dromundas]

Quite the pickle I'm having.

I've made a few follower mods which edit the DialogueFollower quest and have always been able to find a solution to my problems, until now.

My problem is with my mods for my other mod called Multiple Followers Framework. Check out the link for a clearer description of the mods.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/24167

The problem is with the Follower Dialogue mod for my framework. Eventually Papyrus fragments stop receiving/applying updates in the CK and nothing but starting over in some way will fix it. I tested extensively after the first and second occurrence of this issue and was able to determine that the Papyrus fragments indeed weren't updated in-game but otherwise operated normally.

New fragment code will save and compile correctly. Code running in-game does not update and can even run previously removed functions/code, even in other scripts, depending on what existed when the fragment was first created. This leads me to wonder if it's something to do with: the quest starting enabled, script back-ups, or quest fragment logic. I'm hoping that I've just done something wrong.

The first time this happened I could not figure out how to fix it so I rebuilt the mod. The same issue with dialogue fragments happened a second time, everything worked and then, during work on an update for my mod, stopped working and can't be fixed, so I rebuilt the mod again after testing it for a while. With the third approach I opted to try something different. Instead of replacing the original scripts with xEdit, I would simply recompile the originals to do what I wanted. For now the issue hasn't happened again. Usually it occurs during an update which I have yet to do. Which brings me to the next issue I'm having with this specific quest now. This time it happened with my Thrall Spell mod.

Thrall Spell adds followers to a reference alias which applies a keyword. The keyword is used to enable/disable dialogues and worked properly until it didn't (again during an update). The game just ignores the conditions I've set relating to the keyword now. As soon as I noticed this, with further testing I also noticed unedited dialogue fragments had stopped working as well (trade, favor), then simply started working again a few game startups later. The keyword conditions still aren't working anymore.

The first issue/rebuild lead me to split the original mod into 3 separate mods so I could isolate what was causing the issue. All of the problems seem to stem from DialogueFollower which is a start-enabled quest. Yet nothing is throwing an error code or showing signs of breakage.

Upon further investigation of many hours, I read that Papyrus can simply get picky at times and things like names of files and properties/functions can stop working correctly. When that happens try: starting over, creating a new scripts/names, check all properties, etc. I'm not sure how accurate/useful this info is. What worked for me is restarting from scratch, once something changes after saving and exiting, it seems to break. Do it all right the first time I suppose.

Can anyone help me sort this out?

Edited April 16, 2019 by Dromundas