[LE] I can't seem to get conditions to work

[CinderHawk]

Long story short: I want to edit certain subtitles to certain dialogues so that they'll appear differently based on the player character's gender. To do that, I used TES5Edit to find some dialogues with Brynjolf, since he refers to the player as "lad" or "lass", depending on their gender. And here's what I found:

 

 

 

 

So, first, I created a new, female character and played the intro until that point where Alduin breaks a tower with his head and you have to jump to a burning house right in front of the hole to proceed. Soon after, Hadvar appears and says something like "Still alive, prisoner? Keep close if you want to stay that way". This line was my target of practice. I wanted to see if I could change the subtitle to appear different based on the player's gender. So I went and found that same line in TES5Edit as well:

 

 

Its inside its own dialogue branch. So what I thought I could do, was duplicate it, change the text of the second one, and then apply the gender condition in each one of them, male and female respectively (all of this in a new .esp, of course). Pretty much the same thing as it was with Brynjolf's dialogue (and yes, I remembered to change the number of "responses" in the dialogue header from 1 to 2). Thing is, this is glitching the dialogue. When I get to the point he should say that, he just says nothing at all, and just stands there, and my game is soft-locked because I can't proceed. At first I thought that, once the first condition (being male) wasn't met, the game just... Didn't know what to do, and couldn't proceed. So I inverted the conditions, making it so that the first (and original) dialogue just required you to be female to start. Aaaand... Same result. Hadvar just stood there. Then I thought "well, maybe it works differently for dialogues that don't lock the player in place, and are just being said sporadically as the player walks by". So I found another, different dialogue, right at the start of the game, where Hadvar says something to you depending on your race. This is what I found:

 

 

Condition is slightly different, but still something related to the player, so I tried this one isteand, using "GetPCIsSex" istead of the "GetIsSex", and the rest was just like the one in the screenshot above. Aaaand... Same soft-lock. I don't know what exactly is causing this or why this isn't working, since I'm literally just altering the text, as far as I know. I thought that I was accidentally messing with the dialogue's ID, and then it wasn't being recognized by the game to be played at that time, but if I remove the condition and just change the subtitle, it plays out normally (with the edited subtitle). Pls, help!

 

(keep in mind that I just want to alter the subtitle, the audio itself is supposed to play out normally).

Edited August 7, 2019 by CinderHawk

[TomTesoro]

Your theory is correct, but you really should be using the Creation Kit for this. Doing it through xedit is unnecessarily complicating things. You can find that same line in the CK and add the condition to it and it will work as expected. Here's an example from one of my mods where I did the same thing.

 

 

Update:

I accidentally pasted the same screenshot twice. The bottom one should be looking for a female PC.

Edited August 8, 2019 by TomTesoro

[CinderHawk]

Well... I'll try that with that one line and see how it goes, but... Do you know why exactly mine from xEdit didn't work as intended? :/ Considering I'll have to do this with a TON of subtitles in the game (I'm working on a translation mod), I didn't really want to rely on CK all the time, the interface is too cluttered with stuff I don't need for this kind of work, and it runs a bit slow on my computer. But still, while we're on the matter: Are those other conditions related to the gender thing as well? Or I just need the GetPCIsSex one?

Edited August 8, 2019 by CinderHawk

[TomTesoro]

I'm not sure what's causing your particular issue in xedit, but generally this kind of thing should be done in the CK. I have a feeling something stemming from how you're trying to edit it is causing this, and that would be negated by just cracking open the CK and doing it there, though I can understand your trepidation.

What could maybe save you some time is doing your work in the Player Dialogues tab instead of in Dialogue Views, since you most likely don't have the xml files to make them look nice. What I would do in this situation is use the find function to locate your particular lines, under edit > Find Text.

 

And no, those other conditions don't matter for you, they are related to my quest. Although, GetIsID is a way to make sure that only a specific actor is the one saying a line, though there are other ways to accomplish this.

[CinderHawk]

I did exactly as you said, re-did all the gender thing process using the CK instead, and it was still soft-locking. I did some testing and apparently it isn't an issue with the conditions themselves, its an issue with the game not knowing how to proceed once the initial condition isn't met. When I invert the conditions and put the female subtitle first, it plays out normally. But when male comes first... Yeah, soft-locks again. I tested this with Hadvar's next line as well, and it was the same. If I put the "check if male" condition first, it screws up. I'm super tired, I literally spent the last 3 to 4 hours trying to figure this out with your tips, but I'm done for today. Tomorrow I'll explain what I did with more detail, too tired for it right now, but basically, I did everything right (because it looked very similar to the race specific dialogue in the beginning, at least from a Creation Kit point of view), and it still wasn't working. Can you give me a screenshot of your condition? Like, left click them, and show me the values and stuff. Maybe a screenshot of the entire window or something, might spot something I'm missing.

 

Also, keep in mind this is a line categorized as a "Scene", which means its dialogue that plays out regardless of player action (you just need to be close to trigger it, of course). The race specific commentary in the beginning is a scene as well, btw.

Edited August 8, 2019 by CinderHawk

[CinderHawk]

New day, same old stress. I'm about to punch someone in the face.

 

 

Look at this. This is a gender specific line from the beginning of the game. Now here's mine:

 

 

Can you spot any visible differences? I sure as hell can't and I'm getting more and more stressed about this. There's no logic reason as to why this isn't working. Its exactly like the one from the main game itself. There's no explanation, at all.

[TomTesoro]

How much work have you put into this already? It might be worth making a new esp and seeing if the issue persists. It's also possible that there's some kind of mod conflict causing it.

[CinderHawk]

Quite a lot, actually. But I don't think its conflicting with anything, the only mod I'm using is the USLEEP (which is in fact a requirement for the translation). or else other condition specific dialogue (aka the race commentary) would be bugged as well. Anyways, I'll try creating a new .esp and see how it goes, thanks :b

[BowmoreLover]

I think editing a vanilla dialogue records for translation purposes is a very bad idea for the following reasons:

- As others have said, they are likely to conflicts with other mods. Dialogue records can be often edited by mods, so if you add the records according to player's gender, such mods will not work for a particular gender or will overwrite dialogue conditions that you modified, so you will need to make compatibility patches for every single mods.

 

- Besides, NPC voice files are associated with dialogue records with file names that have certain rules. If you want to separate the dialogue records, you will also need to rename and copy these voice files. Otherwise the dialogue will be silent.

 

- I don't think we are allowed to redistribute the vanilla plugin itself. Therefore, you will need to provide it as a patch file to make such modifications.

 

 

EDIT: I have tried to separate Hadvar's response by gender, it worked well by adding conditions with GetPCIsSex function.

Screen shot of xEdit here: https://imgur.com/a/RWCAui4

 

EDIT2: You may want to try my tool Lazy Voice Finder. You can use this tool to see a list of dialogs, check conditional expressions, and find voice files. It will probably help you make that mod.

[CinderHawk]

Wait, so in other words... The conditions are fine, but I have to make a copy of the audio file to assign it to the female version of the subtitle? If so, this won't be that hard with the tool you linked. It'll take some time before I learn how to do everything properly, but I'm definetely going to download it right now and give it a go. Thank you so much, yet again! I would've never figured this out myself, I thought there was something wrong with the conditions...

Edited August 9, 2019 by CinderHawk