Can't get Quest Dialogue working

[Hellscreamy]

I've been having this problem for several months now and absolutely nothing seems to fix it.

Quest NPC's I've made won't show any dialogue and I can't find the source of the problem.

I can't fix it with Quick-Save/Load and I have a SEQ-file generated (Tried with the Steam launch option and TES5EDIT), the dialogue's all have .wav and .lip files. Despite all of this, nothing shows up.

 

To make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong I've followed the Bendu tutorial on the CK website to the letter and created the exact same quest, just with a sword instead of an amulet and different npc's.

 

The quests are all enabled on starting a game, I've checked it ingame with GetQR which showed me true on all created quests. I was able to progress the entire quest by setting the stage to 10 and then following the quest, but the stages with the dialogue appear to be broken.

 

The weirdest problem is that this has suddenly happened, because a while back I was still able to create entire working quests, yet now everything seems to break.

 

I've tested my mod with old save-games, entire new savegames (through COC and by starting the game normally) and I've also let others test my mod.

I have no other mods or plugins active beside SkyUI.esp and the ones needed for the quests (Skyrim.esm, Dawnguard.esm and the MainMod.esm file I'm creating the quests for).

 

Any help would be appreciated, we can't continue modding this way and I'm on the point of giving up on this.

 

EDIT: Added some more info

Edited March 17, 2013 by Hellscreamy

[Anska]

I do have an idea what might cause this, but I somehow hope that I am wrong.

I have/ had the same problem, sometimes the dialogue would show up, sometimes it wouldn't. I did some tests and for some reason the dialogue either stopped working as soon as I had added an alias to the quest (even if it was not connected to the dialogue itself) or I could not remove the link established through the alias again (if it was linked to the dialogue). For example: I gave Sifnar some dialogue via an alias, which worked fine. But when I later on changed the actor connected to the alias, Sifnar kept saying the dialogue no matter what.

Edit: I just took a look at my own Bendu quest, which works fine. I only seem to have issues with dialogue and aliases in connection to existing actors - especially if they are already tied into a lot of quests and dialogue anyway.

Edited March 17, 2013 by Anska

[Hellscreamy]

It could be, one of my npc's has several quests attached to him, and I made small changes to him after I added his alias to the quest.

However, another npc has just one quest (not the Bendu-like quest though) and I'm 100% sure I did not change anything about the npc as it is not highlighted green.

 

All npc's and objects I use are custom objects, everything is in a different worldspace than Skyrim and I had no problems with this mod a few months back when I started creating quests.

 

Another teammember just tested my latest version on his pc and he couldn't get the quests running either.

[Korodic]

An alias that isn't filled/created properly could break the quest. I also noticed that stopping/starting the quest within the quest (like in the same line) is not a good way to restart it and will actually break EVERYTHING.

[artificialsloth]

Do you have multiple npcs in the quest dialogue conditions thing?

[Hellscreamy]

I've the exact same setup as the Bendu quest. This means one questgiver (Unique with alias pointing to him), a thief (chosen the same reference type as the thief in the Bethesda quest) and a blade as item. The blade is created inside the thief.

 

The progress between the stages works, I can kill the thief and it goes to stage 20, take the blade and it goes to stage 30.

When I try to initiate any kind of dialogue with the questgiver I'm having trouble. I don't start/stop the quest anywhere, I've created the exact same thing as the tutorial.

 

Do note that this npc has another quest he can give, but I haven't finished creating the entire quest yet. Another npc only gives one quest that I based on the pelt gathering quest from Ivarstead (In this case you gather ingredients). This quest will not show any dialogue either.

 

It isn't a problem with my installation of Skyrim because I had another member of the modding team test it and nothing happened.

 

I wish I could share the esp so that you can test it yourself and maybe see what's wrong, but it is dependent on a large worldspace .esm we have created so it's hard to share it quickly. I could try to recreate the quest in a new esp without the master, I haven't tested whether I could get it working that way.

[Anska]

I'm sorry I could not be of more help. The only other things I can think of now are the usual: trying to remember if you made any changes to your computer around the time the problem started or trying to reinstall the creation kit.

 

@Korodic: Is there a way to not create an alias properly? All I usually do is to create a new alias, give it a name, link it to an actor and click ok. I thought, that was it (unless one of the more fancy options, such as "allow disabled", is required).

[Hellscreamy]

Sorry for the bump but I'd like to update this thread on my progress so far.

 

It seems my esp got corrupted some way or the other, I'm not sure when or why but I had to restart all my work (just quests though).

I found this out by recreating one of my quests in a new esp, without any masters beside the skyrim.esm. Everything went smooth and I didn't even have the save/reload issue. After that I tried adding this quest to our mod by adding the esm as master and change the npc's to those in the new worldspace. This worked so I've now created another quest not based on a tutorial using the npc's I had issues with. Again, no problems whatsoever.

 

Does anyone know why this may have happened so I can prevent this from happening again? I had some issues before where an esp became useless because an error occurred during saving but I doubt this was the case this time.

[AchillesPeleus]

Sorry for the bump but I'd like to update this thread on my progress so far.

 

It seems my esp got corrupted some way or the other, I'm not sure when or why but I had to restart all my work (just quests though).

I found this out by recreating one of my quests in a new esp, without any masters beside the skyrim.esm. Everything went smooth and I didn't even have the save/reload issue. After that I tried adding this quest to our mod by adding the esm as master and change the npc's to those in the new worldspace. This worked so I've now created another quest not based on a tutorial using the npc's I had issues with. Again, no problems whatsoever.

 

Does anyone know why this may have happened so I can prevent this from happening again? I had some issues before where an esp became useless because an error occurred during saving but I doubt this was the case this time.

 

Did you discover any other information about this? I've been trying to create a quest, and have followed the tutorials to the letter, but every time I go to my starting quest npc he won't engage me in the dialogue options to start the quest.

[aragonit]

 

Sorry for the bump but I'd like to update this thread on my progress so far.

 

It seems my esp got corrupted some way or the other, I'm not sure when or why but I had to restart all my work (just quests though).

I found this out by recreating one of my quests in a new esp, without any masters beside the skyrim.esm. Everything went smooth and I didn't even have the save/reload issue. After that I tried adding this quest to our mod by adding the esm as master and change the npc's to those in the new worldspace. This worked so I've now created another quest not based on a tutorial using the npc's I had issues with. Again, no problems whatsoever.

 

Does anyone know why this may have happened so I can prevent this from happening again? I had some issues before where an esp became useless because an error occurred during saving but I doubt this was the case this time.

 

Did you discover any other information about this? I've been trying to create a quest, and have followed the tutorials to the letter, but every time I go to my starting quest npc he won't engage me in the dialogue options to start the quest.

 

Maybe you forgot to set a condition for his dialogue to NOT start if the quest is already running?