Quest dialogue without general subtitles?

[tewlons]

In making a new quest, I am writing a bunch of dialogue for multiple new NPCs. I do not plan to have them voice acted and want the dialogue to be displayed as subtitles. At first I thought I will just tell users to enable dialogue subtitles when playing my quest. Then I realized that this works for interactive conversations with the player, but it does not work for other types of dialogue, such as an actor participating in a scene. To see the subtitles for this kind of dialogue, the player must also enable "general subtitles." The problem with this is that it then displays general subtitles for all of the mindless random chatter that Skyrim NPCs say which quickly becomes annoying. I want to find a workaround for this problem.

 

I can think of a couple of possibilities:

 

1. Force the game to enable general subtitles only when I need them for a scene, and then disable them again when the scene is over. It looks like skse has (or had at one time) a function called SetINISetting which could allow me to enable/disable general subtitles in script. However, when I try to use it in script, it doesn't compile, and I don't think the function actually exists. It's also not to be found in the skse scripting reference on creationkit.com. Can anyone tell me if it's possible to use it?

 

2. Have the end user enable general subtitles, but remove all of the mindless random chatter from NPCs. This is drastic. I am trying to build my mod in a way that doesn't change much about the vanilla game, but just adds to it. However, most of the generic NPC chatter is really annoying anyway, and if there is no other solution, I may choose to do this.

 

3. Bypass the dialogue system and display the text on the screen some other way. This would be the most flexible as it would not require the user to enable subtitles at all and wouldn't change the vanilla NPCs. The downside is that I might not be able to take advantage of some of the organizational tools for dialogue and scenes that are provided in the creation kit. I could live with that, but I'm not sure if this is even possible to do. Is this possible? Has anyone else tried to do it?

 

Ideas?