Windhelm House & Blood on the Ice Quest (#199)

March 12, 2012

First, is this bug still outstanding?

If so, then I'd like to gather some notes here and get your input. I've been trying to trigger it in my game with no luck so far. I'm hoping it might trigger now that I've finished the main quest. The civil war was interfering with buying the house earlier.

March 13, 2012

Yes, it's still broken. I haven't even begun to dig into it yet. Bethesda supposedly fixed it but that turned out to be less than true.

The odd part is my conjurer character got through most of the quest just fine, though it got stuck sometime after being able to buy the house and no amount of patches has fixed it. No doubt because the scripting system clings to bad versions of scripts for no good reason.

March 13, 2012

Ysne told me she was able to complete the quest on her first play-through but hasn't been able to since. It might be worth moving this thread to the public forum so other people can pitch in with info.

She thought the Blood on the Ice Quest triggered when she entered the Windhelm house after buying it and she had to complete the quest before she could update it. That might have been coincidence. According to the UESP Wiki, the Blood on the Ice Quest is triggered when you fast travel from another hold capital to Windhelm four times. That sounds awfully specific to me.

I'll talk a look at this in the CK tomorrow. It's been a rough day for me today.

March 13, 2012

Just dropped in to see if there was a forum.

Blood on the Ice is triggered by multiple travels to Windhelm (thought it was three but you're probably right.)

One of the things the USKP will fix with it is that the main quest MS011(?) never terminates, which is why the Strange Amulet stays a quest item. Rather ironic that they actually fixed the quest item system so that quest items lose that status automatically when the quest terminates... and they they go forget to terminate it. :lol:

Edited March 13, 2012 by Kivan

March 13, 2012

Well I still can't trigger the stupid quest. :mad: I was going to take a look at the code later and see if I could find anything. Any suggestions?

March 13, 2012

That will be all well and good for my conjurer who has the "strange amulet" I guess, but he's still got blood stains in the house and the Jarl's steward isn't offering to clean that up.

My Argonian has never been able to do anything with the quest at all, and he's been to Windhelm 50 times now. The Papyrus debug logs told me that

So whatever is wrong, Bethesda didn't fix it entirely.

March 13, 2012

Thanks... I wanted to confirm if the option to clean Hjerim up still wasn't working properly.

Oh, and one other thing I'd be happy to confirm: we still have the alphabetical BSA loading issue where BSA files override others based on the alpha sequence of their ESP, ie the same vanilla script in AMod.bsa tied to AMod.esp gets overridden by BMod.bsa tied to BMod.esp, correct?

If so I need to rename the USKP to "A Skyrim Unofficial Patch.esp" and "A Skyrim Unofficial Patch.bsa"

If I go with "A Unofficial Skyrim Patch.esp" the English majors will complain.

Edited March 13, 2012 by Kivan

March 13, 2012

No, I think the BSA loading issue has been fixed. I thought that once we figured out that it was now loading mods according to plugins.txt, all that got resolved. Probably best to get confirmation from Arthmoor though. I can't find the thread on Beth right now that talked about it.

Now, here's what I've found so far regarding this quest:

It's started by the MS11Kicker quest, which has this code snippet in its startup stage:

EnterWindhelmCount.SetValueInt(EnterWindhelmCount.GetValueInt() + 1)

Debug.Trace("MS11: Counting entrance to Windhelm -- " + EnterWindhelmCount.GetValueInt())

if ((EnterWindhelmCount.GetValueInt() >= 4))
if (  (GameHour.GetValueInt() >= 19) || (GameHour.GetValueInt() < 7)  )
	 Debug.Trace("MS11: Kicking quest start on Windhelm entrance #" + EnterWindhelmCount.GetValueInt())
	MS11.Start()
endif
endif

if (MS11.GetStageDone(100) && !MS11.GetStageDone(105))
if (GameDaysPassed.Value > FollowupStartDay.Value)
	MS11.SetStage(105)
endif
endif

Stop()

As our logs show, it's definitely incrementing that counter. So the quest should start between 19:00 and 6:59. Continuing to trace...

Quest has definitely started. So is that the first problem? I don't see anything in that code snippet that would prevent MS11 from continually starting.

Log entries:

[03/13/2012 - 02:01:53AM] MS11: Counting entrance to Windhelm -- 33
[03/13/2012 - 02:01:53AM] MS11: Kicking quest start on Windhelm entrance #33

Also, in the MS11 startup stage script, I don't know how to track down these references:

kmyQuest.Setup()

PreQuest.Stop()

SetStage(1)

What is kmyQuest?

Edited March 13, 2012 by AndalayBay

March 13, 2012

kMyQuest is an operator to reference the owning quest's script's variables or functions without needing an explicit cast.

Arencha glad they made it so easy for us this time around? What with the aliases and properties it takes me 4-5 times as long to write scripts.

March 13, 2012

Oh for christ's sake. Talk about taking a good idea (object oriented style scripting) and completely breaking it! Goddamn fucking hell - this is worse than global variables. Sorry, I'll stop the rant now, but this is going to mean a ton of issues down the line.

Anyway, I just did an sqv on MS11 and it's not enabled or running, so I don't get it. It starts when I enter Windhelm, but stops as soon as I leave? I guess they've set it up that I have to witness the scene and then the quest will continue. But I don't see anything when I enter Windhelm. The scene is supposed to be in the cemetary, right? I'll do some more checking.

Also, we need Conscribe back. I'll start bugging shadeMe about that too.

March 13, 2012

Don't even get me started on the fiddly PSC/PEX file mess.

March 13, 2012

Yeah, not sure who's brilliant idea it was to pull the scripts outside of the CK. I notice that Find Text never works anymore either.

Anyway went back to Windhelm again. Once again the MS11Kicker quest runs but doesn't do anything. It says that MS11 has started, but an sqv on MS11 says otherwise. And no body is present. I was in the city at 4:45am which is right in the proper time frame. But the quest isn't running and the quest stage doesn't get set to 1, despite that little code snippet I posted previously.

I can see that there's a MS11KickoffActivator script, but I don't know what that's attached to. I also don't know when that's supposed to come into play, although you'd think that something called Kickoff would be at the start...

March 14, 2012

BSA load ordering was fully corrected with the 1.4.27 patch. They now load in the same order as the mods in plugins.txt. Which makes getting load order correct pretty damned important now.

As far as MS11, there are numerous trigger boxes sitting in the WindhelmWorld worldspace that probably have something to do with why this thing isn't working properly. For instance, I've never once seen a debug message telling me that MS11.Start() actually fired. I've only ever seen the log of how many times I've visited. Since my lizard has been there 50 times now, that's definitely >= 4, but SQV claims MS11 isn't running at all.

Something is obviously interfering with this. If it's not one of the trigger boxes, has anyone checked the SM Event Nodes yet to see that something THERE isn't causing a conflict? It sure seems like something is actively stopping the quest to me.

March 14, 2012

Ok, that might be a place to look then. Because I've gotten the log message saying it's started, but when I do an SQV, it's definitely not running and the kicker quest isn't either.

March 14, 2012

The only reference I can find in the SM Event Nodes is the Change Location Event, which is definitely firing fine.

March 14, 2012

BSA load ordering was fully corrected with the 1.4.27 patch. They now load in the same order as the mods in plugins.txt. Which makes getting load order correct pretty damned important now.

Yay! No stupid renaming! :beerchug:

March 15, 2012

It looks like the beta fixes a couple of bits concerning this quest. I guess I'll grab the beta and see if I can get the stupid thing to trigger!

March 15, 2012

I noticed that. Are we going to be playing cat n mouse with Bethesda on this stuff now?

March 15, 2012

Now I have this image of Kivan pouncing on bugs! :rofl:

Yeah, it looks like we need to run through and try to confirm bugs with each patch. Is there any way to do a diff on the Skyrim masters to see exactly what was changed? Hmmm, too bad I haven't gotten Gecko done - you could compare plugins with that.

March 15, 2012

Well you could keep the old Update.esm file, rename it, then get the new one. Use FO3Edit to get at least some idea of what changed and what hasn't.

However, the CK needs an update now too. All those new kill cams are giving it fits about unknown settings and record sizes that have changed. I suspect that if one is not careful, mods generated with CK 1.4.23 will NOT WORK with Beta 1.5.

I've already found that Open Cities is no longer stable in any meaning of the word after testing it with the beta. It crashes on any cell transition in an affected city. Which doesn't bode well for me. When shit like this happens, starting over tends to be the only viable solution. That's not something I'm all that keen on having to do. Also means I have no test right now to know if the navmesh bug is fixed or not. Somehow I doubt it since cell transitions would certainly involve loading navmeshes into memory.

Edited March 15, 2012 by Arthmoor

March 15, 2012

They didn't mention anything about the navmesh bug, so I doubt that's fixed.

I haven't grabbed the beta yet, and now I'm not sure what to do... Are they going to release an update to the CK? Probably a rhetorical question - not sure you'd know anymore than I would. Might have to poke them about that.

March 15, 2012

I already posted a poking, this is what you'll see though if you update to 1.5 and then try and launch the CK with Update.esm loaded (which you NEED for USKP work)

MASTERFILE: ===========================================================

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'fTemperingSkillUseItemValConst' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'fTemperingSkillUseItemValExp' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'fTemperingSkillUseItemValMult' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'fConstructibleSkillUseConst' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'fConstructibleSkilluseExp' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'fConstructibleSkillUseMult' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

MASTERFILE: GameSetting 'sInvalidTagString' in file 'Update.esm' is not recognized by the current EXE.

FORMS: Chunk size 44 too big in chunk DATA_ID in form CAMS_ID (0010C75B).