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

[Arthmoor]

Yes, but TESVSnip doesn't have a side by side view like TES4Edit does. Comparing stuff in that manner would not be easy. FNVEdit may not be ideal, but even in a massively broken state it's still more useful for comparison purposes than anything we currently have.

[AndalayBay]

That's true.

[Arthmoor]

Notice this when testing civil war starts and such in Windhelm:

[03/19/2012 - 08:23:00PM] MS11: Counting entrance to Windhelm -- 1
[03/19/2012 - 08:23:01PM] MS11: Counting entrance to Windhelm -- 2
[03/19/2012 - 08:23:02PM] MS11: Counting entrance to Windhelm -- 3
[03/19/2012 - 08:23:02PM] MS11: Counting entrance to Windhelm -- 4

It seems that damn trigger or whatever it is is going count crazy. That was with appearing on the docks, and walking from there up to the palace. 4 visits despite clearly only being on one? With 1.4.27 btw.

[AndalayBay]

The problem is that that variable is incremented in the ChangeLocation event node - see my post on the previous page. So it would seem that change location is firing way too often. Other than be rather inefficient, I'm not sure that's a problem though, since the quest start criteria is simply >=4.

There's something that's stopping this quest from continuing and I can't figure out what it is. I thought it was incredibly ironic that there was somebody on Beth the other day asking how to keep this quest from firing because they wanted the murder victim as a companion or something like that.

[Arthmoor]

Even if the change location event is flaky, firing 4 times upon simply arriving at the Windhelm docks makes no sense. Using the alt-start, I checked it the moment I selected to arrive in Windhelm, and the log had 4 hits already. It picked up 2 more after I went to go bug Ulfric. So whatever it is, it's totally fubar.

[AndalayBay]

It might update every time you change a cell - a single cell, not even a load zone. Which is terrible for performance...

[Arthmoor]

That doesn't explain why it updated itself 4 times before I even began walking. The cell changes I could see, and there may not be a way around that, but just standing there?

[AndalayBay]

Oh... that is odd.

[AndalayBay]

Grrr... I thought I might have found a way to make this quest trigger, but I don't think it has. I'm still on 1.4.27 and I'm wondering if I should upgrade before messing around with it anymore.

Here's my game progression:

• sided with the Imperials, but didn't complete the civil war questline. Got partway through it and opted for the negotiation option in the MQ. So Ulfrid is still the Jarl of Windhelm and doesn't like me. I've tried doing a couple of radiant quests, but I don't think I'll get the option to buy the house this way.
  
• killed Nilsine Shatter-Shield as part of the DB quest
  
• broke into the Shatter-Shield house to grab one of Barenziah's stones
  
• grabbed key to Hjerim from Tova Shatter-Shield's body
  

I had read somewhere that the other way to get the Blood on the Ice quest to trigger was to enter Hjerim, but I think that's only if you buy Hjerim, not enter it this way. Because when I entered the house, nothing happened, even though I read the journals.

So I think this is well and truly broken... I'm not sure how to track it down.

[Arthmoor]

Upgrading won't matter, they didn't give us the updated Papyrus scripts again, so we're going to be firing blind against anything they may have done with 1.5.

So far as I've seen, you can't BUY the house until after this quest is done, so whoever keeps saying to buy it first is wrong. The steward just whines about something bad happening there and won't sell.

Edited March 20, 2012 by Arthmoor

[AndalayBay]

I don't even get the option. Apparently it's Ulfric that's supposed to suggest you buy the house to become Thane and he doesn't like me, so I don't get that dialogue.

Ok, let me run some SQV's after entering the house and see what they say.

[AndalayBay]

Nadda. This quest will just not trigger for me. I have the key to the house, but entering it doesn't fire off the quest either, even though I see all the blood and journals.

[Arthmoor]

I'm beginning to suspect there's a problem with one of the aliases. If they can't all fill correctly, the quest will simply fail to start. I had something similar happen while updating Live Another Life. I made a couple of aliases to take over Balgruuf's AI and was stymied by the startup of the mod simply dying with nothing in the logs to explain why. Then I removed the aliases and it worked again. So I think that's where the problem lies. How to fix that? Hell if I know. This alias thing is like trying to decipher Greek.

[AndalayBay]

Well it gives us an idea of where to look because I've been stuck - completely. I'll try going through and listing them. If you dig some up, please do the same.

[Arthmoor]

It's definitely got to be alias related.

On a freshly started character landed in Windhelm, the kicker quest counts up the 4 needed visits immediately. Use the carriage to leave. Come back by carriage. Make sure the game hour is between 7pm and 7am. Enter Windhelm, head for the graveyard. The quest will have begun properly. Checking SQV output shows all aliases for MS11 have filled.

Trying this with my Argonian results in the quest simply never starting, with all aliases on MS11 listing "NONE" as a value. Classic case of alias fill failure - which despite the flag, never logs a warning when this happens. He's completed the civil war on the Stormcloak side if that matters, which I have to assume it somehow does.

My freshly created guy was able to talk to the guard, interrogate the 3 witnesses, then went to see the steward to get permission to investigate. 3 objectives popped up then. One to investigate the crime scene. One to speak to the steward (wtf, I just did!) and one to talk to the old woman who runs the Hall of the Dead. Talking to the old woman is the only objective I can complete at this point. Investigate the crime scene points me back to where the body was, but nothing triggers to complete the objective. The steward has no further dialogue options. Thus, I am stuck if I am following the clue trail as strictly given to me. There is no indication of what else needs to be done to get one of these other objectives to clear, and I can't even figure out how stage 50 gets called, or if it does. We may not have this code since the CK update didn't ship with updated scripts. Again.

My conjurer who short circuited all of this stuff at the beginning never got the Necromancer's Amulet you're supposed to be able to obtain, and with Claxito dead, there's no chance of that happening either, though he somehow tripped the quest while playing in 1.4 and it's known to still be quite broken there.

[AndalayBay]

According to the UESP wiki, you should have gotten a clue that Susanna's coin purse is still intact. There seem to be a couple of other people you can talk to, although I suspect you find that by blind luck.

Can you track down the aliases or are you looking for some help with that? I'm working on some other programming stuff right now, but can crack open the CK if you want.

[Arthmoor]

Yes, the old woman from the Hall of the Dead is one of the witnesses. She mentioned the coinpurse still being intact. I got stuck at a later stage.

Tracking down the aliases is easy, they're all contained in the MS11 quest. Figuring out why they fill with a fresh char vs a post-war char is what's going to be difficult, if not impossible. Some of the aliases are just location and marker stuff, which shouldn't really change. It doesn't help any that the checkbox in the quest data tab to warn on fill failure does nothing at all. Unless that requires a debug flag of some kind.

[Arthmoor]

Scratch that. Missed where the guard said to follow the blood trail. The quest is completable as is in 1.5, apparently so long as you haven't finished the war yet.

[AndalayBay]

Now we need to track down what interferes with this if you've finished the civil war or the truce part in the MQ - it doesn't work after that point either.

[Arthmoor]

The peace conference gets in the way? Hrm. Nothing in any of these aliases suggests why that would be.

I did find though that my poor lizard has already broken into Hjerim, which has probably screwed something up permanently there. Not a thing in his journal about it though.

[AndalayBay]

I think I messed things up by starting the civil war by siding with the Imperials and not finishing it. I still have the quest in my journal, even though there's no way to complete it now (the Reunification of Skyrim quest). There are so many permutations...

[Arthmoor]

The aliases on MS11 have at least one verifiable problem. Ulfric is included in the list, yet has no role to play. This would almost certainly cause issues with finishing on the Imperial side since he'll be dead and gone. It's marked as an optional alias, but I don't believe this will take into account his being alive at the start and dying later. He shouldn't be included at all.

Also, I recall having seen some sort of chatter somewhere (too many places to remember it now) but it had something to do with this quest not being doable. Well, it *IS* if you've never hit it before and are playing it through cleanly with 1.5.24 and up. I'm coming to the conclusion that it will be impossible to retroactively correct it. There's too many sneak circuits here.

Edited March 28, 2012 by Arthmoor

[AndalayBay]

Kivan's post here sounds like he has some fixes for this quest, so I'm not sure if there's anything for us to do or not.

I've pretty much concluded that this quest is permanently broken in my current game and I'd have to start a new one to be able to do it.

[AndalayBay]

With the start of a new game, I was finally able to complete this quest. Still buggy though. The main thing was I talked to the court mage and got the option to wait for the murderer to strike again. That was supposed to happen at night. Well then why did I get to witness the murder at 3 in the afternoon? Please don't tell me that setting the timescale to 10 screws everything up. I worked just fine in Oblivion.

I didn't follow the path suggested by the journal. Rather I talked to the mage first and he never got arrested. The option winds up being the same, although I believe you can prevent another murder this way.

[Arthmoor]

So far as I can tell, there's only two possible murders you can take part in investigating. The 3rd only happens if you don't stop the killer fast enough.

Funny you should mention this quest btw. The USKP has fixes for it which were written up prior to Patch 1.5 and I'm fairly certain we're now stepping on Bethesda's own work done to fix things. We don't have the updated source code though, so there's absolutely no way to know what we're clobbering.