Troubleshooting Some Odd Forcegreet Behavior

[garthand]

While working on a mod, I decided to see if I could make a few tweaks to the marriage quest, (which spans across RelationshipMarriage, RelationshipMarriageWedding, and RelationshipMarriageFIN).

 

With the current setup, (with USLEEP), after the player character says their vows, the love interest attempts to leave the altar and usually stops within a second or two, and then looks back toward the altar. After Maramal is done talking, they try to deliver their forcegreet package, but end up just saying it out loud without forcegreeting, forcing you to go talk to them to hear it again. I wanted to see if I could change this behavior.

 

The first part, (the spouse trying to leave the altar), was a fairly easy fix. By moving the code (GetOwningQuest().SetStage(100)) from the beginning to the end of the papyrus fragment TIF__00075CA2, attached to Maramal's final monologue on the RelationshipMarriageWedding quest, your spouse wouldn't attempt to move until after Maramal was done speaking. As an added bonus, they would even forcegreet the player character as expected and deliver their line. However, this leaves a few issues and introduces some others I was hoping to get some guidance on. None of this is really game breaking stuff, but I'm hoping to use this as a learning opportunity and hopefully someone here knows more about this than I do, (actually, I'm sure of that, I'm just hoping someone will share that knowledge )

 

After moving that script to the end of the fragment, as soon as Maramal is done speaking and you can control your character again, some odd stuff happens. Your spouse won't deliver the forcegreet dialogue until you walk a few steps away from them, and then they'll walk towards you and forcegreet. Sometimes they deliver the dialogue immediately, but they won't say it via forcegreet. They then will wait for you to talk to them or for you to move away to forcegreet, repeating the dialogue. Even weirder, sometimes a dialogue menu will flash by and then disappear as if you had opened a dialogue menu with your spouse and then closed it.

 

I thought maybe this was a timing issue, and that if I could introduce a delay into processing the forcegreet package, it would work successfully. This is where I ran into a truly baffling issue. The forcegreet package (both the vanilla one and the HF variant), are attached to the LoveInterest alias on the RelationshipMarriageFIN quest. During my testing, I discovered that even if those packages were removed from the alias, the spouse would still act as if they were assigned to them. This was the case even if I deleted (!) the packages altogether.

 

I'm not sure if I've stumbled into an extremely bizarre bug that's forcing NPCs to process these packages in a specific way despite how I attach them (or don't), or if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how something works.

 

Any advice would be very appreciated. I'm happy to provide any more detail if needed.

[garthand]

Quick update. The issue seems to be something inherent in the forcegreet package. Moving the script to the end of the fragment keeps the spouse in place as hoped (yay!), but forcegreet won't trigger unless you're at least a few feet away from your spouse.

 

Has anyone ever run into a way to make forcegreet work when the distance between the player and the speaker is near zero? Also the forcegreet package mysteriously kicks in no matter what you do to it, but that's not a huge issue, more of a curiosity.