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[SSE] Dialogue Bugs Strike Back!


Arthmoor

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An old bug has reared its ugly head again in SSE - one quest modders should be intimately familiar with - the dreaded "Dialogue Bug" (details here:https://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/3160-skyrim-solution-dialogue-bug-fix/  )

The tl;dr is this: A quest unique to your mod with new dialogue lines in it will not run the dialogue unless you save/reload the game. Even quicksave/quickload works. The solution was to generate a .seq file to distribute with the mod and all was well.

Somewhere along the way this solution has stopped working. Mods with generated .seq files are (at least for some of us) not firing off their dialogue anymore despite the use of these files. Only this time the problem is not limited to us. In SSE, even the base game files now have this same problem. This can be quickly checked by starting a new game, going to Windhelm, finding Sofie over by the gate and trying to talk to her. If everything works as expected, she'll try to sell you flowers. If not though, all she'll do is give you generic "hmm?" style responses with no other dialogue. If you then save and reload the game, all is well.

Bethesda will have to fix their own broken stuff at this point as fixing these in the USSEP is simply not viable (nor would it work anyway).

For the rest of us, as long as there are not too many quests flagged as "start game enabled", there's a solid workaround. You can either set a trigger box up somewhere the player can't avoid walking through, or set up a control quest with an OnInit() event that then calls startup on everything else you need to have done. So long as the quests with your dialogue have those startup calls issued *after* the game starts, this should work fine. It's a shitty workaround to an even shittier problem, but there's no way to know if BGS can or will fix this on their end even though it affects both the base game and all of the CC DLCs that have these kinds of quests running.

The weird part about this is, reports of this behavior go back as far as March of 2019 yet are not widespread or even consistently reproducible. For instance, until I finished my system upgrade tonight, I was unable to verify this problem because all of my game dialogue worked in all cases. Now, after a fresh Windows install and restoration of my game files, it is broken unless I do the save/reload thing. Go figure on why that might be, but there it is.

Oh, and just in case someone was thinking it, no, deleting the .seq file doesn't help. I tried :P

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  • Arthmoor pinned this topic

Unfortunately, I'm 100% confident in the fact that Bethesda will NOT fix an almost 10 years old game...

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  • 5 months later...

Well, I stumbled over this recently and thought, oh well, if I want to port my followers mod to SE some day, I need to take care about it. I have a lot of dialogue quests that are start enabled. I tried to be clever.

So I reworked the quest structure and started only my mainquest that works as a frame around all with the game. All other quests were started then through queststages or dialogue. That works great and I thought it's even better if quests get only started, when they are really needed.

What I did not know was, that every line flagged with say once needs to be put in a start enabled quest. I tested and wondered why always the same topics appeared and game completely ignored my say once flags. Topics list got bigger and bigger. That never occured in years. Then I found out.

Switched everything back now and all works fine. So what do I do exactly when porting over? A follower mod that triggers no dialogue is like fish without water. And save - load the game is immersion breaking. Triggerboxes would not work for me, never know where the player runs along.

How would that work with the OnInit event? After my last excursion with that event I have no idea how to set this up.:shrug:

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  • 9 months later...

I am starting to suspect it goes further than described. I’m in process of porting a mod up from LE, that has a scene with dialogue that just doesn’t do anything in SE. The quest is NOT marked “start game enabled” but the dialogue is stubbornly missing. Everyone just stands around looking at each other and saying nothing. Since player controls are disabled at this point, it becomes a show-stopper. 

I will try to detach the stage-setting from the dialogue, but I suspect the scene is just hung up, and the quest will never get any notification of it ending.

Orc Hearthfires’ post-fight scene dialogue worked, but there are still some pathing/timing issues with that. So I have one mod with a semi-working scene, and another where it hangs with no dialogue showing. If I gain any insights, I’ll add them here.

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