[RELz/WIPz] Unofficial Starfield Patch

[DayDreamer]

[again, this should probably be a new topic]

At the parents' house, my bed does not work. Nor does the kitchen work. The parents repeatedly say I'm welcome, and invite me to stay. Is this is bug? An improper ownership?

[smr1957]

25 minutes ago, DayDreamer said:

[again, this should probably be a new topic]

At the parents' house, my bed does not work. Nor does the kitchen work. The parents repeatedly say I'm welcome, and invite me to stay. Is this is bug? An improper ownership?

You should be able to sleep in your childhood bed, but as for functioning kitchens, there are basically none in Starfield - cooking is done at Cooking Stations, stoves and other appliances are just for show.  As to the sleeping issue, are you using any mods?

Edited July 23 by smr1957

[DayDreamer]

16 hours ago, smr1957 said:

You should be able to sleep in your childhood bed

Checked again. Nope. Tried parent's double bed in the other room, and that works.

16 hours ago, smr1957 said:

stoves and other appliances are just for show

But NPCs appear to use them.  So player should be able to use them.

Things are just not done as well as Skyrim. The whole place has a sterile feeling. Too many untouchable objects. Like the fake barrels and boxes among the working ones in Skyrim, but so many more of them here....

Having to wander around all the time with the 'f' scanner running is not very immersive. While the mechanic has an explanation for searching outside, and a path-finding function, it just feels wrong indoors. It would be better to have everything functional.

Rather, the scanner would be more useful to instead intelligently highlight only "resources" and "unread books" among the clutter.

At least you can pick up the forks and knives and plates. Remember the unusable ones in Skyrim until the unofficial patch fixed them.

16 hours ago, smr1957 said:

are you using any mods?

Smallest load order ever: SFSE, Baka Achievement Enabler, and USFP.

[smr1957]

I haven't used the trait that makes the parents' home available - but it would seem to be either a misplaced marker or Bethesda set it up that way (though I can't see having them set the parent's bed as useable by you and not you own childhood bed).

As to the other critiques you made, those are all design decisions, and as such are outside the scope of the Unofficial Patch (that's not to say they aren't good points that you made - just that they are not something that the USFP team can address).

[DayDreamer]

I'm gradually discovering things that probably should be obvious to everybody else. Just went back 2 weeks of saves, because I'd not realized that Sarah was supposed to be assigned to the ship. It had a tutorial hint for Vasco, but my brain didn't make the connection for Sarah. Now she says a lot of things during flights, and flights use less fuel.

Anyway, on this run, I've discovered that Sarah and Andreja are not capable of moving near each other. They constantly stop and talk. Sneaking, they talk. Weapons out, they talk. As they walk up a stair, they talk at every landing. Then stare at each other silently for awhile.

This did not happen in my previous attempt using Barrett. This does not happen between the Lodge characters, who seem to talk in the background once per 10 to 15 minutes.

What we need is an "time between related events" test, as in Skyrim for every random dialogue line.

In the CK, I'm not able to figure out how "Actor Dialogue Event" triggers the 4 scenes. (The scenes themselves were easy to find.) Under well hidden Character->Quest->Story Manager Events, the (00021E65) Actor Dialogue Event "is an invalid version to be edited."

Quote

The current version of this form is more recent than this editor can support. Please update your editor before modifying this form.

File SFBGS003.esm.

CK 1.12.36.0 was downloaded a few days ago (Jul 26, 2024, at 5:43 PM), more recently than the game, so it should be very up to date.

[Hand typed, as the CK doesn't allow copy and paste of its forms. Sorry for any mistakes.]

 

[DayDreamer]

On 7/24/2024 at 7:29 AM, smr1957 said:

or Bethesda set it up that way

Neither 0021C4D2 (single) nor 000229C1 (double) have ownership or faction set. And both objects show those lollipop tags out the side, that usually mean the furniture is usable.

I'm missing something here?

[Arthmoor]

37 minutes ago, DayDreamer said:

File SFBGS003.esm.

The issue with this is that the file uses a bunch of Partial Form designations but apparently the public CK is not capable of dealing with that yet.

[DayDreamer]

18 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

the public CK

is an obsolete CK. We cannot depend on its input, or its output. We cannot depend on its provided source for scripts.

Why can we depend on it for an unofficial patch?

[Arthmoor]

Because it's not obsolete, the scripts are actually being kept up to date, and it works perfectly fine as long as you minimize or avoid touching records it claims it can't edit.

[DayDreamer]

On 7/24/2024 at 7:29 AM, smr1957 said:

either a misplaced marker or Bethesda set it up that way

Bethesda site dressing put a static bedspread object over the main part of the bed, blocking the bed activator. Very hard to detect in the CK.

You can use the bed by sidling to the far right, and targeting the pillow instead of the usual middle of the bed. I'll report the bug. It would have been better to simply use differently colored beds.

Another issue is the unique backpack and note respawn.

Edited August 10 by DayDreamer

[smr1957]

5 hours ago, DayDreamer said:

Bethesda site dressing put a static bedspread object over the main part of the bed, blocking the bed activator. Very hard to detect in the CK.

You can use the bed by sidling to the far right, and targeting the pillow instead of the usual middle of the bed. I'll report the bug. It would have been better to simply use differently colored beds.

Another issue is the unique backpack and note respawn.

Wow, what can I say... Glad you discovered the reason for it, DayDreamer.   That deserves a cookie!  ...or two 

[Arthmoor]

USFP 1.0.3 is out. Not much done on this one, mostly keeping in sync with 3 fixes Bethesda did.

[DayDreamer]

IIRC Arthmoor opined that there were not many things to fix.

The UESP folks have figured out how to dump the affinity tables and conversation scenes. It has become apparent that there are huge numbers of bugs or omissions. Part of the problem is the CK isn't capable of bringing up related records. For example, a prompt in a scene might have [C] (conditional) and/or [AF] (affinity), but there's no easy (single click) way to find the condition or matching affinity. The result is dozens (or hundreds) of missing entries. Scenes were setup and voiced and even occur, but the affinity remains unspecified (indifferent) for many or all companions.

Another problem seems to be missing triggers. In the data there are triggered scenes that never happen. Sarah in New Atlantis are mostly QA'd and working, but lots of missing stuff otherwise. The problem with these is it's impossible for us to know whether this was deliberately cut content, or badly implemented, or simply overlooked.

Then there's the problem of regulating the frequency of scenes. Many are nicely bundled into a quest, and can run only once per day and/or once per planet visit and/or only after all the other random scenes in the same quest have run.

Others are each in separate quests, and run over and over and over with no regulation. I've seen folks complaining about Cora. My report to Bethesda about Sarah and Andreja in the same cave was marked "duplicate". They know about the problem. The weird thing is that Barrett and Andreja don't seem to have the problem in my subsequent test, but I cannot figure out why....

[DayDreamer]

On 7/31/2024 at 6:00 PM, Arthmoor said:

it works perfectly fine as long as you minimize or avoid touching records it claims it can't edit.

The recent version can edit more records. Those story manager records appear now.

Another thing that seems to be working better is the scene records. I've finally figured out how dialogue loops and progression works. It's amazingly flexible directed graphs, that cannot readily be displayed by the CK scene manager. Every response can jump to any quest and any scene and any phase. (Because they used the same form for prompts, they also could jump, somehow around the paired responses, but that would be insanity; I've not found any yet.) Affinity changes can happen on either the prompt or response side (or both).

It takes at least 3 clicks to bring up the link records, so there seem to be plenty of mistakes and oversights. Anything that requires so much effort means that QA misses them. Different developers used different layout techniques. Some were very consistent and diligent, others not so much.

Also, different quests that can happen in parallel and/or sequence weren't well tested together. My most recent example, taking Sam Coe to Neon (first time) on both the Rangers faction (Shadows in Neon) and main mission (All That Money Can Buy). Besides the oddness of them interleaved, eventually Sam is such high affinity that we begin his special companion quest, whose first thing is going into the Rangers office. The ranger is verbally hostile to Sam. But we were both there just 2 game days earlier with no hostility.

How much of this inconsistency would we like to fix?

Also, the displayed speech is often different than that spoken. We fixed a lot of text in Skyrim. Is that planned here?

 

Edited September 13 by DayDreamer
phase

[Arthmoor]

USFP 1.0.4 has been released in support of the new game update version 1.14.70.