Can you help me understand what you mean by "Topic/Info"?

I'm experiencing this bug first hand in both my mods, and what you describe does not reflect what I'm seeing. For a consolidation, go back to my Summary post and B1gBadDaddy's Summary post. We've both provided summaries from what we've been seeing.

As I understand a "topic", they are a subset of the Dialog? So unless I misunderstand your meaning, that doesn't describe what I'm seeing. It's a bigger problem spanning many aspects of the quest - from the dialog (as you know), to the Scenes and including the Quest itself - such as the "Start Game Enabled" not getting applied correctly. I would say the problem is with the conditions/variable for the Quest object. The Quest object does not seem to be initialized properly and/or not saving its state correctly.

Examples:
Quest conditions not working the first time - requiring the save & reload
Quest conditions wrong - how to explain both dialog topics display for an either/or condition check?
"Say Once" state not being "remembered"
ESP disables vanilla dialog but the vanilla dialog still runs

And my newest discovery:
Dialog broken when running in seperate Quest works exactly as it should with the same condition check (including Say Once dialog) when running as part of a vanilla dialog.

What quest conditions, and what are the symptoms, apart from dialogue not happening (or the results of dialogue not happening)? Has a quest without dialogue not started?

All the other things you've mentioned are scenes and dialogue, which means they use Topics - the things actually said. (Well, I suppose scenes without topics are possible, but surely rare to non-existent.)

Yeah my ESM has this problem. Most dialogue doesn't work, saving and reloading fixes it for some of my testers. What dialogue works when, for who, is really sparatic.

Quest conditions - the conditions on the first page of the quest to determine who the quest dialog applies to

1. The "Start Game Enabled" is specificaly not a topic, which is why I'm saying it's not "just" a topic issue.
2. "Say Once" is not a topic - it applies to a topic, but obviously not a topic itself.
3. Both dialogs diaplay even though it uses an either/or condition - so the topics themselves are fine, but the conditions limiting when to show is the problem

My point is to say that I don't think the problem is "limited" to topics... I think it is a deeper problem affecting topics, scenes, etc. Interesting point you ask about quests without dialogs not starting. Even if there is no dialog, that wouldn't neseccarily mean it's the dialog/topic, it could also be that there's no conditions on the quest.


I agree with Arthmoor on this point. That's the reason I am being so particular. As a developer myself, if I had to go in to this code to start debugging it, these distinctions are BIG. Who knows, maybe I'm not helping, but if I don't at least try, I can't complain much if it doesn't get fixed. So, please, keep the questions coming I think they help.

Simply for testing purposes I created a new ESP with Dawnguard as it's master. Created a new quest, start game enabled, run once, priority 30. 1 Dialogue branch + topic, just for hunters in the game to say.

Results:

Same as my non-Dawnguard mods. Dialogue only shows after saving and reloading. SQV shows the quest as running/enabled.

So we know the problem applies to both user created ESM's and ESP's...

"Start Game Enabled" does seem to be a common thread, but not "the" problem:
1) Obviously the Skyrim.ESM "Start Game Enabled" are not affected (but ESM isn't the answer as AV reported)
2) Even though an ESP disables a vanilla quest (unchecking the "Start Game Enabled"), the vanilla quest still runs and shows its dialog
3) Dialog/conditions that don't work in a new based Quest work fine when inserted in to a vanilla quest (so it's not the dialog or conditions themselves)
4) As B1gBadDaddy's just showed, the problem isn't limited to using Skyrim.ESM as the master (I think others reported the same results when using/not using Update.ESM?)

I have sent another PM to Gstaff. He has yet to read any of my mine from the last week or so. I really hope he can soon so they devs get the info and have all week to work on it. Hopefully 1.8 can contain a final fix... I'm really urging him to get a dev in here so we can talk directly to them and report our finding in a constructive and organized manner. :/

Sollar, by Topic/Info I am going by the definition provided by Bethesda - an Info is one or more Responses (ie "line of dialogue") meeting a single circumstance (ie conditions), and a Topic is a collection of Infos which will fire when a condition is met. Here's an example, to my understanding:

Topic A: Tell me why you're here.
Info 1: These notes can summarize the matter, sir.
(conditions: speaker is a specific NPC, and player has completed the Winterhold questline)
Info 2: You aren't cleared to know.
Get back to the college.
(conditions: speaker is a specific NPC, and player has begun the Winterhold questline)
Info 3: None of your business, punk.
(conditions: speaker is a specific NPC, and player has not started the Winterhold questline)

When the player speaks to the NPC in question, the game checks conditions for an appropriate Topic and associated Info to appear as a choice for the player. In this case it goes down the list of Infos until it hits a set of conditions that works - "speaker is a specific NPC" hits because it is this specific NPC, but then the Winterhold questline checks will determine the specific Topic/Info combination to be presented to the player.

When everything is working correctly, the player should see "Tell me why you're here" as a selection, and after selection the correct Info will appear. However, the Topic/Info combo is made prior to the player selecting "Tell me why you're here" - presumably it occurs when you first attempt to talk to the NPC, but I don't know for certain. This would seem to be the case due to the existence of Prompts which allow you to alter the particular Topic/Info combination (for example, "What are you wizards doing here?" as the prompt for Info 3 above).

When it isn't working correctly, no Topic/Info combo will appear. I guess the easiest way to test this is to make a conditionless Topic/Info which should presumably appear for every NPC in the game. If it doesn't without the load/save/reload workaround, then the game may be looking at some kind of hidden condition that is not added by the mod creator.

I just want to point out that in my Dawnguard game, the bug extends to vanilla NPCs. For example, dialogue I have already had with Serana IS NOT GRAYED OUT unless I save/re-load. I don't know if it's been said before, but the problem is not "Say Once" per se, but that all dialogue resets, and "Say Once" repeating is a symptom that results from the game not flagging what lines you've previously listened to.

EDIT: Here is a video showing what I mean. Shows a Dawnguard NPC and location so kind of spoilery but not really as there's no context.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQbedm3x2Ko

But the only failures I have seen mentioned in Starts Game enabled quests are in their dialogue (or scenes which use Topics). Are other things failing - for example, their aliases?


I think your points 2 and 3 are probably the same thing, as SayOnce is a sort of hidden condition: the game must store whether a topic's been said and save that somewhere. And the need to load a game the mod has touched (which is the 'Starts game enabled problem, as I understand it) could suggest that the game wants to load a value that isn't in a savegame.- possibly a hidden condition value.

I agree that conditions on Topics including hidden ones looks like it could be the problem. I just don't want to broaden it to say 'quests', until some symptom not involving topics is found. Not least because there've been problems with ForceGreet packages, which are not quests but use topics.

Edit: This!

Sollar, this is something that struck me when I looked at your summary post. If you don't mind, I have a question for you about the Scenic Carriages showing both options incorrectly as you previously mentioned. Do you have them set up as:

Topic A
Info 1 (conditions)
Info 2 (separate conditions)

Or as:

Topic A
Info 1 (conditions)

Topic B
Info 1 (conditions)

Thanks!

Good to know. I am very pleased, that you have been able to positively rule out the possibility, that "Start Game Enabled" might have any causality with the issue. Otherwise, I would have thought it a bit odd to try to suppress any evidence seeking in the matter.

Still, having a vivid imagination, I might be able to think of a scenario, although not a likely one, where the game engine, for whatever reason, might look for that condition only in the first esm it loads, or something, or whatever. I guess anything might be possible, when one mixes a whole lot of 0's and 1's in a pile. Anyway, please take that just as an example of a vivid imagination, and not a serious theory.

My only serious comment would be, that this discussion seems to be mostly in need of good empirical evidence about the nature and extent of the issue, wherever that evidence might be found. Evidence, that clearly rules some things out, even though they might not initially feel like likely culprits to begin with, is always good evidence.

Excellent idea!!

So I tried it. Exact same results as before - dialog doesn't show until after Saving & Reloading.

What if you do the same for a vanilla quest? IE, add a topic to an existing Vanilla quest from the Skyrim.esm?

I haven't seen anyone post that their aliases are failing... doesn't mean it's not happening though. Maybe they can't get that far because they don't have the dialog? Or maybe they are failing and people aren't recognizing the problem? Would be a good test to see if it is the "conditions" that are failing.

I've been suggesting for a while that the problem is with the conditions, not the dialog topic. I think you're idea above would help narrow down the problem.

They are two different topics. I will test using your first scenario. Honestly, not sure what the results will indicate, but I think more data points are better than less.

In my mod the dialogue fails, but advancing quest stages does a bunch of things with aliases and every piece of that works correctly. Scripts are also fine. I have 20+ aliases in the quest, all of which appear are being filled correctly. For what I'm doing it would be very, very obvious if they were breaking or incorrect.

The conditions on the Quest data tab affect the dialogue, so that would not add anything. But packages have conditions: if conditions in general were the problem everything would be screwed up.

From my admittedly limited understanding of how Bethesda organizes its dialogue, it seems that the Topic with multiple Infos is their preferred way to handle conditionals. It doesn't particularly solve the issue, but it may be a workaround for separate either/or topics breaking.

I mean "quest" conditions...


So that would confirm it is not quest conditions either.

It's not topics either because I get all the topics, so they are working. It's not "just" topic conditions because the quest "Start Game Enabled" is not a topic condition.

You get all the topics without the load/save/reload workaround?

SGE quests work fine once the game is loaded from a savegame touched by the mod. Other quests are not affected simply because they aren't expected ever to work from a savegame that hasn't been touched by the mod, anyway. If the game now expects to find some data for topics in the savegame that is not present until a game has been saved with the mod active, that will affect SGE quests and not others.

Edit: However, I think topics are being reset even after games have been saved, so there must be something else as well.

Well, preferred or not, this is actually the Bethesda carriage dialog and it's how they did it. They have two completely seperate topic threads based on the carriage mode. And it was a good design that I kept. (It would make no sense to have it all combined to one topic as the choices aren't always 1:1.)

I should ellaborate though: It's actually more like this:

Topic A (Condition: Either/Or)
Info A1 (conditions)
Info A2 (separate conditions)

Topic B (Condition: Either/Or)
Info B1 (conditions)
Info B2 (separate conditions)

I created a new test, and it's working just as expected AFTER doing the Save & Reload. I'm even using the same Global Variable.

I do know many people are still using my mod without any problems. Others, have reverted back to my previous version which has the dialog still in the Bethesda quest. (I moved it to its own quest just before the 1.6 patch and thought I got lucky by dodging that bullet. I guess Beth uses a shotgun.)


After. Before I reload, I do have a topic (which is unlike my other mod).

Gotcha. Thanks!

Decided to go through my mod and see how long before a start enabled would fire off. Started in game at Fridas 10:40 and tried again on Middas at 2:40 and it worked. Went and did all of Sniffs quest, noticed odd behavior with combat subset of dialogue. I have two infos for Sniffs' Combat Topic dialogue. Both are set with flag of Random and only condition is that the speaker is Sniffs. The top info from the topic is the only one that ever fires currently.

Before the patch, it would actually alternate after 2-3 instances, and appear random in how he would select this.