So I have a custom NPC who sells house upgrades. Most of the time you press 'E' to initiate the dialogue and it shows the NPC's greeting and subsequent dialogue options immediately. The problem is that sometimes there is a full minute long silent pause before the dialogue shows up on screen. To be clear, the NPC's name is visible (as is normal when conversing) but there is no greeting and no dialogue options for an excruciating 60 seconds. It almost seems as if there is a long silent sound file that has to play before it begins. If anyone has any idea what I can do to fix this I would be eternally grateful. This issue has plagued me for a long time. >.>

For the record this is NOT the issue where the dialogue flies by - I have silent sound files attached to everything and normally the dialogue functions beautifully. There's just the occasional looong pause before it starts.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: The issue usually pops up after you have spoken to the NPC, exited the dialogue and then tried to speak to it again... not sure if that's relevant or not. Is it possible it has to finish playing the silent sound file for the bit of dialogue that just happened before it can move on? My silent sound files are usually 30 seconds to 1 min long.

Your suggestion sounds correct.

Although you can tab out of dialogue with an NPC, if the NPC was "playing" a sound/voice file when you did, AND that is the last voice file in a chain (so it has nothing else to skip to, in that topic) then you ARE listening to that speech, whatever you do ... and the NPC is frozen until it finishes it.

You should time your silences to only be as long as it takes to read the subtitles ... minimising the hanging around.