Hey guys, as I've been scripting quests I've gotten into the habit of simply calling SetStage on objects and events that move the quest forward (like picking up an item or killing an actor), and putting my SetObjectiveCompleted and SetObjectiveDisplayed in the fragment box of the stage itself.

I notice some people (Beth included) use those on the objects rather than fragments, and sometimes mix stage and displayed up together. Particularly in their CK Wiki quest tutorials.

Is there a preferred way for you guys? Or am I doing it the wrong way?

You can do it however you want to do it. I prefer using the Stages to display Objectives because it's cleaner (keeps the quest operation stuff isolated to the Quest's assets, meaning less work to track things down for debugging). Actions and events in game call the stage changes, and the stages themselves call the Objectives and anything else related to that quest that needs to happen at that time. That's my preference.

Yea that's how I do it. There's no disadvantage to that method as far as I can see. Other than if you alter your stages and not your objectives

That was how I started out doing things, because it is so neat. But I think there are some disadvantages:

1) Quest fragment scripts are the least readable scripts in the game. Particularly because fragment numbers aren't obviously related to stage numbers. Of course comments help here.

2) Quest stages occasionally become associated with the wrong fragment number, causing much mystification and gnashing of teeth.

3) As AmethystDeceiver has noted, dialogue TIFs can be changed or deleted without problems, but deleting other scripts (or their properties) causes Papyrus to complain in perpetuity. Making TIFs perhaps the best scripts to use whenever possible, despite their horridly unhelpful and unprefixed names?

4) This is speculative, but it seems to me that having a larger number of smaller scripts could help the game take advantage of multithreading, when that's desirable. I don't suppose this matters when all you're doing is setting objectives, but it might count against doing everything in a quest script.

Yea some good points mate.

I just like the neatness of it. All my enabling and disabling, setting and displaying objectives, an all that stuff, is done in the stage script. Outside the script, events just push the stages forward.

I think I like thr way because having a whole host of various objects in the quest can get confusing as to what does what. So if my quest controls all that stuff, it's easier for me to manage it.