Hello, all. I like to think of myself as a pretty thorough play-tester, but since I've published my mod on the Nexus I've gotten several potential bug reports, only one of which I've been able to duplicate. They pretty much all have to do with the quest not advancing. The feedback has been constructive and I want to do right by the mod-users.

Now, I did find one bug in which my own cleverness thwarted me. I had different dialogue based on the cell the NPC happened to be in, and there was one particular cell in his path that I hadn't included in the conditional - so I couldn't duplicate it in game because the chances of him being in that particular cell at the particular time I talked to him were slim, but I eventually located the missing script in the dialogue. Found it, squashed it.

The other "bugs" (all of which seem to involve SetStage not firing when it should), however, are occurring at linear portions of the quest - only one way to move it forward: talk to X, acquire item Y. Everything works fine for me when I test in-game with a clean save, and I go into the CK to verify that all the scripts are where they're supposed to be. I even "quarantine" my scripts - moving my .pex and .psc files out of the Data file temporarily so that I'm only working with the same .bsa the players are when I test.

What are the chances these errors are just hiccups on other people's machines? And what other testing methodologies should I use to try and get this worked out. I pride myself on releasing polished mods, so having these blips pop up is very nerve-wracking. Unfortunately, only a few people ever tell you on the Nexus when everything works smoothly, so I don't get a clear sense of the numbers of people having problems vs. those having no problems.

I'd contact the bug reporters and ask if they have a savegame they can send you where the bug is occurring...then see what's happening and doublecheck things by using the trace and notification debug options and reloading the save to get the relevant variable values and back track it, and so on.

What mods atre your testers running that you are not?
What other quests - or other quest stages - have (or have not) fired for your testers (that's damned hard to track)?

Saved Games ... some things seem to persist in odd ways ...

Put another way, are you and your testers all running Vanilla and from the start of the game? If not, then - as suggested above - getting saved games from them (and a list of active mods) is probably going to be the only way.

Your testers' machines should not be having an impact ... but the state of their game may well be.