EDIT: One of the developers just explained this to me, and contrary to what I thought, the Dialog views aren't that important: they give a visual overview over the dialog flow, but you can just as well "only" add dialog through the Player dialog interface. Which means that the "rule of one" won't be a disaster in this case, it should work similar to Oblivion.




"The rule of one" as we know it from previous construction sets is valid also for the new creation kit. It basically means that if several mods changes the same thing - like an item, a npc, a voice, a vanilla (Oblivion or Morrowind) script - the last loaded mod will "win". It's the changes in this mod that will show up ingame.

Now, with Oblivion, this wasn't a big deal when writing dialog. You just made your own quest and linked possible replies to your hearts desire. You could cross-link topics and replies between various quests, it really was quite easy.

The dialog in Skyrim looks a bit different. You have quests and you have *dialog views* that are linked together.

I was thinking of how to add in an option to make my new housemod an optional place to live together with a spouse.

And then it dawned on me that this might as far as i can understand be quite tricky.

The way I believe the "rule of one" will work, I cannot do it through the original quest for spouses - if i add a new response-option to the dialog view, what would happen if someone else does the same? As far as I can understand, every dialog view from Skyrim will be cursed by the "rule of one". I.e. if someone else gets the same idea and adds a reply-option to the dialog-view for houses, this other persons mod will now overwrite mine.

So, in order to avoid this, I have to make a new quest with a new dialog view and a topic that is also added to spouses. I have to do this. And every other modder that wants to add his house as an available option for living with spouses will also have to do the same. So, we might then have 10-20 new topics about optional living.

It wasn't like this in Oblivion, as we could link replies from one quest to a topic from another quest - it worked like a charm. And I'm certainly not sure that I am right in everything i say here. But I think this could turn out to be a potential problem of quite some dignity.

What are your thoughts on this?

Maybe instead of a dialogue option, an activator in your house could work? I assume the new quest aliases system ( ) would allow you to override the AI of your spouse so that they start living there when the activator is pressed. It's not the most immersive system but it could work. Or you could have the new dialogue view and topic not show up until that 'make available for spouse' activator is used.

I'm basing most of what I know on tutorials so far and not personal experience though, so I might not be entirely accurate here.

Well, the dilemma is not how to handle spouses in houses - the dilemma is the dialog views and the rule of one.

Another example that comes to mind is if 20 different modders want to add extra resting options for companions and uses the original comanion topic as a template. The thing is that I believe the Dialog views follows the "rule of one" and this means that we can never reuse existing topics for any purpose, which of course else would have been a very tempting and easy solution.

Issues with dialog are not so often brought up; as I think there might be a potential major issue here, I thought I'd bring it up.

I understand now, that is a problem indeed.