EDIT: Looks like problem is related to other quests using the same NPCs.

I appears I have stumbled across a mod breaking bug caused by the new alias system. When I add one more alias to my mod, even if it has no fill types assigned, the additional dialogue topics no longer appear on all the npc's. Strangely, I am able to add a Specific Fill type with no problem, but that is on a horse (no dialogue). As far as I can see, the quest form is similar to the "stables" quest in the esm.

Human NPCs are all vanilla and use the Unique Actor fill type.
Horse NPC's are non-vanilla and use the Specific Reference fill type.
1 empty fill type, thats forced on a horse via script (gives them a name).

When I add one more alias to a vanilla NPC - bug hits
When I add one more to a non-vanilla NPC (horse) - no problem
When I add a alias record, but do nothing with it - bug hits

Can someone have a look at my plugin to confirm if its a bug, or its just me doing it all wrong ?

Download my Plugin from here >>> http://www.mediafire.com/?m46sp1p82aqiw48 (filesharing site)
www.mediafire.com/?m46sp1p82aqiw48

The readme will explain where to find everything in the esp.

Thanks

Can anyone help or confirm if this is a bug

Sorry about the bump but I've been at this for days now. Mostly trying to isolate the cause of the problem, and restarting from scratch. I notice one person DL'ed the plug-in from mediafire, and possibly is as stumped as I am. I don't know if the plugin I uploaded to the file sharing site would have the data you see in the property manager. The scripts are all prefixed with JAD_, so they won't get lost amongst the other scripts.

Groan... I even tried to get around the problem by making a new quest form to handle it. It stops the problem of all dialogue breaking on the other quest form, but the additional characters on the new quest form will not have any new dialogue. Come on Bethesda, this is a major bug.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1351173-problem-to-get-npc-dialogue-work-video-included/#entry20376325

Thanks, I'll give that a try later & report back if it works or not.

Still a problem to solve. Something is causing the Allow Reserved tickbox to be greyed out. Optional is ok.

The character causing me the problem is Arivanya (Windhelm stables Ostler). She takes over from Ulundil should he die. Apart from the Stables quest (to sell horses), She is also part of MS11 quest (Blood on the Ice). Here, her alias , , is ticked as Reserve Reference, Quest Object and Allow Reserved. Yet the Stables quest (which is similar to mine) has no problem running. Her alias, WindhelmHostlerBackup, has no tick boxes checked.

On my own quest her alias is WindhemOstlerBackup (using the european variant of Hostler as Ostler).

The script on the Stables quest doesn't alter anything, it just specifies properties. So that might allow other quests, such as MS11, to activate / deactivate if they are public.

Starts Enabled quests automatically consider all their aliases to be "Allow Reserved" - this is to prevent quests from starting up in different orders and winning the race to reserve something, causing other "Starts Enabled" quests to fail.

(So most likely her being reserved is not the issue for your quest - she's failing to fill the alias for some other reason.)

Thanks. It seems that as soon as I add another alias, for any of the other horse sellers, suddenly all of them lose the topics I've given them. Its like there is a limit to the aliases I can make, or at least a limit on the vanilla NPCs. This is a real mystery. Could it be a genuine bug?

Race conditions is the bane of digital equipment too, fixed by a gray code (binary code).

I updated the creation kit wiki article about Quest Data Tab with this.

I think I just read it, thanks. Its probably why its greyed out for Starts enabled quests like mine.

As a Test, I added a new alias but instead of selecting another horse-seller, I chose Lydia. So perhaps adding one too many references is not the issue, but an unassigned alias will cause a problem (except for the certain cases, like the empty alias to rename an NPC). Its only when I select certain horse-sellers it seems. 5 horse-sellers work, (2 at Whiterun, 2 at Markarth and just 1 at Windhelm). So far the the backup horse-seller at Windhelm and both Hostlers at Riften causes a problem. Maybe its the other quests they are involved in - perhaps - thats causing the problem for all the dialogue in the plug-in. Still need to test the two stable owners at solitude. If we can isolate the kind of things that cause such a problem, it will help a lot of other people hitting the same stumbling block. Its odd that the aliases in the vanilla "stables" quest works with no check boxes ticked.

Update: It looks like adding aliases for the Solitude Hostlers does not cause a problem either. So problems apply only to...
Windhelm: Arivanya (backup Hostler)
Riften: Hofgir & Shadr

The problem is probably caused by another quest associated with these NPCs. Perhaps the story manager, or maybe something in those associated quests scripts which allows the stables quest to run properly. Maybe the allow reserve default for start enabled quests only works for new games at startup. I hope not

By the way, is there anything on the wiki about debugging why aliases fail to fill? There are some ways to turn on logging for this, but I'm not sure it's documented anywhere.

http://www.creationkit.com/Debug_Script you have the Debug.DumpAliasData() function and also a few profiling functions, but not particularly for aliases. I have never been able to read anything about alias profiling per se. Maybe you could profile the script generated automatically for your quest ? I've never tested it, I don't know what information you get from the profiler.

Doing some digging, looks like very little of this is documented anywhere.

ESML (EnableStoryManagerLogging) - this turns on (or off) the story manager log, which tracks any event through the story manager tree. This can also be turned on in SkyrimPrefs.ini (under General):

bEnableStoryManagerLogging=1



SetQuestAliasLogging QuestID 1 in the console to turn it on, 0 to turn it off. “SQAL” can be used instead of the full quest name.

When quest alias logging is turned on for a quest, whenever that quest fills an alias randomly from a pool of options, the contents of that pool will be written out to the WarningsQuests.txt file. So if you are finding a random location with the keywords “dungeon” and “undead” , when that alias fills you’ll get output about what the collection of locations were it picked from.


SetDebugQuest QuestID 1 1 -- this is used to set the specified quest to be the only quest that is allowed to start for its event type. The second param is to turn it on or off (1/0), the third param is the number of times you want it to be the only quest allowed to start (1 is usually what you want)


Some useful INI settings:

[General]
bWarnOnFillAliasFailure=1 ; this causes warnings to be written to WarningsQuest.txt
bTrackAliasReservation=1 ; same thing but when an alias reserves something
bShowEventHandlingOutput=1
bEnableStoryManagerLogging=1 ; turn on story manager logging
iStoryManagerLoggingEvent=1 ; which event to log (I don't know the IDs of the event types though)

(I made a quick new page on the wiki for this: http://www.creationkit.com/Quest_Debugging)