Clearly you CAN use unique actors in quests and scenes, since there are plenty of examples ingame (The council meeting at High Hrothgar comes to mind...lots of them in there)

Has anyone figured out exactly how it's supposed to be done?

(Edit): What I'm referring to is using pre-existing unique actors like Elisif The Fair, General Tullius, Jarl Baalgruf, Ulfric Stormcloak, etc, not completely new NPCs.

maybe one of the developers could pop in and tell us how to use existing unique actors? it's really hard to have Ulfric give the player a quest if you can't use him as an alias.

And before you ask, yes, "allow reserved" is enabled.

What's the problem?

Exactly -> What's the problem?

I have about 20 quests now all have at the very least 1 unique actor, and I am having zero issues with the quests running or the alias's filling, scripts running and triggering at the correct times...

Well I add a quest alias for a unique actor (examples, ElisifTheFair, Ulfric, Tullius, etc), click "Allow reserved" (Or have the quest "enabled at start", which is supposed to be the equivalent as well, Try to start the quest, and the aliases won't fill. I don't know what kind of voodoo the quest writers used to get quests like MQ302 to actually load all the unique actor aliases, but it clearly isn't "on" by default.

Raise the priority value of your quest on the quest data tab. That number matters for the order in which aliases take effect. If another quest has a higher value than yours, you have to bump yours above it.

I've had no trouble whatsoever overriding Balgruuf's AI using a quest alias, and no trouble overriding Hadvar and Ralof either, using aliases in the same quest. All set to use the unique actor, because I don't want to specify their refs and turn them into permanently persistent items.

I found it out in a previous thread of mine.

The actors need to have a Persistant Location set up. It's the second tab in the reference window. If you don't set it, it defaults to the location of the cell they are in. This means that if you have no locations set up for your unique cells/worlds yet, then it defaults to nothing, and they cant fill. However, if you place an actor in vanilla Tamriel, it fills and works just fine.

Set up your locations and it will work, or until then, make them Specific ref's. Then once you get your Loc's set up, change them.

I don't think other modders would appreciate it if I permanently moved Ulfric Stormcloak. I don't see any "Tabs" in the Quest alias windows for setting up Persistant locations for alases, and I don't want to edit the base objects for the actors.

Oh, you're doing vanilla NPC's? Because they should all already have loc stuff set up. :/

EDIT: And by 'Vanilla Tamriel' I just mean any cell that's part of the game, be it interior or exterior. So where Ulfric starts should count. :/

The custom made Unique NPCs I made myself work just fine. It's just when I try to use an existing NPC that it won't work.

And I take it you're doing the obvious like checking 'Allow Reserved' and verifying that the alias isn't filling with SQV?

See Post #2 in this thread.

And they're not filling at all...quest isn't launching at all.

Is your Save a "Clean Save" ? because only reason I can think of for the quest not running even if you have it set to start game enabled is you already saved it as not started.

I wrote a completely new "Test Quest" (Catagory: Side Quest, Priority 100) that has:

1 quest stage (0), all it does is send a notification "Unique Aliases Loaded" - Checked as Startup Stage.

The following unique Aliases (All tagged with "Allow Reserved" before I turned "Start Game Enabled" just to make doubly sure): ElisifTheFair, Ulfric, Tullius, Balgruuf, Maven, Arngeir, Karliah.

They are all alive (I checked) - Boot the game up, no notification appears.

Open the console ingame, type SQV QuestName. The "Startup" stage checkbox is unnecessary because your quest only has one stage so it has to choose that.

Somehow I doubt the player will want to start any quests with the console only....I think I figured part of this out...in my sample quest anyway, it wasn't loading Karliah because she was disabled (not dead), so I got the test one to load...now I just need to figure out why the OTHER quest is having trouble loading them...

And of course there's still the issue with vanilla unique actors ignoring scenes and just sandboxing away regardless of the assigned AI packages in the scenes and quest...

You can have vanilla NPCs participate in mod-scenes, it's just not easy. I've taken to adding a conditional package to these actors, top of their list, to keep them from wondering while a scene is in place.

That pretty dirty though, so I can only use it for testing... we can't release stuff like that.

I suggested SQV Questname to check if the quest is actually starting or not - there could have been an error in your debug notification. It doesn't start the quest.

AI packages assigned to alias has escaped me and I cannot figure out a solution. I can get simple AI packages in scenes to work, alias dialogue works and everything -except- AI packages assigned to the alias - theoretically they would perform that ai package list for the duration of the quest. They don't even have AI packages given to their editor instance but it still works only sometimes.

See my thread here about it:
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1354960-npc-ai-packages-have-got-me-stumped/page__fromsearch__1

Yeah, we can't have Elisif The Fair running around nvde in Markarth shouting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVla__QFfEo