Hi all, I've been working a re-balance mod for vampirism in Skyrim, and I'm running into some issues with a modification that overwrites the default vampire quest script. I started a similar topic http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1351366-scripting-help-playeraddspell-fails/page__fromsearch__1 a while back, which didn't come to any resolution on what the root problem is. I'm starting a new topic since further research has yielded more information on what the problem isn't

Essentially, I have a function which based on how long the player has been a vampire, adds certain spells to them. When the function player.addspell(spellname) is called, it fails due to a null reference. The output from the debug log is:

[03/26/2012 - 04:27:17PM] error: Cannot add a None spell to the actorstack:[ (00000014)].Actor.AddSpell() - "" Line ?[PlayerVampireQuest (000EAFD5)].playervampirequestscript.VampireFeed() - "PlayerVampireQuestScript.psc" Line 247[ (000CF02C)].PRKF_VampireFeedBeds_000CF02C.Fragment_0() - "PRKF_VampireFeedBeds_000CF02C.psc" Line 9

Now, this would seem to imply that I hadn't properly linked my spell reference in the Creation Kit. However, I've triple-checked, the references are all properly filled-in, and they are getting re-set to none at some unknown point between Skyrim's startup and my test cell loading.

My theories so far are that an ESM file from one of the patches is overriding my changes, or that something I don't understand is interfering. I've checked that the code for adding spells itself works with a test snipped attached to a button, so I know the failure is specifically in the spell reference, but I can't tell what to poke now to figure out what causes this.

Anyone know of anything similar, or additional steps I can take to debug this?

You're positive you set the property for the spell in the quest stages? The "none" thing looks just like what happened to me the other day with something I swore I had set, only to find the property was pointing to nothing.

Redwood Elf posted a http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1362677-why-isnt-my-script-seeing-this-global-variable/. It turned out that the property was somehow getting set to None even though he set it properly in the CK. I think he fixed it by changing the name of the property and recompiling the script, but you should read the thread to make sure.

Properties set by the plugin are not guaranteed to be what you expect if you changed them after you saved your game. Changing the name of the property, recompiling the script and updating the properties in the plugin will tell the game to throw out the old variable and load the new one, thus now you know that the game will take the value from the plugin rather than the savegame when it loads.