Elder Scrolls Forum: Clean Mods... DIALOGUE!!!

After spending yesterday evening with fixing Dialogue of some Quest plugins that base on Tribunal.ESM v1.4, I really need to write this...

Dialogue is linked by this Hidden "Info ID" numbers:

If you look at a Dialogue Info/Response in TESAME, you see three entries:

INAM = the ID of this Dialogue Line
PNAM = the ID of the previous Line
NNAM = the ID of the next Line.

As long as the dialogue line has a PNAM and NNAM entry, the game looks for those next and previous lines in the current dialogue chain and places the new line somewhere between them. This works fine even if two plugins make a new line of dialogue at the same place. The two new lines will be placed between the old ones without any troubles.

Even when one of the plugins/Masters has a dialogue line with only a NNAM entry, there is no problem, the game puts this line on the very top of the Dialogue-Chain.

What happens when two plugins/masters try to come on top,
is best described by an example:

Original lines:

---(top)
ABC
DEF
XYZ

Plugin 1: (newer file date)

---(top)
1:A
1:B
1:C
ABC
DEF
XYZ

Plugin 2: (older file date)

---(top)
2:A
2:B
2:C
ABC
DEF
XYZ

Resulting Dialogue chain in Game:

---(top)
2:A
2:B
1:A
1:B
1:C
ABC
2:C
DEF
XYZ

The game exchanges the lowest Line of Plugin2 (the older one), with the next original line, And places the other lines on top of the dialogue chain. So there might be problems, if Plugin2 depends upon the "2:C"-line coming before "ABC".

Even worser when both plugins add bottom-lines:

Original lines:
ABC
DEF
XYZ
---(bottom)

Plugin 1: (newer file date)

ABC
DEF
XYZ
1:A
1:B
1:C
---(bottom)

Plugin 2: (older file date)

ABC
DEF
XYZ
2:A
2:B
2:C
---(bottom)

Resulting Dialogue chain in Game:

ABC
DEF
2:C
XYZ
2:A
2:B
1:A
1:B
1:C
---(bottom)

Again the now undefined "lowest" line of Plugin2 is exchanged with the nearest original line to restore a working dialogue-chain, but now the dialogue sequence of plugin 2 is corrupted.

In the beginning we thought it to be more "clean" if we store only one original dialogue line in our plugins, but this proved to be a mistake.
Tribunal did the same as we, and corrupted most of the Dialogue-intensive plugins.

Bloodmoon hasn`t that many new top/bottom lines, and most of us have learned our lesson, so there were almost no conflicts between Bloodmoon and older plugins.

Another common mistake is using the "copy" command to make a new
dialogue line, and then continuing to change/make copies of the
lower line (the original one, with the original Info ID)

---(top)
ABC (the copy of the ABC line with a new ID, but the old text)
2:A
2:B
2:C (id of original ABC, but text was changed)
DEF
XYZ

For a text-oriented human it looks like a clean plugin, but for the game, that only cares about the ID-Numbers, it`s just another plugin that tries to put its own line on the top of the linked-list...

If you followed me till now, you can figure out what happens when you
load this plugin together with another one with top-dialogue:

---(top)
ABC (the New ABC line)
2:A
1:A
1:B
1:C
2:C (Original ABC-Line)
2:B
DEF
XYZ

The dialogue sequence of plugin2 is destroyed, because the original top-line and the next plugin-added line are exchanged, but this time you ( the author of plugin 2) have a hard time to find the bug, because you first need to find out that you changed the original line instead of your new one.

The best advice I can give, is: Always place your new dialogue-lines in the middle of the topic. never use the top or bottom, and avoid the second line, because you easily can confuse the original top-line and the copy. Confusing is no problem as long as your new lines aren`t at the top or bottom of the linked list...

--------------------
Havish (Updated to v1.2 !!!)

Pirates! (WIP)

My Morrowind Corner

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