Quest and Scene Troubleshooting

This tutorial covers what to check in cases where there is no logging error. Enable logging and verify that there are no errors related to the particular quest. This can be found in the Papyrus output log.

• Quest is not starting: Most often this is due to reference alias violations. If an actor is dead or disabled, and the associated reference alias does not allow for those possibilities, the quest will not start.
• Reference Aliases aren't being filled: This occurs when a single, particular reference alias fails to have been filled. For example, if you set the alias to Unique Actor, but there is no instance of that unique actor anywhere, this could lead to a fill failure, which means no attached scripts will work.
• Scenes are starting but not playing: again, this is often due to reference aliases not being filled or not being referenced correctly for the actors involved in the scene. However, this could also be due to a missing voice file associated with a dialogue action slotted in the first phase. For subsequent phases not playing, it is also worth checking whether the sound file (packaged or not) exists for every dialogue action under it. In rare occasions, an actor may be stuck in their combat state, blocking the scene indefinitely.
• Scene plays up to a point, but actors stop committing actions: This is most likely due to dialogue actions not being played while a player is transitioning to a different cell. For example, if an actor moves into a different cell, then the player enters that cell whereupon the phase is supposed to play a dialogue action, the dialogue will seemed to have been skipped. The very next phase is not executed, and the actor seems to abandon the scene. In order to fix this, you should delay the dialogue in a subsequent phase (using a timer action) and have location conditions for both the player and the actor for the completion of the initial phase.
• Scene suddenly ends: The scene flags were likely violated and should be reconfigured. For example, by default all scenes are set to end when combat begins. If you are testing a scene and actively modifying it, you cannot load a savegame in which that scene is running; the data may be effectively corrupted. You'll have to start the scene from the beginning or load before it has started.