NPCs Not Executing Scripts (Suspected)

[Shadriss]

I come back, and so do my problems. You know you love me.

 

OK, so another one I've never seen before. I'm still early in my game, and I now have a total of 4 NPCs that are not moving as they are supposed to. Specifics:

 

1) A group of three Whiterun Guards. This is supposed to be the detachment sent to Riverwood - I know, because I heard Irileth yelling at them about it. I left the city before she finished, but that's never been an issue before. Now, they are still standing there... breathing... they respond to talking, but other than that, just stand there. Staring at me. Judging.

 

2) Delphine at Dragonsreach, post Bleak Falls Barrow. She had her conversation with Farengar, and now she's a permanent statue-like resident of Farengar's room.

 

Ideally, I'd love to know if there is a command to make them continue on their scripting path. Barring that, removing them would be the next choice, but unsure how that could affect things, given Delphine is somewhat critical to the main quest. Just a little.

 

No significant changes to my mod lineup, other than the removal of a few texture mods. No mod additions since last seeing these particular scenes.

 

Thoughts?

[TechAngel85]

Nothing comes to mind on this one.

[hishutup]

What you described is not scripts, its packages. I have pretty limited knowledge in this area.

[Shadriss]

Sooooo ICAIO was being lazy that day then? Don't want to start the playthrough again, but will if I need to. I'm HOPING that when Dragon Rising starts that the guards will all head off, but Delphine's next trigger is a LONG way off yet.

[TechAngel85]

You can disable and re-enable ICAIO in the MCM now.

[Shadriss]

I'd forgotten about that - I'll give it a shot and see if it kicks the NPCs in thier packages or not.

 

...

 

Wouldn't that constitute assault / indecent exposure? Ah well.

 

EDIT: No such luck. In addition to trying to enable/disable via ICAIO, I also tried enable and disable via the console, as well as teleporting to my location in an effort to unstuck them. No such luck on any front. As I've never seen this happen before, let alone to four separate NPCs at once, I'm going to just restart and see if it happens again. Unfortunate, since I only have a few days more to play before I have to pack everything up for a move across country.

Edited June 1, 2017 by Shadriss

[TechAngel85]

I take it you have looked in xEdit to make sure nothing is overriding the packages?

[Shadriss]

I do not, unfortunately, have enough knowledge to do that. I can clean things in it easily enough, but a lot of the other functions are a bit on the arcane side. I'm pretty sure that this was a hiccup of some kind, as this has not happened in any build I've ever done previous. And, as I mentioned, what stuff I removed had nothing to do with NPC actions in any way.

 

I'll poke around in there (because I also hadn't though of it) and see if something leaps out at me... but I'm honestly not even sure what I need to look for.

[soupdragon]

Its not a scripts issue its a package issue as has been pointed out. Whats likely happened is a quest that was supposed to send the guards to wherever has gotten stuck at a certain quest stage due to you exiting or quitting or whatever it was. I don't know the quest offhand (Dragon Rising?) but you could look it up and check if its still running etc and possibly force it to the next quest stage etc.

Edited June 4, 2017 by soupdragon

[Shadriss]

Now THAT is a good possibility - except that the two instances are from two different quests, one of which follows the other.

 

A) The three guards situation occurs when you are sent to Bleak Falls by the Jarl. This quest completed when I returned the dragonstone (IE, was shown as completed and removed from active quests). The guards, though talked to by Irileth, never moved from that street corner to Riverwood as they should have following the receipt of their orders.

 

B) Delphine occurs after turning over the dragonstone. NSF:MQ halts the main quest progression at this point for X days (depending on setting). I wasn't able to continue further to when it re-triggers due to other issues.

 

It may well be that you are right - at least concerning Delphine. Odd, though, that this hasn't happened before given that no relevant mods were changed between all my other play-throughs and that one. I think it's still an odd 'Skyrim-ism", but if it happens again, I'll take a look at this more closely.

[Shadriss]

It showed again, so I did some poking around. For this, the only active quest I have is MQ103 (Bleak Falls Barrow) to make T/Sing much easier.

 

1) Verified only quest running was MQ103 (via ShowQuestTargets console command).

2) Found active stage of quest MQ103 (via player.sqs mq103 console command). This shows state 90 as active. At this point, the conversation between Irileth and the guards has concluded, and they are standing around.

3) Advanced the quest stage via console to the next stage shown in in the above list, in this case Stage 100. All guards despawned in front of me.

4) Ran to Riverwood, and found all guards perfoming guard-like tasks.

 

Conclusion: Something is interfering with MQ103 stage 90 in some fashion as to prevent it from completing.

 

Next Stage: Figure out how to look for this conflict in TES5Edit. I attempted to do so, but... Greek. Pointers?

 

I'll do this again for Delphine when I get to that point, since it now seems likely that this is a mod conflict of some type.

[TechAngel85]

Pointer: You'll find the quest in xEdit under...Quest.

 

Open up Skyrim.esm and expand Quest. Sort by Editor ID (click it at the top) and scroll down to MQ103. For the STEP Extended setup, there are only text changes to the quest. NSF:MQ is only making text changes as well and there are no script changes from that mod. That's about all I can tell you from a STEP standpoint.

[Shadriss]

Yeah - I was looking at those. Thing is that nothing is overwriting that quest at all. Just what you've already mentioned. Looking at the section for the Stages, 90 has nothing there for me to look at, not even telling me what AI Packages it's firing off. Filtering for conflict losers isn't helping here either... the quest simply isn't being overwritten by anything unexpected, which means trying to find out what that stage of the quest is actually doing.

 

Also: THBBBBBBBT! :p

 

Also Also: What are the chances that script lag or something of that order might cause something like this? I do run a script-heavy lineup, and am inclined to think this isn't the case here since it seems to be two specific instances, but figured I'd ask, just in case.

Edited June 6, 2017 by Shadriss

[TechAngel85]

Script lag is just that...lag. If it was lag, then the script would eventually run; just delayed.

 

I opened up the CK to take a look at the quest and Stage 90 simply enables the guard's camp in Riverwood. This puts into play three packages:

• MQ103SoldiersToRiverwood
• MQ103RiverwoodGuard1HoldPosition
• MQ103RiverwoodGuard2HoldPosition

These packages simply tell the guards to hold position and then run to Riverwood. Well, it tells them to walk, but ICAIO changes the speed to run. These packages are found under the Package heading in xEdit, if you want to look at them in your setup. My guess is that 'MQ103SoldiersToRiverwood' is not firing off which tells the guards to run to Riverwood as long as Stage 90 is complete but Stage 100 is not. Stage 90 is set when Irileth completes her speech and this is when "MQ103SoldiersToRiverwood" should fire off and the guards run to Riverwood.

 

Stage 100 seems to trigger a function in the CWScript which is the global script of the Civil War. Particularly Stage 100 is calling the "AddGarrisonBackToWar" function of the script. What this function does, I'm not entirely sure, but the only thing that seems to set this Stage is starting the civil war on the Imperial side. Therefore, Stage 100 should probably not have been set manually.

 

However, looking into this, quest MQ103 also relies on parts of MQ102 being complete (which is you reporting to the Jarl about the dragon attack). As you can see, messing with quests in the game can run very deep...

 

You should look to see if anything is altering those packages listed above. Finding the cause of this issue, is quite literally looking for a needle in a hay stack.

[Shadriss]

Thanks for the interpretation - unfortunately, I've run out of time, and my main system is being taken down tomorrow for the move and my retirement from the USN. I'll still be in and out here, but it will be late in the month before I can look back into this again.