Is Solitude just ... buggy?

[Noobsayer]

Mild Solitude spoilers below!

 

So I think I have my Winterheart II playthrough about constructed. Doing some final testing before starting for real, using Alternate Start. The first time I went into the city on the initial "full" test, everything worked fine. However since then, I noticed the execution scene didn't want to fire correctly because the little girl (Roggvir's niece) was missing. The dad would talk to her like she was there, but then he never took his place for the execution so it never fired.

 

Since it was raining, Wet and Cold was the first culprit I thought of. While sometimes it would fire correctly with the "NPC go home" disabled, it still didn't work all the time. (Just did a bunch of loads from a save right outside the gate).

 

Did a lot of testing with "vanilla" (actually Unofficial Patches + Alternate Start installed) and its hit or miss. It seems the error is specific to the character -- IE, if it worked OK the first time off the boat, it works largely every time. Some saves with Alternate Start, Winterheart II and Wet and Cold and forced rainy weather worked. Some didn't. If my pseudo-vanilla save worked, then adding Winteheart II + Wet and Cold worked. If not, it didn't.

 

I can't seem to find a pattern. Any suggestions/similar experiences? EDIT: Nothing modifies vanilla Solitude except Textures and SMIM, but even those weren't installed for "vanilla" testing runs.

 

I use largely the old Skyrim Revisited for compatibility guides. If it's just general weirdness I can live with it, I just want to make sure it's not a deeper incompatibility that's gonna bite me later. Worth noting is I rarely crash in hours of playing, and I suspect heat is the issue there.

 

EDIT: On many subsequent tries it's worked fine, both vanilla and fully modded. Conclusion: Solitude is weird.

[Glanzer]

I've never noticed that problem in Solitude, but I have noticed sometimes an NPC is missing who is actually talking to me and I don't see them at all (e.g. the Blacksmith's daughter in Riverwood). To make them reappear I leave the area and come back to make it reload and then they're there.

 

I have no idea about your particular problem though. Perhaps you have ugrids set higher than 5 and it's causing some of the events to fire prematurely before you're actually "there"? That's just wild guess, I actually have no idea.

[rootsrat]

It did happen to me a few times in Whiterun as well, the first time you enter the city and Battleborn is supposed to be talking to Adrianne - a few time he wasn't there, and she just continued with the dialogue, as he was there, making pauses for his lines. It also happened once when Alrik's warriors appear for the first time talking to the guards about the missing woman - the guards were not there, and the two of them were again talking their dialogue, making pauses for the guards' lines.

 

I presume it's some weird error, maybe too many scripts running and the game not able to load all the data or something like that. For the scenes I experienced, there was no disruption to the game, a there was nothing critical happening, the one-side conversation went one until it finished and everything went back to normal. I can see how this is a problem for Solitude and the execution scene though.

 

Maybe try using the new Memory Patch 3.0? This should solve not-enough-memory related problems, so it theoretically fix stuff like that, if my understanding is correct.