How can I diagnose a faulty quest?

[DanielCoffey]

I am trying to get into quests and scripting for the first time to enable more interesting book hunts in the Lost Library and I am having issues with my first attempt. The instant the game loads, I get a CTD. It even happens on a New Game so it must be my Quest due to its Run At Start property.

 

Here's the situation...

 

I am following the Creation Kit tutorial (to a degree anyway). The quest will be created to run once at startup. I have set up a couple of stages for the initial condition (0), when the player encounters a corpse and loots a journal (10) and when the quest is completed (20). I have created aliases for the corpse, the journal and a dead horse. The horse is initially disabled. When the player finds the corpse and loots the journal, the quest advances from stage 0 to stage 10, enables the horse, presents a "Started : That Damned Horse!" message and creates a misc quest with description in the Quest Journal but does not display a map marker. When the player arrives at the location of a certain dead horse they step into an Activator which triggers stage 20 (if stage 10 has been set previously) and closes the quest down. They don't actually have to loot the horse.

 

At least that is my intention anyway. What actually happens is that the game just CTDs to desktop the second the world displays.

 

How the heck are we supposed to diagnose the issue?

Edited September 21, 2014 by DanielCoffey

[Glanzer]

Sorry I'm not a modder but first thing I would try is turning on papyrus debugging to see if it puts something in there that's helpful.  Also are you sure you really want the quest to start automatically for a new game?  If so there are other things to worry about, such as the effect on the infamous cart ride, compatibility with Alternate Start, maybe others I'm not thinking about.  I generally like mods that allow the startup to be delayed, for example the Sounds of Skyrim mods wait till you've exited Helgen (or exited AS) till they start up, or like Frostfall which waits till you gaze at the heavens, etc.

 

Sorry, that was probably more opinion than you wanted and fewer real answers than you needed.

Edited September 22, 2014 by Glanzer

[DanielCoffey]

I reverted to my previous version of the mod, re-did the actor placements and completely restarted the quest creation and it worked this time... or at least didn't crash on load.

 

I agree that I need to look at the Run At Start and I will see if the quest triggers properly without it.

[DanielCoffey]

I have got the quest working with Startup Enabled and Run Once since it injects a Journal into a dead guy's inventory. I suppose the alternative is to not enable it at start and to place the Journal in the inventory directly. I will test that method tomorrow and see how it goes.

 

I will have questions about cleanup later but I'll see what I can google first. I know I can Disable the first corpse because it is out of sight when the quest is completed but the second corpse is right in front of the player when the quest closes so I can't use Disable on that one.

[Glanzer]

Ok here's a stupid question so don't laugh at me...  Why would you need to script that, why not use a plugin to place that Journal?  I thought that was the preferred method for placing things at startup.

[DanielCoffey]

I was just following the Tutorial since I have not done quests and scripts before. Now I know it works that way, I can explore alternatives that may be simpler.

[DanielCoffey]

I did need to keep Start Enabled / Run Once after a test because the script that fired when the Journal was picked up needed the quest to be registered.