I've got a tricky bit of dialogue involving Bjorlam the whiterun carriage driver, a chest and key and a perk to lock the chest. Nothing I can't handle, but tedious to debug.

So what I thought I'd do is put a chest, key, etc in a test cell and add a greatly simplified dialogue tree to a separate quest, just so I could test that all the components work. Not wanting to mess with Bjorlam, I duplicated him and added his clone to the test cell.

Where I'm having issues is that Bjorlam's clone won't talk to me except for "I can take you to any of the hold capitals".

And I can't work out why! The quest is started (start game enabled, SEQ file created, stage 10, all aliases filled) the topics are in a dialogue view and conditioned to the clone by means of GetIsAliasRef. The alias points at the correct version of Bjorlam. And all this worked just fine for the real Bjorlam with the complicated dialogue. But it won't work on the clone. I even tried bumping the quest priority up to 90, not that it should be necessary.

Can anyone think of anything I might be missing?

[edit]

It's not the clone aspect: I replaced Bjorlam with a kajiit preset and kitty didn't get any dialogue at all. I'm missing something basic.

Probably time to re-read the tutorial page again...

[edit]

Doing some searching, it seems there are a few posts where the modder hada SEQ file and made sure the aliases were filled and the quest was running, and dialogue still didn't work.

Is this one of those odd "The Creation Kit just does that" sort of bugs? I'm starting to wonder.

[edit]

I took all the conditions off one of the topic infos. As I understand it, every actor in Skyrim should now have a topic of "Hi, how are ya?" with a reply of "Not bad. Yourself?". No one has that topic.

I think this quest is just ... I better not say what I think this quest is. Let's try redoing it from scratch.

[edit]

I created a new quest, and set this one to start when I pressed a button. Suddenly dialogue everywhere. No idea why it should work on this quest and not on the other.

And yes, I made a SEQ file for the quest that didn't work. Several times.

Anyone have any ideas about what went wrong? I'd love to know, if only so next time, I don't waste so much time trying to fix the unfixable.