At some point a massive chunk of my dialogue got shoved to the bottom of Greetings 1 after a cleaning, and I need to bring it back to the top (just under the failed oath of silence) or else a bunch of my dialogue will never be seen due to a conflict with the original game dialogue. I can't possibly move it all one-by-one in the CS and then reclean everything in Greeting's 1 all over again. There's way too much of it at this point.

I tried editing the PreviousInfoID/NextInfoID field in Enchanted Editor, but all it does is make the program freeze. Please, someone help me find a solution.

Not sure if this is possible to do in EE. But have you tried to copy (perhaps cut and paste instead of copying) the Greetings data between loaded plugins.

It's only possible to copy dialogue entries in the CS. You can only do one at a time, and it drops the duplicate right above the original entry, so you can't paste them anywhere else. You still have to move each one by hand--and if it has a lot of variables, that takes forever--and it dirties every reference along the way and introduces errors if you accidentally re-order them the wrong way.

Edit: So the CS is out. What I need is another modding tool. I just don't know which one.

I guess you don't have another option then do a daunting task unless someone knows a work around to make it easier.

If there's no workaround, the next version of Uvirith's Legacy isn't happening. That's all there is to it, really. I've put a ton of work into UL 3.4, I didn't notice the messed dialogue until now, the problem is critical, and it's too late to roll it back to a former version.

Hi Stuporstar

Do you mind if we just start with a hug?

I know this is virtual and you can't feel it - but please imagine you are getting a really empathetic hug right now. And the good thing is that you can re-read this post and always get a hug.

Sometimes words just aren't enough.

Ok as someone who has deleted over 2000 lines of dialogue and thus over a year's work in a moment of insanity and started over again - I can say although i don't know how you are feeling right now I at least do know how to manipulate the dialogue in the CS

Can you please post an image of what the dialogue is at present -

You said that it has been reordered to the bottom of the list in Greeting 1 - I vaguely recall that happening to me once before too - did you press error check results? I learned early on never to touch that foul button of oblivion - not without saving and backing up first anyways

However even if your dialogue is at the bottom of Greeting 1 - what difference does it make? Hence the need for a screenshot - Greeting 1 is for quest specific greetings and almost 100% filtered - it shouldn't impact your greetings at all - but I can't prove that assumption unless you share some more info please

It is possible to import and export dialogue - Cyran0 would be the best person to ask on that as he can explain the unique ID's of lines - I'm thinking you could export your dialogue as a CSV - alter the ID and reimport - I personally haven't imported dialogue before but have exported numerous times

In any case please don't despair just yet - it can be fixed - and don't underestimate the power of the community to assist either - Trainwiz lost a huge amount of work on his mod and others were willing to help him rebuild - you could easily ask for assistance and have others sort text for you

All you would do is export the text you want added - ask someone to add it to the dialogue at the points you idenitfy into a new mod - then merge that mod in (after first checking TESAME for any additional errors that might need deleting

Have you absorbed all that? No..? Ok go to the top of this post and reread the first 3 sentences

Thanks, Illy. I went and cooked myself a nice dinner, so I've got a much clearer head now.

It's difficult to show, because the different points of dialogue are so far away I can't get it all into a screenshot. One piece of Beth's dialogue in Greeting 1 conflicts with all my owned-slave dialogue. I have so much slave dialogue, it would be soul-crushingly difficult to move it around in the CS the normal way. Removing the slavestatus == 2 variable from all my dialogue would take a lot of work too.

However, I've looked at Importing/Exporting dialogue, and it might fix it--if the Import/Export feature works as intended. The info I need to alter is right at the beginning of every line when I open exported text in Notepad. It looks like this:

"32134297152346911917"	"2165015673318404974"	"2541719609232088513"	"Greeting"	"Greeting 1"

And I'm guessing the dialogue's ID goes first, followed by "previous" and "next" linking them all in a chain. All I have to do is figure out where to link my broken chains, and test export it into a blank esp until I get it right. Then I'll try removing all my dialogue from a copy of my mod and try pasting all the fixed dialogue back in, in either TESAME or import it in the CS itself.

I think I can do this.

Edit: I was wrong. The order of those numbers is "previous" "current" "next", so the entry's ID is the middle one. I think I'm getting the hang of this. Getting it wrong though, oh boy does that ever mess everything up. I guess I just have to do this one step at a time.

I afraid I cannot help you much here, as I do not have experience with this problem, so the only think I can do is keep my fingers crossed

You could also try to ask Jac, he has a lot of experience with dialogue in case you would need more help.

I hope it will work out in the end

I got it done late last night. Now I need to know what the best cleaning method is for dialogue (that won't mess my mod up again), because importing the text flagged the bracketing entries again.

Once I got the hang of it, re-organizing my greetings that way became really efficient. I remember why I avoided exporting/importing dialogue in the past though: all the dialogue under topics had their entries logged upside-down, which can totally screw up filtering if you're relying on one entry being on top of another for quest filtering. All the greetings imported/exported in the right order though, so I cut all the other text from the exported file and only replaced the greetings.

Hmm... that depends a lot on how many entries you need to clean? Safest and best way is to open your mod in both CS and EE, read the dialogue IDs in CS which should be cleaned, and find them in EE and clean them. I think that tes3cmd does not clean it. At least if you add a dialogue line, which marks the upper and bottom line as changed, tes3cmd will not clean them. TESTool had cleaning dialogue function, but IIRC that function is broken.

Now that I think about it, since you mentioned each dialogue line has also ID of following and preceeding line, if cleaning the upper and bottom line from mod after you add new line could not screw up something. But I have always cleaned it and never run into any issues.

I've always used TESAME for cleaning dialogue - just delete all the entries that are original vanilla - i.e. not the cookies and cream added by you

it doesn't take very long to do even with a ton of dialogue as there are only a few entries you end up deleting

I've use TESAME as well, but sifting through my dialogue to find that handful of entries is a big pain. I have well over a thousand dialogue entries in UL. I've been thinking of trying EE this time, since I'm pretty comfortable with it, and the dialogue ID numbers by now.

I just remembered today that I once (sometime last year) loaded UL with one of it's add-ons still checked (that had nested dialogue) and saved it. I'm pretty sure that's what messed up my greetings up, now that I think of it. I usually never save my main mod if its add-ons are checked for exactly that kind of reason.

There's a MaintainImportedDialogueOrder setting in [General] section of Morrowind.ini. Switching it to 1 should solve the problem.

Thanks. I can't believe that's not the default setting.