I'm starting this thread because I recently installed many new mods at once (I know it's a big no no, but I'll get to that in a minute) and I ran into a small issue and I want to get some feedback on the preferred troubleshooting techniques people use to trace various issues depending on the source: dialogue, missing meshes, script errors, etc.


Installing Techniques

I was impatient and installed over 30 mods simultaneously into a setup which already had over 250 mods. So of course there were some issues.

I know there are established "play-it-safe" methods of installing mods which are the most foolproof methods. I don't remember how this method goes exactly, but I remember hearing a well conceived version from Elaura a while back. Basically it's just activating mods one at a time, booting up the game between steps to make sure things run correctly and cleaning mods appropriately (maybe Elaura could post her nice little step-by-step guide here).


Troubleshooting Techniques

Similarly, there is a "play-it-safe" method of troubleshooting errors after installing mods which involves deselecting all mods and then reactivating them one by one until the error is reproduced. This will hopefully pinpoint the issue, but can take a considerable amount of time if you have merged some mods and/or have nearly 255 mods.

For issues where you want to know what added specific things to the game, you can use the ever useful ORI command to see the object reference information. However, this only works if there is an offending OBJECT or NPC, it doesn't help with dialogue (that I am aware of).

What is the best method for handling errors with dialogue? Is there a tool which lets you search dialogue string references in a mod, or better yet, a set of mods (can tes3pcd do this)? For instance, I am currently having an issue where everyone in the game greets me by saying http://dl.dropbox.com/u/42876609/Fargoth%20Looks%20at%20Me%20Nervously.png replace "Fargoth" with the NPC name.

For that matter, what's the best way to track any reference? I had another issue where a script was whining because the "uvi_centurion_01" was missing from the "uvi_robot_scr" script (don't quote me on those IDs). I assumed, based on the reference, that this was either from UL or BUUL. I was correct and it was from BUUL. But how could I quickly check and confirm without going through every single .esp if I had no idea what mod it could be from?

I tried to break this up so it wouldn't be a wall of text, but may have only succeeded partially. Please help by answering these questions, which may all be answered by the many tools running around these days. I'll update this post with the answers given to help out posterity. Thank you!

-MD

tes3cmd can do these things. For example to find where that dialog comes from, you could execute this command in your "Data Files":

tes3cmd dump --type info --match "looks at you nervously" *.es?

I think you'll find that dialogue comes from plugins related to Uvirith's Legacy.

For the uvi_robot_scr situation, since you know it's a script, you could search for which plugin provides that script:

tes3cmd dump --list --type scpt --id uvi_robot_scr *.es?

(Adding --list to the dump command just gives a summary of the matching records, otherwise entire records are printed).

You can view the output of a command in the command shell window by adding "| more" and hitting spacebar to get subsequent pages of output and CTRL-C to interrupt:

tes3cmd dump --type scpt --id uvi_robot_scr *.es? | more

Or you can put the output in a file for later viewing with a text editor:

tes3cmd dump --type scpt --id uvi_robot_scr *.es? &--#62; output.txt

(and then open output.txt in you "Data Files" with any text editor).

Edit: Also, if you don't know the record type you want to search for, you can just leave that option out, and tes3cmd will just take a little bit longer to run:

tes3cmd dump --match "looks at you nervously" *.es?

An incredibly useful and versatile tool. I'll have to familiarize myself with it even more then. Thanks for the quick guide on checking these references.

Although, this has answered my questions here, I'm still curious if anyone has a step-by-step of what they do to install mods to minimize issues seen. Dialogue issues have always been the worst issues I've faced in the past, so tes3cmd's ability to handle them is very useful.

I don't have (or know of) a good step-by-step guide. What I usually do is put together the mods I want to play, start playing, and if I run into problems, try to figure out what is going wrong. That process led me to learning the CS, making some little patch mods to get conflicting plugins to work together and finally to write tools like mlox and tes3cmd so I could do things faster and with a better understanding of what is really going on. It's kept me busy. Some day I hope to actually play through again

That sounds about like what I am doing, though maybe with a little dash of ignorance thrown in due to complacency.
I always hope for that, hence why I go through this ritual of adding all the mods I want to use and getting the game playable.... and then getting distracted by modding or other games and then having to do this again when mods are updated, outdated, or created.