DROPPED Better Quest Objectives (by whickus)

[Roogal]

Discussion thread:
Better Quest Objectives by whickus
Wiki Link

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Description:
Have you ever wanted to turn those quest markers off but couldn't because the quest description doesn't give you any indication of where to search for your objective, so you're forced to blindly make a beeline to that marker, taking the wonder of exploration out of it? That's why I've created Better Quest Objectives! What I've done is edited nearly 250 quest objectives/descriptions, spanning over
160 quests, that have super vague or even non existing descriptions of where you're supposed to head next.

For example: This Guy tells
you to go talk to That Guy. Well, That Guy is in a town you haven't been to yet because you're brand new to the land of Skyrim so you have no idea where that town is. Also, nothing in the quest description even mentions the name of the town. You're just supposed to remember the name of the town that This Guy mentioned. This is even worse if you picked this quest up 30 hours ago and haven't touched it since, which means you've probably forgotten the details of the spoken conversation. In this situation, I've changed the quest objective from:


"Talk to That Guy"

to

"Head to This Town at the eastern base of This Mountain and talk to That Guy"


This will allow you to progress the quest by actually navigating your map and not blindly following the quest marker.

I've
left certain quests with ambiguous descriptions alone since finding the locations is supposed to be a riddle. Also, if the quest involves a
journal that is supposed to shed light on the objective's location, I've edited that journal instead of the actual quest description. That way,
you can still deduce the location of your next objective by reading any documents that pertain to the quest.

This mod also cleans up various typos and inconsistencies (for example, misspelled names or referring to a statue as a chalice, etc). If you find any remaining
glaring errors, let me know and I'll fix them.

Roogal - I believe it's essential and I haven't found any issues. Interested to hear opinions.

[TheCompiler]

Great candidate for the Roleplay mods section ;)

[blacksol]

Does it work properly with the Unofficial Patch, as I understand that cleaned up various quest text. As this loads after it shoudl override the patch, but just thought I would ask

[Farlo]

Wanted to reiterate Blacksol's question, I can't find an answer in the mod's comments either. I hope it will if it's loaded after USKP, but just want to make sure.

[z929669]

The only way to check easily would be to go into the CK and check several examples against original vanilla (I don't know how to do that offhand)... no simple task unless somebody knows of a specific example(s)

[TechAngel85]

I contacted the mod author and this is what he had to say:

Hi TechAngel85,

 

Better Quest Objectives only makes two types of changes to Skyrim.

 

1. It changes the displayed text on all quests listed in the readme. This will conflict with any other mod that edits these quests, including the unofficial patches, but it will conflict in a way that accomplishes the mod's goal - better quest descriptions.

 

2. There are a few quests where a little bit of scripting was added in order to make radiant quests display the specific location chosen by the engine.

 

You can see these changes if you load my mod in TES5Edit. Long story short - it is very likely that my mod conflicts with the unofficial patches. Obviously, if my mod is loaded after any other mod that changes the quests listed in the readme (like the unofficial patches), the changes in my mod will take effect in-game so it's advised to create a merged patch.

 

I hope that helps answer your question. I haven't played Skyrim in a while so I don't plan on making any changes to mod, but I may in the future if I start playing it again after some more DLCs are released.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[z929669]

Thanks for this, Tech. It at least answers part of our questions (there is conflict, and the end result will be OK). Still have to wonder if USKP corrected this sort of thing in a similar manner though.

 

Hints may be in the version log of USKP (or we could ask Arthmoor).

[Kelmych]

I contacted the mod author and this is what he had to say:

Hi TechAngel85' date='

 

Better Quest Objectives only makes two types of changes to Skyrim.

 

1. It changes the displayed text on all quests listed in the readme. This will conflict with any other mod that edits these quests, including the unofficial patches, but it will conflict in a way that accomplishes the mod's goal - better quest descriptions.

 

2. There are a few quests where a little bit of scripting was added in order to make radiant quests display the specific location chosen by the engine.

 

You can see these changes if you load my mod in TES5Edit. Long story short - it is very likely that my mod conflicts with the unofficial patches. Obviously, if my mod is loaded after any other mod that changes the quests listed in the readme (like the unofficial patches), the changes in my mod will take effect in-game so it's advised to create a merged patch.[/quote']

From my understanding of what he's saying is that it does conflict, but doesn't break anything; adding better descriptions to those conflicts. His recommendation is to create a merged patch with Better Quests and USKP.

I looked at this in more detail and I don't think it is possible to make a BQO-USKP patch with TES5Edit as this would only allow selection of which script file (the USKP or BQO script) is associated with the quest. Since Better Quest Objectives was written USKP has made major changes to the scripts (.pex files) for a number of quests, including changes to quest stages and associated locations in some of these quests. For these quests, applying the small text changes that BQO adds would I expect require editing the USKP script source files and creating new .pex files. Is there a simpler approach that Matt recommends which would allow a merged patch?

[kryptopyr]

I've not actually compared the changes made by Better Quest Objectives to the changes in USKP, but from my experience in working on my own mod, The Choice is Yours (which also makes changes to a lot of different quests), changes made to the quest scripts (including the script fragments associated with different quest stages) can be compatible with separate changes made to the journal entries, aliases, and other quest data...changing one doesn't necessarily overwrite the other. Simply changing the journal text for a quest should not affect the .pex or .psc files for that quest.

 

If Better Quest Objectives and USKP both make changes to the same quest, but Better Quest Objectives does not alter the quest script, whereas USKP makes changes ONLY to the script (it doesn't add extra stages or make any other alterations to the quest data) then both changes should remain valid assuming that Better Quest Objectives doesn't mistakenly package the unaltered .pex files in with the mod.

 

Of course this assumes that all of the conflicts between these two mods are structured this way, which probably isn't the case. But it's at least worth considering that the conflicts between the two may not be as severe as they seem at first glance.

[Kelmych]

Better Quest Objectives hasn't been updated since March 2012, so unlike The Choice is Yours there are many USKP-added quest data and script changes, and a few script changes added by Dawnguard, that have not not been accounted for with BQO. In a few of these quests USKP made changes to the quest stages. When I looked using TES5Edit at the conflicts between USKP & Dawnguard with BQO, there are 60 quests whose quest data will need to be updated in BQO using TES5Edit. For each quest there isn't typically much data that needs to be changed. The NNAM Quest Objective Display Text that BQO changed needs to be preserved, of course and the display text might need a little expansion for the new quest stages that USKP added to make it consistent with the rest of the BQO changes.

 

The BQO mod author said that there are a few quests in which script changes were made to allow creating better objective display text for radiant quests; if these scripts are also ones that USKP changed then the BQO author will need to add the BQO changes into the USKP scripts. I also don't know which quests have these BQO script changes.

[TheCompiler]

I personally use The Choice is Yours and find it awesome. Farlo, please do the same and find a place for it in the upcoming 2.2.1 :P