Whats the deal with dialogue options reordering themselves?

[traison]

So next up on my TODO list of endless Skyrim issues is my dialogue options. Basically there's 2 symptoms:

1. While the NPC is talking, selecting a dialogue option like "What do you have for sale?" will actually just pick some other dialogue option instead like "Nice shoes.". This is not the issue fixed by better dialogue controls (got that mod already), see below.
2. When the NPC is done talking, some dialogue options reorder themselves. Using the previous example, the "Nice shoes." option would switch places with "What do you have for sale?". Now the dialogue system actually works like it should.

The thing that perhaps makes thise more annoying is that from what I can tell, it's only mod-added dialogue options that switch places with other things. This smells like a game engine issue.

 

dialoguemenu.swf is provided by DBVO's Dear Diary Dark Mode patch:

Dear Diary Dark Mode Patch - warm color-84329-1-1-1-1691781069

 

I'm kinda tired of listening to Belethor talking about selling his sister every time, and I can't interrupt him without running the risk of accidentally asking him to tell me more about his facinating history. If you know of a fix for this, I'm certain Belethor would be greatful to you for saving his life. He may even give you his sister for free.

[Yinkle]

Better dialogue controls? Apologies if this is a separate issue

[traison]

1 hour ago, Yinkle said:

Better dialogue controls?

 

This was already mentioned in the OP.

 

Currently looking like the issue is in Dear Diary. Removing its dialoguemenu.swf appears to fix the issue. This is very unfortunate, mainly because I don't really have time to pick up yet another programming language just to fix this.

 

Anyone fluent in action script? Find and fix this issue for me?

[NymphoElf]

  

2 hours ago, traison said:

When the NPC is done talking, some dialogue options reorder themselves.

 

Sounds like dialogue topics with identical priority values.

 

Many topics (both vanilla and modded) use the same values, so it just randomly orders them whenever the topics are called. Certain quest topics, such as when you return to Farengar after obtaining the Dragonstone ["I have the stone tablet you wanted."], have higher values so that they are ordered higher in the list and you are more likely to see them first.

 

https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/Category:Dialogue

https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/Topic

Edited August 8, 2025 by NymphoElf

[NymphoElf]

2 hours ago, traison said:

While the NPC is talking, selecting a dialogue option like "What do you have for sale?" will actually just pick some other dialogue option instead like "Nice shoes.".

 

This is a Dialogue issue that I've dealt with myself. I'm not sure what causes it, but this is an issue with the pointer position being desynced from the mouse highlight/selection. The workaround I've been using is using the keyboard for dialogue selections and/or scrolling all the way to the top or bottom to re-sync the positions.

 

I always chalked this up as a BUGthesda issue and dealt with it once I knew a consistent workaround.

 

I don't use Dear Diary, so I personally believe that isn't the cause - though I won't say it couldn't potentially be made worse by that mod.

[Grey Cloud]

3 hours ago, traison said:

While the NPC is talking, selecting a dialogue option like "What do you have for sale?" will actually just pick some other dialogue option instead like "Nice shoes.".

I get this one.

 

27 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

but this is an issue with the pointer position being desynced from the mouse highlight/selection. The workaround I've been using is using the keyboard for dialogue selections and/or scrolling all the way to the top or bottom to re-sync the positions.

That's how I see it and my workaround is to give things a couple seconds to settle down then make sure the option I want is highlighted before I actually click on it. Not 100% guaranteed and still annoying but the best I could come up with.

 

I might be wrong but it seems worse with SE than it was with LE.

[traison]

43 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

Sounds like dialogue topics with identical priority values.

 

This doesn't really explain why the vanilla dialogue menu works.

 

32 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

This is a Dialogue issue that I've dealt with myself. I'm not sure what causes it, but this is an issue with the pointer position being desynced from the mouse highlight/selection.

 

This was fixed by a mod made 13 years ago: Better dialogue controls.

 

Just tested with DBVO's dialoguemenu.swf and it appears to work. So that also suggests the problem is in Dear Diary. Gonna see if I can copy-paste the code from the vanilla menu and have it Just Work™.

[NymphoElf]

14 minutes ago, traison said:

This doesn't really explain why the vanilla dialogue menu works.

 

Could it be conflicting "Starter" pointers causing things to shuffle? Because the vanilla dialogues only have one "Starter" pointer in each topic, which may give things a set order.

[traison]

Just got the vanilla menu to swap positions on items as well.

 

I got the Dear Diary menu to be more reliable. While it still swaps item positions after the NPC finishes talking, it hasn't picked the wrong dialogue option yet when I interrupt them.

[traison]

I got the Dear Diary menu to stop swapping item places. The PopulateDialogueLists function gets called twice and stopping it from being called more than once stops it from swapping items around. There's a bigger issue here however which is that now that items no longer switch places, I always end up with the wrong topics being selected. That is to say, the arguments array that is passed to PopulateDialogueLists is wrong the first time its called, and correct on the 2nd time (after the NPC is done talking). Something scrambles the list before or after the first call, and it no longer lines up with some internal list of topic ids.

 

I need to do the same edit to the vanilla menu to see if it also starts to pick the wrong topics then.

[traison]

The vanilla menu also picks the wrong topics. This is some engine bug then as I suspected initially. Could also be caused by some other mod like dialogue camera, headtracking, engine fixes, ... My current testing method is also quite unreliable I'm noticing now, which suggests that @NymphoElf's idea about dialogue topic priorities could be relevant. It seems to be nothing but dumb luck which topic item is first in the dialogue list.

 

So most likely what's happening here is that the topic list is generated twice by the game engine. Once for when you intialize dialogue, and a 2nd time some time before the NPC finishes speaking their greeting topic. This explains why if I pick a topic before the NPC is done talking, topic index 1 is no longer what it used to be.

[traison]

Restored the swf menus to their originals, so I'm back to using the DBVO's patch for Dear Diary:

Dear Diary Dark Mode Patch - warm color-84329-1-1-1-1691781069

 

Picking the wrong dialog topic seems to have been fixed by removing: 

Improved Alternate Conversation Camera AE-68210-1-2-0-1705625705

 

Unfortunately the source code does not appear to be available for this mod, nor is there a new version. Judging by the Nexus bugs listing, this mod was abandoned about a year ago. Had a scroll through the code for Alternate Conversation Camera just in case these 2 are related, and it does mess with the dialogue menu quite a lot.

 

@Grey Cloud Are you also using IACC?

 

The topic entries are still getting scrambled after the NPC is done greeting. I've disabled:

True Directional Movement-51614-2-2-5-1698369428

PC Head Tracking - MCM v4.8 SE-11993-v4-8-1629727400

[traison]

Preliminary testing shows that configuring IACC as follows could fixes both issues (scrambling, and wrong topic):

bHideDialogueMenu=1

 

10 tests were done, where 0 showed issues. The unfortunate thing with that is the following note I have for this IACC version:

Issues:

*  bHideDialogueMenu is still broken and has to be disabled.

Edited August 9, 2025 by traison

[PippinTom]

Not sure that definitive list of mods that have potential to screw menu (make it self-reorder after voiced greeting ends playing) is nailed, however I greatly appreciate pointing out right direction - thank you.

 

I don't use any of mods mentioned in this thread (except for DBVO, recently just started) but I do use something called Dialogue Interface ReShaped (+patch for DBVO), and first thing I'll check next time I have a chance to play will be removing DBVO and all it's descendants from the equation to see what happens. (honestly, quality of majority of DBVO packs seem so low that for my taste - immersion-wise - silence may be beneficial and I'm ready to accept it as a solution if it turns out to be a valid one - we'll see).

 

BTW: reorder issue started buggering me just recently, I guess - after upgrading 1.5.97 to 1.6+ - which means either that it didn't bother me before enough to notice or it didn't exist in my 1.5.97 build - which I cannot verify due to obvious.

 

Edited August 9, 2025 by PippinTom
typo

[Grey Cloud]

11 hours ago, traison said:

@Grey Cloud Are you also using IACC?

No. I don't use any camera mods.