Hitman impasse bug

[Zenoseiya]

When talking to the two old chinese hitmen, you can convince the one in the restaurant to restore their friendship too early, while the fortune teller continues to offer money for his death. The quest them becomes unsolvable unless you kill the old man in the restaurant. Did anyone else notice this?

[Cylnar]

The way it's always worked for me is, first you talk to the guy in the restaurant (Lu Fang) and get him to agree to restore the friendship. Then you talk to the fortune teller (Ji Wen Ja), who offers you money to kill Lu Fang. You then talk to Ji Wen Ja again, immediately after you exit the first conversation. You will now have the options for peaceful resolution. That conversation has always been bugged, but would require basically a complete rewriting of the dialogue tree for Ji Wen Ja to fix, thus it has never been fixed, either in any version of the True Patch or to my knowledge in any of Wesp's UP abortions.

[Tessera]

My belated response:

Can this issue be fixed..? Yes.

However...

I walk a tightrope when I add repairs to the True Patch. Remember that my goal has always been to fix as many legitimate bugs as possible, but WITHOUT making any arbitrary changes to the game. Yes, I could rewrite the entire dialogue tree for the aging Tong hitmen. But this notion presents us with a dilemma. First of all, the voice acting has already been recorded by Troika and switching it around might not be feasible.... not without making numerous digital modifications to the original audio files. I simply refuse to do such a thing, because to do so would be straying too far into the realm of a MOD, not a PATCH.

Secondly, since it is quite possible to finish that quest without encountering any bugs at all, and since attempting to rewrite the dialogue trees, simply to avoid any possibility of what is, quite honestly, a minor bug in the tree... well frankly, I just do not feel that it is within my prerogative as a PATCH author to make such a profound number of unauthorized changes to the game. If I were creating a MOD for Bloodlines, then I would go ahead and fix it... in whatever way that I wanted to. But in a patch, I just can't justify hacking the game code to pieces, simply to help people avoid a -very- minor bug which usually does not occur.

So to wrap it up: can I fix it..? Yes, easily. Will I fix it..? No -- not in the True Patch. Doing so would involve far too many arbitrary changes on my part, including having to discard some of Troika's original material. Well, I refuse to do any such thing in our patch. Sorry.

I may decide to do something with it in my VTMB Mega-Mod, however. In a mod, anything goes... so if I do anything with this issue, then that is where it will be dealt with: in a mod, but not in the True Patch.

[Zenoseiya]

I thought it was simply a matter of preventing the option to reconcile him from happening before you reached the same state with the fortune teller. Why would this involve changing the voice acting or rearranging the trees?

I mean, assuming you make a flowchart of their dialogue trees, wouldn't they appear equal?

[Tessera]

If you still feel that strongly about it, then give it a try.

If I like what you come up with.. and if I feel that it is indeed a fix, and not a mod... then I will consider adding it to the TPG.

And I will of course credit you accordingly within the patch notes.

Fair enough..?

[Zenoseiya]

I've briefly explored infinity engine games and Neverwinter Nights, which arranges dialogue trees into threaded lists, but this isn't the system bloodlines uses. It would be slightly more time consuming, since I'd have to chart the trees manually, and I still don't know how Bloodlines dialogue trees work, aside from the fact that they look very similar to Fallout dialogue trees (which I don't understand either).

Basically, the bug is just that the option to persuade restaurant hitman appears about one or two back-and-forths too early, before you also get the chance to persuade the fortuneteller hitman. I don't know whether there's a misplaced variable or what. It's a very minor bug (caused by sloppiness, probably), and I doubt it will affect most people unless they're deliberating trying to reproduce it (I only noticed the option when I was doing the quest a second or third time).

[Tessera]

Run it past Acrimonious and see what he thinks about it. Just send him a PM, or whatever.

Personally, I consider this to be a minor fluke. I'm willing to fix it in a future TPG hotfix... but please understand that it is very low on my current list of priorities. That is why I suggested that you might want to take a crack at it yourself, to save time.

Keep in mind that Wesp has an entire army of people who submit suggestions and fixes to him. But over here, it's just me. Or if he decides to come out of retirement, then it's just me and Acrimonious. So there is only a limited amount of things that we can fix within a given time frame. I actually DO have a life, ya know. 

[Acrimonious]

I don't know when I'll have a chance to take a look at it, but if you want to send me a PM with the exact text of the NPC dialogue (so I can easily search for it in the file) you feel is appearing too early, I can check out the conditions on it and see what's up.