OpenMW-CS: TopicInfos index sorting and rearranging isn't fully functional
If you go to Characters > Topic Infos, the resultant list does not sort properly; if you tell it to sort by, e.g., the Actor column, it will not group all that actor's Topicinfos, but still separates by Modified status, and by Topic, sometimes very widely:
- You might find all the unchanged ones for a particular topic grouped together, but the ones with a status of "Added" are nowhere near those entries material).
- Even with vanilla data, it's wrong. I sorted by Actor, and the list I get is sorted by Topic, then by Actor after that. Supposedly. Even within that framework, stuff isn't showing up in alpha order. E.g., for the topic Trebonius, which I did not modify in any way, an "Actor" sort produces a list of blank actor, sirlionwe, malven romori, edwinna elbert, etc., in that order.
- Weirder yet, the entire new topic I added shows up at the top of the part of the list that is non-vanilla material. The Topicinfos I added to an existing topic in the mod I'm altering [I'm working on my .omwaddon patch and expansion for an existing .esp mod by someone else] show up at the bottom of the list of Topicinfos for the topic.
The only possible fix that came to mind was to save the mod, then re-open it for editing, which should treat the saved file as a completed mod that you are patching, with all its records set to a Status of "Base". But it did not work at all. I still get all kinds of records showing up as "Modified" and "Added", so those apparently mean modified or added in relation to the base game file, the .esm.
This probably affects other lists than "Topic Infos"; that's just where I noticed the issue and where it's presently a headache. One serious consequence of this is it completely boogers the ability to see what order the Topicinfos are in for a particular topic and actor; the added ones are not grouped with the rest. If this list reflects the actual order they'll be parsed in, it looks like the only solution is to do extensive condition tests for every Topicinfo one adds, because the order in which they're read cannot be reliably determined, and there's no way to drag and drop them, or move a bunch at once, or move them an arbitrary number of steps up/down; one can only move each one one step at a time, which could take hours for complex topics shared by many NPCs. And there's no available key binding for "Move Up"; it has to be done with mouse clicks over and over again (dangerous, since "Delete Record" is one option away and very easy to mis-click on during Move Up operation number 139 ...).
(RM-4357 from redmine: created on 2018-03-11 by Dark Locq, )