Techie here: Creation Kit dialogue point me in the right direction please

[elekszid]

Fucking shit, man. I am a programer IRL not bad at tech stuff and yet here I fail at the first step. I don't need step by step tutorials just a hint what I am doing wrong, in which direction to learn or research.

 

As an experiment for my planned submod I made a new quest, and for the sake of experiment trying to add a dialogue you can have with every NPC, with the intent to narrow it down with conditions (only members of a faction) later. 

 

So added an alias as a specific reference without telling it what the reference should be because I saw other mods do this, and I assume it just sets the reference to the NPC the player is talking to:

 

 

So I make a scene for a dialogue with this alias

 

 

 

(Please ignore the Hungarian texts, it is just an experiment, a preliminary exercise for building my submod)

 

Expectation: it shows up with every NPC because it sort of automatically makes the reference of that alias to any NPC I talk to

 

Reality: does not work with any NPC at all

 

RealModderz like @DocClox or @Musje please point me in the right direction!

[Pamatronic]

16 minutes ago, elekszid said:

So added an alias as a specific reference without telling it what the reference should be because I saw other mods do this, and I assume it just sets the reference to the NPC the player is talking to:

Not sure how you got this Idea, but this is nonsense.

 

possible solution:

did you generate the SEQ file for your esp? without that, dialogues wont show up.

[Visio Diaboli]

SEQ file but also the reference does need to be set at some point by you. 

 

I've only used Skyrim's CK but it should still hold:

 

In a script somewhere you need to have 'aggypenzt.ForceRefTo(npc)', where aggypenzt is defined as a property on that script (and then assigned to aggypenzt in its properties menu), and where 'npc' is assigned as the npc you currently want to fill that alias.

 

Once you're sure that line has executed, you also need to start the scene.

 

But I'm not sure if scenes are your best bet here: if you just want dialogue that appears on every npc then you don't need a scene, nor a reference alias. You could just add the dialogue in Dialogue Views and attach no conditions to it in that case. You'd still need the SEQ file though, TES5Edit is really convenient for those.

[elekszid]

@Pamatronic @Visio Diaboli thanks a lot. I used to know about the SEQ stuff and forgot. This is why in my first submods I rather added more dialogue options to existing mods. 

 

 

I also tried that way with my other attempts at submodding  but it did not work - probably because of this forcerefto and scenestart stuff missing.

 

As for Dialogue Options - from my reading of CK wiki it sounded like that is outdated, to not be used anymore? The standard esps are not using it...

 

BTW @Visio Diaboli your name suggests that you might have similar tastes as me - I am an evil sadistic bastard - what I was trying is adding a dialogue option to buy slaves in the slave selling AuctionHaus submod of Just Business, and when it did not work then I started testing these stuff on more generic levels like as I said here trying to add a dialogue option to every npc just to test how it works.

[Visio Diaboli]

Dialogue generally works fine except for when you need the speakers to move around and do things while talking, which is what scenes really excel at. So if you need people to walk to certain positions in between talking then a scene is infinitely better, but if you just want to add dialogue then you could do it as such:

 

This is just a debugging branch in my own mod that I've temporarily repurposed for the example: If you create and link topics like this and do nothing else, it'll appear under every single NPC's dialogue options:

Spoiler

 

 

Then once you have a satisfactory dialogue tree, you'd want to click on the topic info (white box) of the first dialogue option and add a condition that requires the speaker to be of the right rank in the right faction for it to appear:

Spoiler

So that dialogue would only appear if the speaker was rank 1 in the AlduinFaction, you'd want to replace those with whatever faction you make and whatever rank you set the NPCs at. Note you only have to add these conditions for the first topic - the second topics can't appear unless the first has been selected.

 

Or alternatively you could go to the Quest Data tab and add that condition for all of the dialogue in that quest at once:

Spoiler

You'd put the same condition in Quest Dialogue Conditions instead of on the individual dialogues.

 

Creation Kit is kind of weird, it best resembles object-oriented systems but even then there's quite a bit of odd stuff going on. A tutorial series would probably be helpful to watch, since they do things in real-time and you can kind of see how exactly they're setting things up. 

[EgoBallistic]

Scenes don't start themselves.  You need to do something to populate the alias and start the scene.  The most common way to do this is with dialogue.  The CK provides an easy interface to force an actor who speaks a line of dialogue to populate an alias and start a scene:

 

Here I have a quest that lets you rescue a captive.  The quest has a dialogue scene similar to yours, with a CaptiveActor alias for the NPC:

 

 

Now I need a way to make the scene start.  On the same quest, I add a new Greeting topic that the captive will speak when the player talks to them:

 

 

The conditions on the topic limit which NPCs can say the line.  In this case, the actor has to be in my mod's victim faction.  If I removed that condition, any actor could speak the line and start the scene.  Notice that Start Scene box in the window below: it puts the actor into the CaptiveActor alias and starts the EBCC_CaptiveScene01 scene which is shown above.

 

 

So now, when the quest is running, if the player talks to an NPC in that faction, the NPC will say that line and be placed into the CaptiveActor alias, and the scene will start.