Slave In Pose Dialogue / modding questions / new WIP?

[schildstarr]

I just started working on a mod that primarily adds more captives to the powder gangers, legion and fiend camps. Ideally they would work similar to the captive in Tryout Kennel (the one on the top floor of the administrative building) but at a minimum I'd like them to be arranged in different poses (as provided by the Slave in Pose mod.)

 

The first thing I tried was to have add a new AI package to the NPC, and then within the package dialogue, set the specific idles from Slave in Pose. When I tested it, I think they're running the packages (I disabled head tracking in the package, and they didn't head track.) However, they were not performing the idles.

 

The second thing I looked at was how Mavia's Slave in Pose dialogue mod functions. It works pretty well, and all that dialogue must have been hard work (thanks for the mod, Mavia!) From what I can see, whenever you choose a new position in the mod, the dialogue sets the position in a quest variable, and then tries to call a script via a spell (msexTieNpcScript) that calls playidle based on the quest variables. In the comments of the script, it says that pickidle doesn't work. The specific animations also have conditions to play based on the quest variable. However, as far as I can tell, the script never gets called properly (not sure why?), and pickidle actually does all the work. I can remove the script body entirely and the mod still functions the same way. However, since it functions using pickidle animations based on a single set of quest variables, all bound NPCs will end up playing the same pose eventually upon refresh.

 

I looked at the FO3 version of the dialogue mod, and I'm not quite sure how that works. It looks like it adds a script spell effect to the NPC to be bound, and then in the scripteffectupdate block, it calls playidle based on (again) a single set of quest variables. Wouldn't it keep calling playidle every frame?

 

Regardless, it doesn't look like using quest variables would work for me here. Any ideas how to have various NPCs arranged in various poses? (permanent, until you free them.)

 

For the more ambitious part of the mod (to have the gang members "interact" with the captives) I'm concerned with the "don't leave cells while sexout animations are playing" that I recently read about. Anyway around that? If NPCs do get stuck, is there anyway to "unstick" them? Is this a concern when playing with SexAssault mods etc. where an animation may be occuring out of sight?

 

Thanks for reading the giant wall of text!

[DoctaSax]

- playidle is the best solution for these things - I'm sure I made a good case for it in the NV scripting thread; what you may be looking at there is that the idle directory is still set up to use pickidle & the script isn't functional for playidle-only (yet).

- Sexout FleshedOut has a few good examples, I think, of using playidle based on the situation. I use spell scripts for that. Maybe have a look at SOFO/Cooking/Dance/VomitingScpt. Also look at where I placed the idles in the idle manager in the geck.

- SOFODanceScpt has a randomizing bit in it; technically, it also calls playidle every frame, but that only visibly executes a new idle when the old one has had time to finish. This may be different for different kf files or different idle entries in the geck, I dunno.
- to keep an actor in place while the idle is played, SOFO occasionally addscriptpackages Sexout's SexoutDoNothing package. It's solid.

- to stop idles playing you call a new, neutral one like SexoutNGReset or however it's called. But if it's a matter of stopping NG idles, you need to stop the sex act itself, by casting the FinishNow spell on every actor that's detected to be getting it on. It's probably prettier to to do that once you've already left the cell (store the actors first, then cast finishnow, maybe). I'm not sure if this is as big a problem as it used to be - my stuff always involves the player - but it's probably best to tidy up as you move on.

 

[schildstarr]

Thanks for the reply DoctaSax. I read the thread and after going through some of the sexout API I think I'll go the less ambitious route for now -- captives will just be more or less static backdrops in various poses. If anyone is interested they can add sexout animations to the mod, but I don't think my scripting skills are up to the challenge.

 

With that in mind I figure changing the mod to use playidle properly is overkill, and relying on tokens is probably the simplest solution. I've made the following changes to Mavia's mod:

 

1) I added all the anim objects from lostrider's mod so that the props show up

2) I stripped out the (now) unnecessary spell calls

3) the idle poses are now completely token based, so that multiple npcs can have different poses at the same time.

 

I'll send Mavia a pm to ask if I can release these changes. My planned captives addition will likely use the same esp, since I'm lazy.