Matador Posted February 24, 2012 Posted February 24, 2012 As much as I've tried, I've failed to find an answer to this: how the hell do you transition from one info in a topic to another without presenting a choice to the player? I absolutely know this is possible, because the game does it all the time--for instance, Caesar's dialog under the GREETING topic: {FIRST TALK}So I finally get to meet the courier who's accomplished so much in so little time. That is why I summoned you here, right? I mean, a man nearly kills you, and your response is to track him across the breadth of the Mojave? Next info: {FIRST TALK}The question is... are you ready to get started? (presents choices) The thing is, I can't find any documentation or hints at all as to how this happens. No scripts, nothing in the infos, nothing. What goddamn voodoo bullshit is this? Also, bonus question: how do you transition from one topic to another without player input? I also know this is possible from Caesar's dialog, since there is an info that leads to a "choice" for vDialogueCaesarFortCaesarTopic93 that most definitely is not a choice. If you're meeting Caesar for the first time with bad Legion rep, he'll launch into that without being prompted.
Guest Loogie Posted February 24, 2012 Posted February 24, 2012 I've had similar wonderings myself, since Cook-Cook does the some thing - his dialog topics are not setup as choices under his greeting, yet once his greeting launches, the choices are there.
Bromm83 Posted February 24, 2012 Posted February 24, 2012 As much as I've tried' date=' I've failed to find an answer to this: how the hell do you transition from one info in a topic to another without presenting a choice to the player? I absolutely know this is possible, because the game does it all the time--for instance, Caesar's dialog under the GREETING topic: {FIRST TALK}So I finally get to meet the courier who's accomplished so much in so little time. That is why I summoned you here, right? I mean, a man nearly kills you, and your response is to track him across the breadth of the Mojave? Next info: {FIRST TALK}The question is... are you ready to get started? (presents choices) The thing is, I can't find any documentation or hints at all as to how this happens. No scripts, nothing in the infos, nothing. What goddamn voodoo bullshit is this? Also, bonus question: how do you transition from one topic to another without player input? I also know this is possible from Caesar's dialog, since there is an info that leads to a "choice" for vDialogueCaesarFortCaesarTopic93 that most definitely is not a choice. If you're meeting Caesar for the first time with bad Legion rep, he'll launch into that without being prompted. [/quote'] To use the aboe mentioned topic as an example: 1. They use this package to start the conversation: CaesarInitialDialoguePackage After the first topic has been said that package will never fire again. 2. They do not use goodbye after the statement wich forces caesar to use another greeting. And since the variable FirstTalk is still 0, the only GREETING option he can use is the second topic with all the responses to choose from. Basicly, as long as you don't give any answering options and don't use goodbye you force the NPC to use another greeting topic. Just use the right conditions and you can do whatever you like.
Matador Posted February 25, 2012 Author Posted February 25, 2012 1. They use this package to start the conversation: CaesarInitialDialoguePackage After the first topic has been said that package will never fire again. That just tells Caesar that he's the one who starts the dialogue, not the player. It doesn't have any scripting to control the flow of the conversation in it. The question really is how to go from one topic to another one without letting the player know it, IE without making him select the topic manually. 2. They do not use goodbye after the statement wich forces caesar to use another greeting. And since the variable FirstTalk is still 0, the only GREETING option he can use is the second topic with all the responses to choose from. Basicly, as long as you don't give any answering options and don't use goodbye you force the NPC to use another greeting topic. Just use the right conditions and you can do whatever you like. I'm not sure about this. If there isn't a topic flagged with Goodbye in the topic list, and there are no other valid dialog choices, the game pulls from the infos in the generic GOODBYE Conversation topic that every NPC has, so that it's impossible to get stuck in a conversation. You can try to add conditions to those infos so that they're impossible to call, but the game will call one of them anyway...somehow. And if you look at Caesar, he has two GOODBYE conversation topics that can always be called, with additional special ones depending on which mission you're running for him. I really hope it isn't hardcoded somehow, because it's a neat trick that makes the dialogue seem a LOT more realistic. It's tailor-made for each individual player's achievements, and it's cool to see and easy to write.
Tefnacht Posted February 27, 2012 Posted February 27, 2012 Hi. First post from me, I'm a new guy. I've been lurking for a couple of weeks now since “accidentally” stumbling into these forums while looking for naughty Skyrim stuff and decided to stay. Hello everybody. Nice to be here. I've since then moved back to modding New Vegas (I am more of a SciFi guy) and this dialog problem Matador posted about really got my eyebrows wrinkling. Very, very odd indeed and I too wanted to know how the hack that works. Chaining up different infos to be spoken without a player choice in between would be a really nice thing. So far I thought this would not be possible ... but Caesar is definitely doing it. After spending a few days carefully analyzing Caesars dialog back and forth I think I finally found out why he is doing it in this way: Using FNVEdit I noticed that those of Caesars infos that lead into another info without a player choice in between are all using a data field labeled “Unknown” which is usually empty. It is located below “Choices” and “Link From”. Like those two it contains a list of TCFU – Info entries ... maybe pretty much like “Link To” we know back from Oblivion? Look at the GREETING info Matador mentioned with FNVEdit. Its ID is 152A16. In the “Unknown” data field, it lists four other infos: [iNFO:00152A2D] (“You arrive on the Strip and waltz into the Lucky... [iNFO:00152A2E] (“You assassinate the head of the Chairmen... [iNFO:00152A2F] (“You visit the Tops, and next thing you know, the... [iNFO:00152A18] (“{FIRST TALK}The question is... are you ready to... See the lowest one in the list? I think that is the link. After the Greeting info is spoken, the game checks the conditions on those listed infos top to bottom and continues talking if it finds a valid one. Manually hopping from info to info this way I was able to reproduce all the info-chaining Caesar does. Bad news is: I really have no idea how to create these links in the GECK. However, I successfully created a working “info-chain” manually with FNVEdit. It is very possible but a real PITA. Maybe someone else can shine some more light on this feature? Edit: Good news! I finally found out how to link infos in this way within the GECK. It is done with the so called “Conversation Editor”, the button at the very right side of the main toolbar. After loading the conversation for a quest, you can browse though the tree, select a response (what the actor says, shown in red), rightclick and choose “Copy”. Then select another response, rightclick and choose “Paste as Link”. Links are shown in gray, prompts (what the player says) in blue. I've created a lot of dialog so far but never touched this tool until now. Quite neat actually. If you load the vDialogueCaesar quest into the conversation editor, all the linking is immediately obvious and easy to follow. Double-click a link to jump to the real item. Its a shame that this tool is not even hinted at in the GECK Wiki.
Tefnacht Posted February 27, 2012 Posted February 27, 2012 No, no, no, no, no. Don't confuse things The “Conversation Tab” the Wiki talks about there is part of the Quest editor (what you get if you edit a quest) and the Filtered Dialog editor (what you get if you click the speech-bubble icon in the toolbar). That one is old news and ... not really that useful since it mostly deals with actor to actor conversation, except some special topics like HELLO and GOODBYE that are only available in there. The “Conversation Editor” is a completely new thing I never really took notice of before. Its the icon to the very right in the toolbar, the one that looks like the “align text to the right” button we know from text processors. Its a thing unique to New Vegas, the FO:3 GECK doesn't have it. This tool seems a little buggy to me but I really just started playing with it. Until now I created all my dialog in the Quest editors Topic tab...
prideslayer Posted February 27, 2012 Posted February 27, 2012 ohhhhhh... ok. Will scratch out my previous post. I've never seen that before either.
prideslayer Posted February 27, 2012 Posted February 27, 2012 FWIW I linked to the wrong thing anyway, I was thinking of the "Dialog Tree" in the quest window, not the conversation tab (which is basically useless).
sen4mi Posted February 27, 2012 Posted February 27, 2012 I'm not sure about this. If there isn't a topic flagged with Goodbye in the topic list' date=' and there are no other valid dialog choices, the game pulls from the infos in the generic GOODBYE Conversation topic that every NPC has, so that it's impossible to get stuck in a conversation.[/quote'] That's not completely true. I got stuck, yesterday, in a "SmallerTalk" conversation loop. I had no goodbye option and all I could do was check for diseases or say something bland. That said, behind the scenes, I suspect that the NPC had an AI package that continually requeued that conversation with me. Probably this was a broken Stalker AI with no relevant courses of action open. I eventually loaded a saved game to get out of that loop.
prideslayer Posted February 27, 2012 Posted February 27, 2012 sen4mi : open console, click, "kill". exit dialog loop. resurrect (if you dare)
sen4mi Posted February 28, 2012 Posted February 28, 2012 That sounds like a great idea... And I have bAllowConsole=1 in both Fallout.ini and FalloutPrefs.ini But my tilde key was not bringing up the console (perhaps because my machine was so overloaded? I will need to test that the next time I am in game.)
prideslayer Posted February 28, 2012 Posted February 28, 2012 Oh was this happening during that wrangler disaster? An inescapable dialog on top of everything else? Ouch.
Matador Posted February 28, 2012 Author Posted February 28, 2012 Hi. First post from me' date=' I'm a new guy. I've been lurking for a couple of weeks now since “accidentally” stumbling into these forums while looking for naughty Skyrim stuff and decided to stay. Hello everybody. Nice to be here. I've since then moved back to modding New Vegas (I am more of a SciFi guy) and this dialog problem Matador posted about really got my eyebrows wrinkling. Very, very odd indeed and I too wanted to know how the hack that works. Chaining up different infos to be spoken without a player choice in between would be a really nice thing. So far I thought this would not be possible ... but Caesar is definitely doing it. After spending a few days carefully analyzing Caesars dialog back and forth I think I finally found out why he is doing it in this way: Using FNVEdit I noticed that those of Caesars infos that lead into another info without a player choice in between are all using a data field labeled “Unknown” which is usually empty. It is located below “Choices” and “Link From”. Like those two it contains a list of TCFU – Info entries ... maybe pretty much like “Link To” we know back from Oblivion? Look at the GREETING info Matador mentioned with FNVEdit. Its ID is 152A16. In the “Unknown” data field, it lists four other infos: [iNFO:00152A2D'] (“You arrive on the Strip and waltz into the Lucky... [iNFO:00152A2E] (“You assassinate the head of the Chairmen... [iNFO:00152A2F] (“You visit the Tops, and next thing you know, the... [iNFO:00152A18] (“{FIRST TALK}The question is... are you ready to... See the lowest one in the list? I think that is the link. After the Greeting info is spoken, the game checks the conditions on those listed infos top to bottom and continues talking if it finds a valid one. Manually hopping from info to info this way I was able to reproduce all the info-chaining Caesar does. Bad news is: I really have no idea how to create these links in the GECK. However, I successfully created a working “info-chain” manually with FNVEdit. It is very possible but a real PITA. Maybe someone else can shine some more light on this feature? Edit: Good news! I finally found out how to link infos in this way within the GECK. It is done with the so called “Conversation Editor”, the button at the very right side of the main toolbar. After loading the conversation for a quest, you can browse though the tree, select a response (what the actor says, shown in red), rightclick and choose “Copy”. Then select another response, rightclick and choose “Paste as Link”. Links are shown in gray, prompts (what the player says) in blue. I've created a lot of dialog so far but never touched this tool until now. Quite neat actually. If you load the vDialogueCaesar quest into the conversation editor, all the linking is immediately obvious and easy to follow. Double-click a link to jump to the real item. Its a shame that this tool is not even hinted at in the GECK Wiki. Oh hey, I just wanted to point out that you are a BADASS. This totally is the answer, something I could not find despite days of trawling the internet. Kudos!
sen4mi Posted February 28, 2012 Posted February 28, 2012 Oh was this happening during that wrangler disaster? An inescapable dialog on top of everything else? Ouch. Yes... but that one was not to bad, since load still worked. I ran into some bugs where I had to exit the game (I could *not* load another game during a rape animation without exiting and restarting because tfc would be enabled -- and without my console), and of course there was the crash where I decided I needed a good night's sleep. In my opinion, the game is not designed for the heavy load that can result when a lot of NPCs are active with a lot of Sexout mods active. Perhaps no one besides me has tried stress testing Sexout? That is probably wise, but I think this is solvable. First, within the current architecture, the sexout scanner should have a mode where instead of increasing the time between scans, it does a partial scan. Scan 10 NPCs and then stop and the next scan do the next 10 NPCs. The number of object scan steps per frame should be configurable in mod configuration. And if this is not currently possible, I would add features needed for this to your NVSE plugin list. I think my first implementation would ignore issues from scan skipping that could result from PCs leaving the queue (if that even happens -- but it should, on actor death). Second (or maybe first, if my above proposal turns out to be too much work): for people dumb enough to install multiple sexout mods, Sexout NG 2.0 might poll mod authors and supporters for new game events that they want, and associated conditions. I imagine you would have to negotiate these so they made sense both for story and for implementation. Then Sexout could send off event notifications after interesting things happen (I do not think "before" is possible). This approach might initially seem daunting -- there's just way too many things and conditions for individual event queues for everything, and GECK does not give us much for abstraction. But even if the code is not doable I think I (and I hope "we") would benefit from talking through those issues.
prideslayer Posted February 28, 2012 Posted February 28, 2012 I need to give your suggestions some thought, but I do like where you're going. You're right, nobody has really stress tested it. I've only recently begun creating standalone ESPs with what "functional tests" and "unit tests" as well, and more of those would help out a lot. The scanner might need a bit more thought in order to queue NPCs, maybe add them to a formlist constantly, while a different script pulls actors out of the list and sends them off to the subscribers based on some kind of load metric.
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