Less Generic NPC Project

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 7:45 pm

I've got a tiny ESM file, 19kb unzipped, just as a sort of job advertisement. If you are interested in hosting this for us that would be great, essentially its a tiny plugin file for anyone who's thinking about joining the team, or just wants to see what we're all about. Go and have a chat to the Silt Strider opperator at Khuul. In the mean time, before we get somebody to host it, email me at gandalfthegrey2002@hotmail.com and I'll send you a copy of the file.

If you ask him about his background he'll tell you about his job and his ambitions, if you ask him about his trade he'll tell you about his family's history with the job that he's doing, ask him about services and he'll tell you how great the shipmaster is.

I have replaced: Background. My Trade. Silt Strider. Destination. Services. Specific Place. Someone in Particular. Khuul. Have a look. You may learn about the fire of Gnisis...

DM

blake · Post by **blake** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 8:47 pm

Excellent Work DM! if done right and if we get enough people on the team this could shape up to be one of the greatest things to hit morrowind since the new faces came out

beornica · Post by **beornica** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 9:19 pm

oooo, guys, how exciting! Wish there was something I could do.....hey, I LIKE writing dialogue! Can I take four? Just designate to me, and I'll do it!
Hey, I think Molag Mar is next up, don't you? What a boring little town. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself....

blake · Post by **blake** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 9:22 pm

take your pic as long as its not one of the ones dm picked or you could and then we could see who had the better background... but that might lose efficiency so just pick 4 and post em so we know not to do them

beornica · Post by **beornica** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 10:08 pm

Oh goody. I've got dibs on Aldi, Brurid, Endris and Helga, then. When I get the dialogue all together, do I just email it to you, Blake? Or to you, DM?

blake · Post by **blake** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 10:41 pm

do you have aim or msn or yahoo? if not you can just email it to me or DM...

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 5:33 am

You can email it to either of us, but it might be better to send it to Blake first, since I'm very busy at the moment.

DM

Monolith · Post by **Monolith** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 6:36 am

hum, I don't know if it is possible, but try to add .jpg to the ending of the esm and attach the file to you post. That way everyone could download it right here. I'm going to have a look at the tutorial - then I'm going to change some of the dialogs at Dragon Fel - just for fun and to see how easy/difficult it is.

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 7:30 am

Still trying to figure out the technical side - so far I had to edit the main 'my trade' option for silt strider drivers and then put 'not_ID' and then the name of the guy I was editing. I guess I could put in 'Not Khuul' for background so that all of the NPC's respond with thier own story, but looking at the existing NPC project in Seyda Neen it seems that somehow everybody says their own individual dialouge anyway, without the generic dialouge being edited in anyway, and thier own dialogue seems to have the same functions and stuff as when I did it in Khuul and it was replaced by the original stuff.

Also last night when I had done all the dialouge I loaded up the game and went for a chat with the silt strider guy, he answered my trade fine, and I hit continue, and he finished what he was saying and we moved on to other things. I then spoke to him about Silt Striders and it hit a dialouge loop. I quit MW and compared the dialouge here to that of my trade, and the formatting was the same, so I just remade the Silt Strider topic so it didn't need a 'continue'. I loaded it back up, and my trade, which had previously been fine, and hadn't been changed in any way, went into a dialouge loop. Can anyone shed any light on this?

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 8:28 am

OK, I've finally worked out how you can give each individual NPC dialouge for the big generic topics: Background, my trade, Latest Rumours, Little Advice, Little Secret, Dumner.. in fact everything that is not unique to them. All the generic dialouge in the game is determined by certain conditions being met, for example the generic response to My trade is determined by the class of the NPC. The only way to add in a unique dialouge for all the different NPC's with the same trade would be to remove the original bit of dialouge, and add thier own, or so I thought. This would have led to to prolems (silt strider opperators around the island would not be able to talk about thier trade until we got around to them).

Through looking at the Less Generic NPC project in Seyda Neen I've worked out that if the NPC is set to 'no lore' they won't have the dialouge options for the generic topics. So what we do is we set the dialouge topics to each NPC, then we set that NPC to no lore. If that didn't make any sense don't worry. Anybody who wants to do dialouge, I'm now perfectly willing to put it into the game. Arno, are you still willing, if so, would you be able to write dialogue for:

Nelmyne Andules-commoner dark elf
in her shack

----in thongar's tradehouse----

Shotherra-assassin khajiit

Ondi-Knight in the imperial legion nord

Thongar-merchant nord

Beornica, the four you suggested would be great.

Dagon Wench:

Miron Garer-commoner dark elf
in his shack

Rivame Samandas-commoner dark elf
wandering around

Svadstar-commoner dark elf
wandering around

since I'll have problems making four characters if I'm going to put the dialouge in game as well. Next time you'll get more interesting people I promise, Its just that I've already started on the Ship lady (in fact nearly finished her).

The way to do it would be to:

1. Open up the Construction Set
2. Open Morrowind esm.
3. Click the speech bubble in the tool bar, and it comes up with a list of all the dialouge topics in game.
4. In the bottom left hand corner of the box that has appeared there is a smaller box with nothing in it, and "filter for" written above it, select that box and type the first three letters of your NPC's name. That should get you close, if not bang on the NPC.
5. Then select them, you will see quite simply all the dialouge that needs replacing, you don't have to change anything in the construction set, just use it to find out what need changing and write up the new Dialouge in MS word. (If you don't have word, use another program and save the file as .rtf)

You will notice that for certain things like latest rumours there are many different options, I only need (and that matter I can only work out) how to enter one latest rumour per NPC, also feel free to link your NPC's together, if one of them states in their latest rumours that they've heard NPC X is having an affair, that leaves some interesting possibilities for NPC X's little secret...

Once you have the file email it to me, with the name of the NPC at the top, and the topic with a line left and then the response. Kind of like this:

NPC: Barry

Background.

I'm Barry. Hi.

My trade.

My trade is interesting and blah blah blah.

If you have any questions (I know those instructions aren't terribly clear) don't hesitate to email or post them here, anybody else who wants to get on board I'd really appricate it. After Khuul I want to do Maar Gan, (23 NPCs) but some of the bigger towns will require a bigger team.

Thanks guys. We can do this!

DM

arno_v · Post by **arno_v** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 9:05 am

So just to be short... What subjects do I have to write a dialog for?
My Trade
Background
Latest Rumors
Little Advice

Is this it or am I forgetting something?

dragon wench · Post by **dragon wench** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 9:12 am

That sounds great. I'll work on the dialogue for those characters this weekend

If anybody wants to send anything my way for editing just PM me and I'll provide you with an email address. But please give me a couple of days, my PM box is quite full right now because I need to transfer some correspondence to a word doc.

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 9:25 am

OK, Arno asked me to specify in more detail what needs replacing, so here goes. For each NPC I'd like a unique response to:

latest rumours
Services
[Town name] - Khuul for this one.
[NPC Race] - this will vary
Someone in particular
Specific Place
Little Secret
Little Advice
My Trade
Background
Destination (if they opperate a travel service)
Anything else that isn't common, but at the same time is not unique to them, for example scouts know about the regions, but if you have to do a scout character, use the editor to find out what regions he/she discusses, then make the response more interesting.

Thanks

DM

PS The first 2 NPC's are complete, and I'm getting better with adding in the dialogue, so if people can contact me with their NPC responses I'll add them in. If anybody wants to look at the kind of thing we're aiming for I can send you the esm, go and have a chat with the Silt Strider Opperator, and the Shipmaster at Khuul.

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 12:10 pm

I know I already said this once, but small messages sometimes get lost in big threads like this, and it was quite a few posts back now. We will need somewhere to host this, just so that people on the forum can enjoy it as we develop it, a wider public release would be nice, but I'd like to do that town by town. Really I just need hosting so that other members of the team can see how the NPC's around them are progressing in dialogue (for example if one NPC is acting like a nasty little ratbag, we don't want another praising them).

Its also to give people an indication of the kind of standard we're aiming for, and the kind of thing we're after, and I suppose for other members to see if they'd like to join the team. I personally despise File Planet beyond all belief and would be delighted to allow hosting exclusive to Game Banshee users if any of you have a mod site, or if not, I really don't want this to end up on File Planet, whom I hate with a passion, but in the end this is a team effort, and up to the team, or which I am just one member, although I know Dagon Wench hates File Planet too.

So, can anyone host a small 31kb file?

blake · Post by **blake** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 12:14 pm

DAMN DM, that is so great... Not a single generic topic... This makes the Npcs seem like they are actually a part of the community, wow. Alright we need to get started on the other npcs

***** five stars

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 12:28 pm

Originally posted by blake
DAMN DM, that is so great... Not a single generic topic... This makes the Npcs seem like they are actually a part of the community, wow. Alright we need to get started on the other npcs

***** five stars

The Solstheim topic remains generic, because I don't want to exclude non BM people or non Tribunal people from this mod.

Monolith · Post by **Monolith** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 3:40 pm

Originally posted by Dark Master
So, can anyone host a small 31kb file?

=>

Originally posted by Monolith
hum, I don't know if it is possible, but try to add .jpg to the ending of the esm and attach the file to your post. That way everyone could download it right here.

You could try Morrowind Summit or Euro-RPG as well.

Dark Master · Post by **Dark Master** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 4:05 pm

I thought about MW Summit, but don't they stick some stuff on File Planet? I tried the jpg idea, but couldn't get it to work. Tell me about Euro RPG.

Monolith · Post by **Monolith** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 4:16 pm

Euro-RPG

I only know that you can upload your own mods there.

blake · Post by **blake** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 6:31 pm

http://www.angelfire.com/crazy3/kickyou ... e/mod.html

Ald Velothi NPC EXPANDED!

Ok just right click and click save target as...

Ald Velothi has been turned into a racist town, this will fit in with the story of khuul and gnisis and the surrounding areas when they are done...

enjoy our first town and please join the team