NellSpeed

we ask the game to bring out "the next character who hates the main character" ...it's a one-line summary of every adventuring game, ever. Wow. Thanks for sharing this!

How did I miss seeing the update on this-- sorry! Anyway, it sounds like you did a lot of great work on this, and I'm really sorry to hear about the constant crashing. The best guesses suggest that Skyrim scripting will work much the same way that Oblivion scripting does; if anything, it may work more smoothly, which would be great. You might consider putting out a call for beta-testers to see if anyone can track down the KotN bug. That's definitely an oddity. Anyway, congratulations on taking the time, effort, & initiative to teach yourself how to do this! In the meantime, you might consider looking over here: Have you ever wanted to be a quest-coder?

This sounds like a LOT of fun-- PMing you in just a bit!

Quoted for 100% truth. Also, congrats on working through this-- too many people give up the first time something goes wrong. Or, you know, the 1,001st. <- is not struggling with finishing scripting at all! No, really.

I'd highly recommend TES Alliance's modding school forums-- they'll take you step by step through just about everything-- scripts, variables, quests, etc etc etc. For gameplay changes, you'll need to know that stuff... and god knows what all else! Welcome to the wonderful world of modding! (Hope you've got plenty of headache treatments on hand....)

And congratulations again-- not just on successfully making the sign, but on being willing to sit down and invest the time & effort!

Congratulations! I swear to god, it gets easier the more you do it. :) One thing I wish I'd known when I started, though: it can be useful to use a unique prefix for everything you add. I use "qns" (q == quest, ns == Nell Speed). So an NPC's EditorID might be"qnsBob", the quest might be "qnsBobQuest", and his topics might be "qnsBobTalk00", "qnsBobTalk00a" and so on. Planning out the structure of your quest before you open the CS is a good idea, too-- it can help you see exactly what you need to do. :) Also, TES Alliance has a whole section devoted to modding tutorials, designed for beginners. You might want to take a peek. :)

@fg109 - Every time I open the CS wiki, I'm horrified by the number of things I'm doing dramatically wrong. Fortunately, I embrace the "failure is always an option" lifestyle. @Mehra - The more you do it, the easier it gets, believe it or not-- it's just getting past that initial WTF? phase, where nothing makes sense. One thing immediately comes to mind-- try removing the condition "GetInCell." IF I've got it right, this is checking to see if Breanne is in the inn-- and 0 means she isn't. I think that might be the problem. EDIT : And, of course, what fg109 said, too. Oops.

Okay, to me that looks like you've created a new topic, not adding to an existing one. I believe it's generally also considered better to edit / add dialogue using the quest window, rather than the dialogue window.

Oops! Yes, sorry-- the ingame console-- and I should have specified that by "yourtopicname" I meant, you should use the name of whatever you called your topic. This is also called the EditorID: http://finalgirl.us/Oblivion/tes_dlgtree.gif So if your topic is called rentabedfrombreanne, you would type player.addtopic rentabedfrombreanne .

As far as I know-- and god knows I'm not a master scripter!-- dialogues must be attached to a quest; and at some point, you'll probably need to use addtopic to... well, add your topic. So we'll try that first! Open the console, and type player.addtopic yourtopicname . If it then appears in the NPC's dialogue tree, then all you need to do is put the addtopic command in your script!

First of all, congratulations on trying to do this-- the more modders, the better! Could you cut&paste your quest script so we can see what it looks like? If it's super-long, you can use the "spoiler" option to hide it.

In my experience-- which isn't all that wide!-- it's both harder & easier than you'd think. The hard part, for me, comes to coming up with a plan and then sticking to it, rather than adding on new bits and pieces. That's why I suggest putting together one single bard in one city, and then adding on from there. I'm not at my gaming system at the moment, but later on I can pull a few examples of scripts I've used that more or less work, & post them here. I've used triggers & say/sayto a LOT. :)

I'm actually working on another companion (and maybe a DIY companion template, we'll see) and about three other projects, but if you want some step-by-steps on how to do triggers, I can probably give you some tips. God knows I screwed it up majorly the first time; at this point, I have a much better understanding of how to handle triggers a bit better. I'd suggest doing one single bard or minstrel at a time-- that way, it'll be easier to fix things when they inevitably go wrong, as they almost certainly will. :biggrin: I think it was David Brasher who said something like "when people say they're doing a final release of a mod, what they mean is they haven't found any new bugs yet".

Then you don't! :) You scoot around it with something like The minstrel sings a song about a clever Lord of Thieves who repeatedly outwits a dull-witted Captain of the Guard. It's obvious with whom the minstrel sympathizes! or The bard recites a poem dedicated to the lives lost in Kvatch. Something in her manner suggests she may have lost someone there, herself. and so on. Depending on how it was handled, you'd be dealing with limitations of line length; and without voicing (silent or otherwise), dialogue tends to zoom by really, really fast. Edit: Okay, MarkInMKUK's idea is better!!

For a single wandering bard within a city, set triggers and a given path for the bard to walk along during certain times of the day. When the bard walks onto a trigger, a script turns the trigger off for X amount of time, and has the bard recite a verse of poetry or "sing," i.e., say something like "The Bard sings a song about (whatever)" or "The Bard recites a long poem about (current event)." You might even have a song spreading from city to city about the Oblivion Crisis and the PC's actions-- sometimes they might be correct, other times they might be completely wrong, just for the fun of it.

I like the main quest okay, but I do love some dungeon crawling. Even the vanilla dungeons feel new if you use mods. In fact, there's a WoW dungeon crawl-- the Scarlet Monastery-- that's a lot of fun, and it's really nicely put together, with some gorgeous layouts. I died a lot going through it. The Ayleid Steps is, IMO, the ultimate free-form / dungeon crawl / exploration mod. There's a plot, but you can ignore it entirely and just go looking for the hidden steps that transport you to various locations (safe and otherwise) around Cyrodiil. I'll admit to being really, really biased, since I really like the Ayleid ruins in general. I love the Oblivion Collectible Cards mod. It adds a new guild and quests, but if you really want to, you can just run around collecting cards, just for the fun of it. Hoarfrost Castle gives you a series of quests that leads to you owning your very own castle. Plenty of content, lots of running around. The Well of Minlorada has not only a dungeon crawl, but some awesome, awesome custom loot. I died a lot playing through it, but I'm not much of a strategist. If Oblivion's leveled loot / enemies drives you nuts, you may want to also look at a level changing mod-- it doesn't bother me, but I know plenty of players find it frustration. EDIT: Oh, my god. How did I forget Gates to Aesgaard? Not without bugs (ALL mods have bugs), but the atmosphere is amazing. Deeply, deeply creepy. I died a lot playing through it. Yeah, that's kind of a theme with me. Bit of self-promotion: I did 2 re-models of the Damsels in Distress mod-- random captives will appear in some dungeons; you get to escort them out for a reward. And the Bear Hunt mod is a collector's mod (So is Sugar High, but that's for shops, homes, etc), with absolutely no purpose except to collect toy bears.

How do you like to play? Do you prefer a specific class? Do you like roleplaying, hack-and-slash, or a mix? Does dungeon crawling seem more fun than running around outside? Do you prefer to interact with NPCs or do you play loners? IMO, playing style can dictate what mods you'll like best. :) Personally: Armor & race: I use the TGND body with Xenius' race compilation. For textures, I'm currently running Lush & Gaudy, for that ultra-bright-and-shiny look; and Natural Environment, because it adds in dragonflies and birds (nothing quite like looking up and suddenly seeing a hawk circling). When I want strictly hack-and-slash, it's time for 28 Days and a Bit. Just played through and loved Well of Minlorada, which is an Ayleid ruin adventure.

It may not be "modders are abandoning Oblivion," but "modders prefer to tell their own stories." No matter how great one person's idea may sound, it may just not be enough for someone else to commit weeks or even months of their own time... especially when they could be using that time for their own projects.

Maybe she's the sole support of her younger siblings, willing to risk anything to make enough gold to support them. Maybe his fellow-guardsmen died in battle, and he's never forgiven himself for surviving. Maybe she's not as confident as she looks. Maybe he's smarter than he seems. There are plenty of NPCs in Oblivion, of course, but which ones do you wish had been given more screentime and/or dialogue? Who do you think would have made a good companion? If you were going to do a mod, whose backstory would you want to tell? There are four that come to mind for me: Sir Mazoga! Her mini-quest was one of my favorites, and she was just generally fun to run around with. Deetsan of the Cheydinhal Mages Guild. I always wondered how she'd do as the new head of the Guild. Would she be targeted for Falcar's fall? Would she be able to unify the other mages? Ilend Vonius. His line about the PC bringing him back from hell seemed to set him up to be a Mazoga-style temporary companion, or at least for a mini-quest. M'aiq the Liar. I think he would have made an ideal quest assigner.

I think that, for now, you should ditch the Hero Realm-- not because it isn't an interesting idea (which I think it is), but because you're finding it dull. Modding can be frustrating enough without trying to make yourself take an interest in it. You can always incorporate a Hero Realm later on. Before adding it to TESN, I'd suggest getting a few beta-testers to help stomp out the most obvious bugs. Other things to consider: - What does your Realm have to offer for lower-level characters? - Is there a way to retreat if the player needs to repair items, rest, etc? Or are there areas for those things? As for names... when in doubt, Seventh Sanctum can help!- http://www.seventhsanctum.com/index-name.php

The Zen of Villainy. This sounds like more and more fun as it goes along. Edited to add: Where fun == "something that will totally get you repeatedly killed"

That definitely sounds entertaining, and it also sounds as if you're making very steady progress on this. You deserve a lot of credit for taking your idea and working to make it happen-- congratulations to you!

Ha! That's actually kind of awesome. You could dress him in all black & red & spikes & give him a deranged vigilante-hero backstory for extra fun! Anyway, if I understand it rightly, if Aggression > Disposition (or if Aggression is just really high), that's when you get NPCs attacking willy-nilly.