davidlallen

I am working on my first quest mod. I have somehow broken a door in a part of the map which I did not intend to change. I used fnvedit to "clean" the mod but the door is still broken. Is there a better place to post fnvedit questions? The files thread has hundreds of posts most of which are just endorsements. I have attached the mod. It is not at all done; I just want to clean this broken bit before I go any further. If you go to location "Field's Shack" (coc slabandonedshack03) and try to walk through the door, you will see that it only opens and closes, it does not let you into the interior. However, in the base game, you can walk through. I used this woodshack01 object as the base for my mod, and I put a copy of it somewhere else (coc dwrshackint). The copy works fine. Somehow in copying, I broke the original. I have followed the steps in the recent fnvedit manual to remove "identical to master" records and to "undelete and disable references". I know this did "something"; the mod file size got a lot smaller after the first step, and the second step identified 70 records which were undeleted. None of them "appear" related to this problem to me; but as I mentioned I am pretty new to this. The attached version is after all this cleaning. Can anybody see how I broke this door?

You can also change the scale of an object in the game. If you simply want to make one instance of an object larger or smaller, you don't need to edit the nif. I have used this to make larger or smaller industrial machine objects, for example. Will that help?

I doubt this happens in pure vanilla. I have added some quests recently and I get the zoom-in-zoom-out when the NPC has no valid lines of dialog to speak. For example, maybe all their dialog is collected into one quest, but the quest does not have "start game activated" checked in the quest data tab. I am sure there are other reasons it could happen, such as incorrect conditions in all the GREET topics.

Add a mapmarker object outside on the ground. In the "marker data" tab, enter the name. Make sure "Initially disabled" is unchecked and "can travel to" is checked. Edit: I lost the race.

Yes. A quest can be in any state or none, and the variable is still available.

I had thought of that but I couldn't think of any specific time an npc had asked that. So I didn't know what to search for.

Hm. Searching "pcname" at the geck wiki and the tes wiki shows no hits. Is there another handy place to look for this type of information?

I retried, and pasting multiple links seems to work. Not sure what was wrong. I guess if I use this window carefully, at least it reduces the total amount of clicking. Still, I wish there was a pure text interface where I could copy/paste using my normal text editor. Much more productive for me. Unrelatedly(?), how do I put the name of the PC into a dialog? NPC: Hello, what is your name? PC: My name is <insert name here>

OK, I have entered a second quest using the conversation editor. It certainly saves time in creating the topics and linking them to this quest. It was convenient to go through and enter each piece of text with a lot less clicking. But, reusing topics either doesn't work, or I can't figure out how. An easy example is just with GREETING. Usually, I want to have two greetings with all the same children. For example, "Hello" with the say once flag, and "Hello again" without any flag. If there are four opening replies under that, I want to have the same four for both. I can create "Hello" and put the four topics under it easily enough, and I can create "Hello again". But now I don't want to enter the four topics again. I chose "copy" for the first topic and then "paste as link" under "Hello again". This is where I get stuck. It seems that each topic can only have one child as a link. If I try to paste a second topic under "Hello again", nothing happens. So it seems that whenever I want to use the same topic twice, I have to enter the right names in the "choices" field of the topic anyway. Since now the topic names are automatically generated, really long names, I cannot easily tell which topic I want to add there. The topic list on the left can't be stretched wide enough to see both the topic name and the text. Can you forward the threads you found at bethsoft? I searched "conversation editor" both there, and at google, but I could not find any clues. I am still hoping to find a less painful way to do this. I can create a text file with the dialog and all the links I want, in about an hour. But then it seems to take 2-3 hours to enter the information into the GUI and get all the links right. This is pretty painful.

If anybody can suggest a solution to moving objects, that would be great. From the database standpoint, there is no reason I shouldn't be able to just change the location field ("re-parenting", if you will).

Here's a more detailed example. I want to place a console in my wilderness cell, so I drag clutter/consoles/console01 from the object view into the render window and place it near my other items. I add a reference editor ID to the object, to give it a name which I can refer to. Now in my quest, I want to put a quest marker on this. So in the quest objectives tab, I use the Quest Target Data panel and select this as a reference in the render window. This works; the quest marker appears on the console in game. Now I want to spread out the objects into the game world. I want to put the console somewhere far away from here. If I start out by dropping another console01, I have to re-enter the quest marker. I cannot give the new console01 the same name, because GECK will complain the name is already in use. If I delete the existing console01 first, then GECK warns me all the references will be deleted. In particular, the quest marker will be deleted. So if I do it this way, I have to go find all the references like the quest marker, and re-make them. I was hoping there is a way to just move this object into another cell or an interior, without deleting it and re-creating it. For some quest objects, there can be many references and it will be a pain to re-enter them. But, I cannot think of anything else to try. Is there a good way to do this?

I am creating my first quest mod. It has several objects with complex behavior, such as a briefcase with two copies: one activator, one not, using enable/disable to flip them as the quest progresses. For testing, I am dropping all these objects into one wilderness cell so that I don't have to wander all over the wasteland to test. But in the final version, I want these objects spread around, in different cells and added to some existing building interiors. Am I getting myself in trouble here? There does not seem to be any way to move an object into another cell, but only to delete it and add a new object. If I had not customized the objects, I wouldn't care. But if I delete one object, all the references to the object get deleted, and then I have to customize it and re-add the references. It will be a drag if I have to redo that when I get to the stage of spreading the objects around. Can I move these objects to other cells/interiors? If it can be done in some other tool besides GECK, that would be fine; I have used FNVEdit to clean up some objects I changed by accident, and I have installed FOMM but haven't done anything with it yet.

Thanks for the suggestions. I will look up FOMM to find out how to unpack the archives. For GECK, there is a special NV version which must be used; is the same true for FOMM? I found a hack anyway; I created a temporary zero length file with the right pathname. Then I used the file browser I mentioned, so that the filename would get in there. Then before running the game, I deleted the temporary file. Worked fine. If I have to do this only occasionally, that may be less painful than having thousands of unpacked archive files around.

Neat! I had not found that. It looks interesting because it has a "file import" button! But, I do not understand how to use it, and searching "conversation" at geck.bethsoft.com doesn't find anything. Is there a description of how to use it? Also, there seem to be many ways to link responses together. I am using the "choices" field in the quest topics tab, but I see some other quests using "add topics" or "link from". Which is the "best" way?

I want to make a console that the user can interact with. I have written the script, based on the "broken EDE" you find in Primm. But, I want to use the existing console02 model; "broken EDE" is a creature. I think I want an "activator". So I click "new" in the activator section of the object window and I get a dialog to enter the information. This is fine. But ... there is no way to enter the model. The field is grey and does not accept typing. The "edit" button eventually brings me to a file select dialog. But the model I want, "clutter/consoles/console01.nif", is packed and is not available in the file select browser. Please see attached screenshot. Is an activator the right way to do this? If so how do I enter the name of an existing model?

Thanks! I have tried "export" and it exports only a few fields. It does not export all the fields which would be needed, specifically the topic condition statements and the post-script. The TES wiki has a very short description of the import command. It says import is useful for localization, so I assume this will only import and export the plain text of dialog. You could then pay to translate it, and import to create a French (or whichever) language version. So I am pretty sure "import" will not help to build topics with conditions and post-scripts.

I have done TC mods for other games, but I am new to oblivion/fallout modding. I am a little intimidated by GECK for entering and managing quests and NPC dialog. For any non-trivial quest, the amount of dialog and topics can grow, and entering each one requires a lot of widget-twiddling in GECK. One NPC, not even that complex, may have 25 topics, 10 of which modify quest variables, another 10 of which have simple post-scripts, etc. All of these may be closely related but with GECK, there is no way to quickly copy/modify multiple objects. Is there some text language or external script way to create all this stuff? Other games, such as Civilization IV, use languages like XML and Python to store all the data. This makes it easy to quickly copy/modify objects to create complex behaviors. This seems much less painful than using GUI widgets to select conditions and equality operators. Also, there are two closely related mod forums here, "talk" and "troubleshooting". Is one preferred for this type of discussion?