Multiple Dialogue Quests for One NPC?

[sullyvanj93]

Hey guys! Just a quick question for you all.

 

I'm hoping to clean up my companion's dialogue a bit, since I have thousands of lines of it. Make it a bit more organized. So I'm hoping to divide each major topic up into its own quest if possible. A separate quest for the initial companion hiring, for example, with all of the dialogue lines, variables, etc that go with that chunk of topics. But I've ran into two issues, and before I run into any more, I want to make sure I'm not wasting my time.

 

My first attempt, I kept all of the GREETING topics in the primary dialogue quest, and tried to link to the necessary topics through the "Choices" tab. But since they were in two different quests, the system didn't seem able to bridge them together... He'd say the greeting, but then have no available dialogue options, so the convo would force exit.

 

So instead, I tried moving the hiring GREETING topics over into the new quest, but that didn't seem to work either. He wouldn't even say the greeting, even though it was the only option the conditions would allow.

 

So my main question is: am I able to set up multiple dialogue quests with different greetings for the same NPC? Is there any way at all to keep this better organized? Or do I absolutely need to keep everything together in one main quest?

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited December 6, 2022 by sullyvanj93

[Radioactivelad]

Make sure the quests are set to automatically start. Many vanilla npcs have dialogue spread across multiple quests, so this concept isn't anything new.

 

There's much better ways to stay organized though, at least at this scale, and you seem to have some weird fundamentals about how to use Topics, which I'll try to address:

 

 

To begin with, you don't want to be linking topics from the greeting as CHOICES. You are right that a topic placed in one quest does not link to the dialogue associated with that topic in another quest. That's because Topics are really just a sort of "figurehead"- all the actual dialogue is local to the quest itself.

 

What you should be doing is Checking the "Top Level" box, near the top of the window, for topics you want displayed after the greeting. You can think of the Top Level as a "hub" for all of an NPC's dialogue. As mentioned- Top Level topics are automatically displayed after the greeting, AND topics that do not link to any Choices will automatically return the player to the top level "hub".

 

 

There's a million ways you can keep your dialogue organized but this is usually what I do: If I have a topic about asking a character some questions, I will name that topic something like ABCBobbyQuestionsHub.

 

To break this down:

ABC is a simple prefix. I usually go with something based on the name of my mod for this purpose.

Bobby is the name of the character that is going to be using this topic.

Questions relate to what this topic is for.

and finally, Hub indicates this as the starting point for a number of CHOICES. (The Topic names of which would be something like ABCBobbyQuestionsWhyAngry).

 

 

Additionally, in the field you type dialogue in, you can actually hide text by placing it between { } brackets. If you have a question you want to ask many npcs, you can use these technique to stay organized *while* keeping all the dialogue contained in a single topic.

 

Say we have the ABCQuestionForEveryone topic, the responses would look like this:

 

{Sally}I don't particularly like cauliflower.

 

{Bobby}I f*#@ing *love* cauliflower.

[sullyvanj93]

Actually, this particular dialogue I am not wanting to be top-level at all. I only do that for topics I want available all the time, after every greeting. Again, this is a companion, so that's reserved for pretty basic companion dialogue. Instead, I use the Choices field so that those are the only options available after this particular GREETING. I use "top-level" and "add topics" for more permanent dialogue choices, and have a vast amount of different dialogue trees set up this way.

 

This separate quest of dialogue is only used for the initial hire, and never used again. I know I can use the Say Once flag, but that gets very messy. I also have them all currently listed alphabetically with a prefix, as you suggested, but after a few hundred, it still gets very busy. Hence wanting to branch out into additional quests to clean things up.

 

All of that being said, the reason that the GREETING wasn't working in the second quest was due to the fact that I forgot to click "Start Game Enabled". :laugh: So I appreciate you pointing to that first and foremost, as my oversite would have driven me crazy. Thank you for the assist!!

Edited December 7, 2022 by sullyvanj93