Adding a custom shout to an enemy

[Ainulindale]

Hi all,

 

Run into a little snag, I'm trying to give an enemy a shout version of the master illusion frenzy spell, and he is so far refusing to play!

 

Firstly, I made the spell from a copy of the frenzy spell, removed it's requirements, buffed its AoE, and removed all the spell effects (basically I'm setting up a riot every time this guy starts a fight, so don;t want to see the spell in action, just the effect on the other NPCs).

 

At this stage I tested the spell by adding it to my player, works great, everyone in the bannered mare has a wonderful time.

 

Next I fiddled around with getting my enemy actor to use shouts, which I eventually managed, adding UnrelentingForceShoutDraugr to his spell list, and giving him a custom combat style with all weapons on 0 and shouts on 10. In game he happily bellows at the locals before becoming the lead role in Julius Caesar Act III scene 1.

 

Excellent, I thought. Next step, turn my frenzy from a spell into a shout, and give it to my NPC. Following the shout UnrelentingForceShoutDraugr, the voice spell UnrelentingForce1 and the magic effect VoiceUnrelentingForceEffect01 as guides, i've made a similar shout, the only difference being the effect archetype (frenzy), the conditions (same as for the master frenzy spell, i.e. won't work on undead etc), and the delivery (self instead of aimed).

To make the shout I set Words 2 + 3 to NONE, left Word 1 as WordDragonFire01 (used by UnrelentingForceShoutDraugr, which worked previously) and set it's effect to my spell, and added the shout. In game however, nothing happens.

 

I've played around for a couple hours with changing to word, or making a new one, but from what I can tell they're only for the player to unlock the shouts, not NPCs, so I think i'm barking up the wrong tree with that (which is bad, i'm not a dog), unless there's something I haven't seen with giving NPCs unlocked words? Can't see anything obvious with boss draugr, ulfric or the greybeards, who all use shouts in combat, and as I said, my guy quite happily uses the draugr version of unrelenting force.

 

On further testing, giving my player the shout, spending a dragon soul to unlock it causes a CTD so somethings wrong somewhere...

 

EDIT: Ok, the shout now functions perfectly when added to the player by the console, but the NPC is still refusing

 

Can anyone shed some light on this?

 

Cheers :]

Edited January 24, 2014 by Ainulindale

[Ainulindale]

Right, made progress!

 

I think NPCs have an inbuilt inability to use illusion magic, since mainly spells are designed for use by the player, or by enemies, aimed at the player, thus illusion is useless - they never trigger anything saying "this would be a good thing to use"

With that in mind, I played around with adding my frenzy effect to a destruction style effect in the voice power. This took many, many tweaks, fiddles and erroneous trials to get working (I'd get results ranging from no shout used, to crashing the game when spawning him - and using the shout with the player character would either work, not work, or crash also).

I decided to simplify it, make a tag-on frenzy effect for unrelenting force, rather than tagging something onto my custom effect. basically I made my frenzy spell into an aimed, rather than on self, power. Combined with unrelenting force worked in game, again after many failed tests. basically I think it requires at least a projectile for the NPCs + physics to realise they're involved in the effects, not entirely sure, but without the projectile, it crashed, with, it worked, and I could turn all other FX off. So in game i've got a guy that will shout silently, with a slightly subtler unrelenting force air-blast effect, that causes everyone within a large radius of where the shout was aimed, to become frenzied. I'd like to get the effect completely invisible, so more fiddling required, does anyone know of a suitable "dummy" FX?

 

Many citizens of Whiterun died to bring us this information.

Edited February 4, 2014 by Ainulindale