Low-Intelligence support in GECK is poor

[fronzel]

Well take it as ranting from a mod creator if ya like to, but low-intelligence support in GECK is a joke.

 

When the New Vegas GECK was released it stated: "Built-in support for low-intelligence dialogue options."

 

That is half-assed. You can use the tags {Dummy} and {Non-Dummy} you can flag the answers of NPCs accordingly.

 

The thing is that this is only half of the fun, since smart questions/choices (called "Topic" in GECK)and a dumb answer just don't make sense. If you need an example then look at dialogue for Ignacio at Helios, Dr. Usunagi at the NV Medical Clinic and so on. There are a few gems hidden for low int characters but not many. In Fallout 2 this was quite funny, but in New Vegas (and FO3) the support is poor to barelyn existant. Even at Helios one for Ignacio Rivas is poor, some player questions/choices are funny as hell - like if Ignacios asks you "Are you here for Peace or war?" and you can answer "Pizza" or "Warm". The failure here is that Ignacios dialogue simply never reflects that you are playing a dumb character, he continues with the same crpa whether you are int 1 or 10. At least he is one of the VERY FEW NPC where you get a different choice for a dumb character at all.

 

 

OK so enough ranting, we're here to make it better, eh? So that is where the GECK kicks in. From the first to last version - as i stated - GECK supports "dumb" NPC answers. Great. But where are the questions/choices?

 

After much research and with unofficial tools i found the answer - they are in the files, GECK simply won't let you edit/add these.

 

Fallout New Vegas has actually 2 question/choice (Topic) values, called "Full" (Which is what you edit as a "Topic" in geck and appears as the player question/choice when talking to an NPC) and then there is a mysterious 2nd parameter called TDUM which is the legendary "Bulitin support for low-intelligence dialogue". Too bad you can neither edit nor see this line with GECK. A tool that can show you these lines is NVEDIT (Download here at nexus).

 

The big drawback is that you cant edit it with GECK (obviously, prove me wrong if you know a trick!) and that the intelligence is fixed (3 or lower counts as "Dummy").

 

So why all this pointless ranting? I simply wanna encourage people to add more "low-intelligence" dialogues, quests and outcomes into their mods. In Fallout 1 and 2 this REALLy affected how you play the game and raised the replay value quite a lot.

 

As i said the built-in functions are useless, so here's a workaround:

 

- So to make a simple test dialogue just create a new quest, make sure it is start enabled and priority 50, so your target NPC will use it.

 

Add the standard GREETING dialogue and add a response like "test: are you dumb?" add 2 choices (new topics!) to it like "testdumb" and "testintelligent".

For testdumb you add a condition like "GetActorValue Intelligence < 4" and run on TARGET. For the imntelligent topic you just make it intelligence > 3. Then you will be fine.

 

I am working on a pretty big mod and it took me several hours to research and test out all this, so i just wanted everyone to be able to look-up the game mechanics and workarounds. As i said I encourage anyone to add low-intelligence options to their mods simply as it's so much fun.