create dialog/quests without geck?

[davidlallen]

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?

[Quetzlsacatanango]

Geck has options for exporting and importing things like dialog in delimited text files, which you could edit it excel or the like. I have never tried doing it this way but I'd be curious of your results if you were to try it.

[davidlallen]

Geck has options for exporting and importing things like dialog in delimited text files, which you could edit it excel or the like. I have never tried doing it this way but I'd be curious of your results if you were to try it.

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.

[llamaRCA]

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?

 

Have you found the Conversation Editor yet? It makes some of this a lot easier. It's the little button with the right justified looking paragraph on it in the right upper corner of the GECK. It's new in the NVGeck. Once you've established a topic in your quest you can start using the editor to add branching topics and manage what's going on from there. It makes it much easier. You can't do all of the quest management stuff there, that still needs to happen in the quest tabs, unless it's in dialogue results scripts, but it's much easier than doing everything in the Quest Topics tab topic by topic. The best thing about it is that it lays out all of the dialogue in the quest and you can open it out and follow what's happening much more easily. It's made my dialogue creation process much, much less painful.

[davidlallen]

Have you found the Conversation Editor yet?

 

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?

[llamaRCA]

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?

 

There are no directions written up anywhere for it that I know of; I'm learning my way through it by messing with it and a couple of the devs have dropped a couple of hints in the GECK thread over at the Beth forums. You get the dialogue into the editor by loading it. That's straight forward enough. You need to click one or both of the boxes on the bottom of that form to get it to populate the editor. Play with that to see what you get. Then, once you have dialogue you can right click to add child and that adds new dialogue (it's added to your quest) and you can copy/paste as link to duplicate/reuse dialogue lines (and treed dialogue) to other dialogue.

 

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?

 

"best" Well, there are different ways for different things and different modders do things differently; But, generally, "Choices" is used in the Topics tab for building dialogue between the PC and an NPC and "link to" and "link from" is used mostly in the Conversations tab and is mostly used in conversations between NPCs. Add topic is used to, lol, yes, add a topic, that is already in your quest and set up, but is not yet present in a NPCs dialogue lineup. This can be useful if you want a topic to be present eventually, but not until a particular time, and then you issue the "Add Topic" and it inserts itself into his dialogue topics. Pretty handy.

 

:) llama

[davidlallen]

There are no directions written up anywhere for it that I know of; I'm learning my way through it by messing with it and a couple of the devs have dropped a couple of hints in the GECK thread over at the Beth forums.

 

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.

Edited December 6, 2010 by davidlallen

[llamaRCA]

Yesterday I copied/pasted as link three children under three different topics (or maybe even more). They were not Greetings though, so those may be treated differently. Like, for instance, it wouldn't let me enter combat dialogue in the editor the other day when I wanted to. I'm not sure if that had something to do with the options I had checked at the time in the Advanced Options. I just check both now all the time.

 

The threads at Beth weren't ones I found, I just happened to be there when they commented, and they didn't say much more than what I've told you. Just little snippets they mentioned in threads. I tried to search again before I responded to you to refind the more informative of the two with no luck. If I remember which dev it was that posted I will look again and repost.

 

I'll go into my esp and see if I can copy/paste as link under a greeting and come back and edit this comment and let you know what happens. Had you changed anything in the Quest manually and not saved/closed out the Conversation Editor between doing those two things. I am always careful to do that if I go out of the Editor and make a change in the Quest for some reason so it is updated and current. The GECK is "careful" about keeping things current and often will report failure when something should work because a window wasn't closed for a saving before you tried to execute some action.

 

:) llama

 

 

Edit: I just went in to try it out. I was able to copy/paste as link under a Greeting with no problem. Maybe I'm not understanding the problem you are having. When I did it I started the first copy/paste on the parent (the blue parent dot; not the red child) and did that for the first copy/paste. Then for the second one went to the second line and copy/paste, for the next went to the third, etc. That was the way I did it to copy a complete set of copied children.

[davidlallen]

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>

[llamaRCA]

I'm glad it's working now.

 

 

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>

 

 

PC: My name is &PCName;