nccs companion questions

[davidlallen]

I am about to create a companion, and I would like to use NCCS rather than doing it by hand. I have looked through the NCCS documentation and made a simple example. I have a couple of questions before I get too far.

 

a. I personally find companions a little overpowered, so I want to avoid the player having both a base game companion and also my companion. So, if the player already has a companion like Boone, then my companion should give the line like "I'm sorry, you already have a companion", and also if my companion has joined, then Boone should give the line. I see a variable iNumberActorsAllowedToFollowPlayer, but this variable doesn't seem to be used in the base game. Is there a way to prevent my companion and a base game companion at the same time?

 

b. I am not sure exactly how to set up voice recording for a companion. I have done voice recording for new NPCs which did not have standard dialog; the filtered dialog window generates a text file of all the required dialog lines. For companions, there are 15-20 topics which have voice lines that come from the standard tactics, inventory, etc dialog. I gave my companion a custom voice type and then generated the dialog list for the companion, expecting that the standard voice lines would be included. They aren't. How can I make sure that the voice actor gets a list of all the lines that need to be recorded?

 

c. This isn't exactly a question about NCCS, but I don't understand how the companion wheel connects to the NPC script. I have read through the ACM companion wheel plugin, and it only adds some variables to the script. Can anybody point to a tutorial or thread which describes how it works?

[NosRhyfelwr]

A) One of the core concepts of NCCS for me was that I hate the limits Bethsoft insists on slapping on us regarding companions. In FO3 it was one; in NV you get one humanoid and one non-humanoid, as I recall. That in mind, NCCS is specifically set up to run alongside the vanilla followers and work alongside a standard duo of followers without incident; thus allowing players to have a party as large, or small, or diverse as they feel they need. It follows, then, that I never bothered putting in a limiter provision; nor linking the NCCS companion management system to the quest that tracks which vanilla followers are in your party at any given time.

 

Resetting your companion to count towards the limit will require modifying either the companions script to reset the variables in the tracking quest the same way the normal followers do, or adding code to stop them from being hire-able if you already have one of the others. Neither one is terribly complex. The tracking for the limited party is handled by the VNPCFollowersQuestScript. A quick glance through there should show you how to set it up if you're so inclined. New dialog will, of course, also need to be generated to make your companion say no if the correct variables are met.

 

B) I'm not positive what you're asking here. NCCS companions don't have any voiced dialog; so I must assume that your issue is your custom voice type has no non-conversation comments? Things like when you knock something over, in combat; the stuff that they say aloud, but not while in a conversation? Most of those lines are kept in quests that begin with Generic - GenericAdult, GenericAdultCombat, GenericFriendlyFire, etc. They're on tabs other than Topics. Not sure how you'd go about adding new topics though, since that type of dialog doesn't seem to be editable like standard.

 

C) Never seen such a tutorial. I don't know whether he peruses the forums to notice this topic and answer on his own, so were I you, I'd PM ttomwv if you haven't already. The last time we talked about it, he had an excellent handle on how the wheel worked; and how it integrates. As I understand it, "how it works", is that the wheel is a set of hard-coded shortcuts to commands contained in a quest and its accompanying script. The Open Inventory button-press runs the open inventory command, for example. It's like a special menu with more elaborate buttons than the text labels we mere mortals get to use.

[llamaRCA]

Hey davidallen,

 

a. You might want to rethink this. I think it's safe to say that most players who travel with companions want the removal of the limits that Bethesda (and now Obsidian) impose on the number of companions we can have at one time.

 

b. Re: their dialogue

 

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking here either, but I'll take a stab at it:

All the dialogue the vanillas have that is similar is in the VNPCFollowers Quest. The topics, combat, detection, etc tabs contain that dialogue. There may be a bit that each have in their other dialogue quests that you need as well, I can't remember off the top of my head if every one of them has other dialogue they need; like goodbyes. But, you can choose which types you want to include for your companion. However, you will need to write new dialogue for your companion unless you want your companion to have the exact, and very personalized dialogue, that belongs to one of the other companions. The best way to be familiar with what they need and what you want them to have is to have spent some time with one of the companions in the game and if you've done that then you should know what categories of comments you want them to have. For instance, I have not written any HealthHalf comments (Combat Tab) for the companion I'm working on now because it bugs me that Veronica tells me she's so injured and then seconds later is completely healed. Although, I suppose, if those were conditioned for IsHardcore only and she then said the HealthQuarter and then died it would be fine, but she spouts them during casual play and I just find it goofy.

 

If I misunderstood what you were asking let me know...

 

:) llama

[davidlallen]

Thanks for the replies. For (a), the answer is clear that NCCS does not support limiting the player to a single companion, and both of you agree that many players dislike this limit. I will think about this, maybe the extra effort and integration pain of limiting to a single companion is not worth it. However, I usually play with ED-E and Boone as companions, and I find that for many encounters, literally I can just stand there and watch the XP roll in as they kill everything. I am tempted to try a play-through where I carry no weapons and strike an enemy one time with my fist, to trigger the companions to attack. Adding another companion makes the game even less challenging to me.

 

For (b), I thought my question was clear but apparently not. Suppose I use a straight-out-of-the-box NCCS companion, and just provide a name for the companion and maybe a custom appearance and inventory. Now I have a voice actor, and I want to give the actor a list of all the lines the companion could possibly say. How can I do that? I have created non-companion NPCs where every line of dialog is written by me as topics in a separate quest. In this case I use the filtered dialog screen and click the button "export dialog", which generates a spreadsheet type file containing all the lines. I tried this for my NCCS companion and this method only exports like three lines. There should be at least 15-20 lines, since the companion makes comments about the slave collar, when asked to open the inventory, to change distances, etc. How can I export all the dialog lines you have already added for the companion?

[davidlallen]

I have built my companion "from scratch" with wheel support. I used the popular Sunny Smiles companion from the download site as a model. Since this dialog uses "getisid", the filtered dialog window works as expected and gives me all the dialog lines. I guess that nobody has built a voiced companion with nccs? If anybody has done this how did they export the lines for the voice actor to read?