Advice on making a relatively simply companion mod

[Douchehat]

So I wanted to make what seems, at least on paper, to be a not-too-complicated companion mod: a Victor companion (honestly I'm shocked no one has made one yet). There are already a few Securitron companion mods out there, so it occurred to me that I could easily alter them, but I wanted to keep my options open, since some of them aren't quite what I want. I've done a little searching around on the forums on how I would go about doing this, and here are the immediate problems I foresee:

 

1. I don't know the first thing about creating companions. I'm looking at some GECK tutorials, but anything else you can recommend would be welcome.

2. The NCCS companion system would seem to be the quickest route to making a companion, but it only seems to support humanoid models. I'm not sure if it could handle Securitrons.

3. I could manually create a companion via some tutorials, but I'd really like to have a Companion Wheel implemented. That seems substantially more complicated. How do I go about doing that? Is there a simple option like "enable companion wheel" for an NPC and I'd modify all of the necessary text, or do I have to build one from scratch?

4. Once I get the mod up and working, text will be okay at first, but for the sake of authenticity I'd eventually like to get as much voice-work into the menu as possible. That would probably involve cutting up audio clips from other interactions with Victor. Where can I find all of his sound files in the game's directory?

 

Finally, I'm curious if the fact that Securitrons are already existing characters in the game, presumably with their own combat AI and whatnot, will make the implementation any easier, or if it will need to be rewritten once they become a companion. It also occurs to me that if (god forbid) this mod ever gets made and achieves any kind of popularity, I would probably eventually need to implement something synchronizing with the game's main questline to determine whether or not Victor is even there, upgraded, etc., but that's so far down the line I'm not even going to worry about it right now.

 

Thanks for your help.

[davidlallen]

NCCS doesn't really care if the companion is human or not; you can use it for a securitron. I recommend you get the companion wheel add-on for NCCS, which shows how to support the wheel. To see all Victor's dialog, find him in the dialog tab, and use the "export" button. This takes a couple of minutes, but it generates a text file with all of his lines and their filenames.

[Douchehat]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

 

Immediately, though, I'm noticing there are four or five Victors in the Actors tab. I'm guessing these are for the various behavior versions when he's at his house, running to the New Vegas strip, guarding the Lucky 38, or deactivated. I suppose I'll have to play around with it to find out.

 

EDIT: So how do I grab sounds that are in an .ESM file? Is there a way to export them, or do I need to somehow unpack the file?

Edited July 21, 2011 by Douchehat

[davidlallen]

The sounds aren't in the esm. The exact filenames of the sounds are in the esm. The sound files themselves are in "ogg" format. Mostly they are inside the bsa archive files, which you can unpack using FOMM.

[Vehicide]

The sounds aren't in the esm. The exact filenames of the sounds are in the esm. The sound files themselves are in "ogg" format. Mostly they are inside the bsa archive files, which you can unpack using FOMM.

 

Huh... Thanks, I was wondering how to get at all those files.