[LE] "I do. Now and forever." for custom voiced spouses

[Noveriaa]

Hello,

 

I am nearly finished with a custom voiced follower I have been working on, the last thing on my list is giving her marriage functionality.

 

I have been applying the techniques used in the Deck16 tutorial of duplicating vanilla dialogue, then editing the copy to fit your NPCs dialogue lines. It has worked entirely for her follower functionality (as well as being compatible with UFO, yay!). Currently, my follower will recognize when the PC is wearing the Amulet of Mara and the "Are you interested in me?" accept/reject chain is working fine, in which the wedding is then initiated. I am currently stuck on the "I do. Now and forever." line during the ceremony, mostly because it is located within "Scenes" rather than in player/misc dialogue. I have no experience working with scenes, so I don't want to possibly muck up all the other potential spouse NPCs by editing it.

 

Could anyone possibly outline the process of incorporating my follower into the scene so she is able to say this line? Or, of course, let me know if there is a better way that my inexperienced self is unaware of. :pinch: I had a hard time finding ANY info about custom voiced spouses online (the majority is just for followers), so advice of any kind on the topic would be greatly appreciated. :smile: Thanks!

[Levionte]

Hi. I used the Deck16 tutorial when I first started, too. It has a lot of good information, and was a great starting point for me. But there are some things I do differently now, as a result of making my share of followers. For example, especially if you plan on releasing the follower publicly but also in general, I highly recommend making your own quest for the dialogue as opposed to changing the vanilla quests. Making changes to any vanilla assets can lead to big headaches down the road in regards to compatibility with other mods, and even vanilla followers. Making your own quest requires you to make your own scripts, but you can copy and paste generic ones from a guide like this one.

 

I bring this up because the same thing applies to the marriage quest. I would generally recommend making your own quest as opposed to changing the vanilla quest. But, to answer your question, it is possible to stick your follower in the scene. This is the tutorial I used to learn how to make quests. It's not the best tutorial I've ever seen, but it is the best I can recommend for making quests and scenes and stuff. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but should give you an idea of how to make and change scenes. I will warn you, though, this is a little more complicated than the follower stuff and could possibly require a little scripting knowledge.

 

I suspect the main reason why there aren't any tutorials on making custom voiced npcs marriageable is mostly because the ceremony doesn't do all that much on its own. You have to ask yourself as the developer, what exactly do you want to change about the character when they get married? Adding a character to the marriage faction is trivial - just one line, an easier script to write than any of the follower scripts. If you want them to talk differently when married, call the player pet names or that kind of thing, you add marriage faction conditions to your Hello, Goodbye, Idle, etc. One set of dialogue for MarrageFaction == 0, One set of dialogue for MarriageFaction == 1, and probably some overlap. If you want them to act differently, that's probably AI Packages with a marriage faction condition. If you want them to move in with you, again, that's easiest to setup on your own. And it's really not as complicated as it may sound.

 

So, the majority of the "marriage" content is on your end. What you're talking about is the ceremony, which is essentially a big On/Off button to activate the optional behavior you setup. If it was me, I'd work on the functionality first and work my way towards an On button - which could be as complex or simple as you want. You can make your own scene, recreate the vanilla scene, have a literal button in your house you can press, whatever you want. Using the vanilla quest is probably more trouble than it's worth.