Unknown Name in Dialogue Box Until Learned

[Toastman500]

In the dialogue screen, when talking to someone, their name only shows up if it's been mentioned before: whether they say it themselves, someone tells you their name, or you read about it elsewhere.

Quest descriptions would probably have to be altered, maybe even some dialogue, but that would be tricky to keep track of.

[Jeffman12]

Would need to go in and manually add quest flags to do all that. Also, we lack an introductory thing "Hello, I'm ___, I'm with the ___/From the ___, who are you?"

[montky]

@toastman500

do you have a code fragment you wanted to workshop, for how you might go about that?

 

are you playing with the player or companion name?

or, are you wanting things like a faction or location reference to be "Pelmanism'd" and hidden until revealed...

 

it's not as nasty as you might think:

this is very similar to AI chatbots, meta-compressive networks, and to chomsky-schutzenberger contextless stuff,

so their insights might help a lot to give some perspective of how to handle variables like that.

you gotta be careful to not hyper-define or too self-referential the variable hehe.

 

In terms of FO4;

shavkacagarikia has already outlined a couple of different ways to do that,

with on-Event stuff, that way you can have "unknown assailant" etc play until the event cue

when they reveal their name, or you read anything which has that event ID ref associated

(listen to holotape, read book or note or document, talk and succeed on local knowledge speech check)

the elegance of Shavka's solution is,

it should also work and be adaptable for things like custom companions,

Dont Call Me Settler or NPC Overhauls,

and new-lands refs.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

it's an enum array which holds the different text-strings.

FactionInstitute might use from [1,2,3,4,5...], 1&2 to refer to x,y,z.

whereas FactionBoS might use from [1,2,3,4,5...] 3, 5 and "X"

 

so, your document would have 'fields' which reference that variable.

If it were a GIMP document or word document, it would be;

 

|greeting| |getThat.player or npc ref ID string --- ie, name|

|text fragment relating to quest.node.ID or OnEventID|

|outro|

 

this would allow for combinatorial procedural iterative text documents;

something which the "Better comicbooks and books in FO4" project are looking into more hehe.

 

You can also use this to have different Realis or Irrealis moods and 'affects',

some folks might hate a faction, and might refer to it that way etc.

with things like "War of the Commonwealth" - you could have your AGIXML/talking heads overhaul

be effected by the local variable - say, after a faction attack

 

Thats how you can also have stuff like

wanted posters with the player character's face on it and their name,

or notes which reference the player character and the last x,y,z nodes they've passed associated with the quest Event ID.

when you combine this with 'self-referential ambient quests',

it can become quite embedded and have a lot of 'verisimilitude'.

 

Chucksteel and greekrage also had some neat how-tos,

as does damanding.

 

----

Between all of them, you'll find out a lot more stuff much quicker than

many of the at-time-of-writing options on bethnet.

I hope this is of use for you, and helps you find the thing you're looking for.

 

 

 

PS: apologies for the allusions Shavkacagarikia,

though thanks again

as you've answered this one a couple of times before

[27alann]

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/12488/?

 

This may be what you are looking for?

[montky]

@TwoSevenAlann

that is a good one, thanks for sharing;

that'll work for a lot of new lands mods and the such like too,

it's elegant.