Affinity System in Creation Kit

[RadoGamer]

OK, so I'm working on a mod that is coming along fine no issues with dialogue a couple of glitches in the recruiting but nothing I can't fix. My question obviously is with affinity. I've dug in to the primary characters in the game and looked at the complexity of this system, as well as looking at other mods that have lesser complex affinity programing. Is there any where I can find a tutorial on this system. I've found them on most everything else but it seems most people shy away from it because of it's complexity.

 

Thanks to a couple of very talented mod creators and their creations I get the gist but.... A little help would be nice. I've noticed there has been a sink or swim mentality lately among people so I would absolutely appreciate any feedback on this subject as I find it a fascinating system.

 

Thanks.

[llamaRCA]

OK, so I'm working on a mod that is coming along fine no issues with dialogue a couple of glitches in the recruiting but nothing I can't fix. My question obviously is with affinity. I've dug in to the primary characters in the game and looked at the complexity of this system, as well as looking at other mods that have lesser complex affinity programing. Is there any where I can find a tutorial on this system. I've found them on most everything else but it seems most people shy away from it because of it's complexity.

 

 

I've never seen a tutorial, but very few people have published mods that use the vanilla affinity system. I don't use it so cannot give you any specific guidance, however, one good place to look is at the DLC added companions (Ada, Longfellow, etc). The Beth devs add them to the existing system and that is very helpful to see how they manage the affinity for the new, added companion.

 

 

I've noticed there has been a sink or swim mentality lately among people so I would absolutely appreciate any feedback on this subject as I find it a fascinating system.

 

 

Modding is a hobby and it's always been sink or swim on the more advanced stuff. The problem with doing anything more complex or advanced is that fewer people also do it so there's a smaller pool of possible people to write tutorials for it or to answer questions or to help problem solve issues you run into.

[RadoGamer]

Thanks LLama, I appreciate the information and your comment on my frustration, I appreciate both greatly and I know you're right. IN fact Heather is one of the mods I looked deeply in to. Fusion City is another, it does use the vanilla affinity system to some extent, I found a lot of information in both. I've been using your mods for several years starting with Willow and now Heather (she's fallen in love with me twice, once as a man and once as a woman) very cool.

 

Anyway I digress, I'll look in the direction you pointed. I'm actually starting to see a lot of the components of the vanilla affinity system in pieces and if and when I get it, I may just tackle the job of noting what I find for others. Hopefully there are others like me who would help in the endeavor. It's a pretty daunting system but not so much that it can't be understood .

 

Once again thanks and best to you and thanks for the work you do.

[llamaRCA]

Thanks LLama, I appreciate the information and your comment on my frustration, I appreciate both greatly and I know you're right. IN fact Heather is one of the mods I looked deeply in to. Fusion City is another, it does use the vanilla affinity system to some extent, I found a lot of information in both. I've been using your mods for several years starting with Willow and now Heather (she's fallen in love with me twice, once as a man and once as a woman) very cool.

 

...

 

Once again thanks and best to you and thanks for the work you do.

Thanks! Yeah, Heather wouldn't help you much in that regard. I don't use the vanilla system much at all (although I am grateful for the dev-built bits I've "borrowed" to get her doing what I want).

 

 

Anyway I digress, I'll look in the direction you pointed. I'm actually starting to see a lot of the components of the vanilla affinity system in pieces and if and when I get it, I may just tackle the job of noting what I find for others. Hopefully there are others like me who would help in the endeavor. It's a pretty daunting system but not so much that it can't be understood .

 

 

It would be truly awesome if you built a companion using the system and then made tutorials for that process. You are not the first person I've seen comment in frustration about the complexity of the system and looking for help to make sense of it. It took me a surprisingly long time to find all the pieces used to build the companion system; there is no overarching naming convention for the bits and pieces of the system and it's spread out everywhere. :psyduck:

 

 

Edit: There's a forum for posting questions about how to build stuff in the CK. It's inhabited by mod authors who help out when they can. It's the last one on the FO4 page, "Fallout 4 Creation Kit and Modders"

[RadoGamer]

Just an update on research progress. It seems the key component in the root of it all is variables, at the heart is the increase of numerical value, Seddon has a good tutorial that speaks to variables and variable scripts in dialogue and even though he doesn't mention affinity, it's easy to see, what he points out in his tutorial moves in that direction.

 

It appears MacCready has the most clear and obvious dialogue quests and dialogue trees that show how the structure works. Even so it's still quite complicated. Thanks again for pointing me in a direction that helped. I'll check out the forum you indicated. Have a good one!

Edited July 25, 2017 by RadoGamer

[gettps]

Getting the basic Affinity counters, Likes, Dislikes, is easy. I got that working in no time.

 

However, DOING anything with it is SEVERELY complicated. I spent months on it and never did figure it out. I can get the affinity values to count up as I do various tasks the NPC likes, but the threshold levels? Getting the system to do ANYTHING once a certain level is reached is darn near impossible.

 

I tried following another companion's affinity quest system, but it's made up of over a dozen quests, hundreds of stages, scenes, and dialogs, dozens of scripts, all cross-linked to hell and back. It's totally psychotic.

 

I tried doing a force-greet dialog quest that ran on the condition that ca_affinity was >=1000 but it constantly fired, even when less than 1000. Force-Greets totally ignore ALL dialog conditions. It makes no sense. I even tested it by creating a force-greet with the condition that it would only play if the player was Male (my player is female), it fired anyway.

 

I tried using a ForceGreet sandbox package, but the quest dialog topic completely refused to appear in the Topic list.

 

Give it up.

 

It can't be done.

[taryl80]

To make a companion after the template of the vanilla companions, you should also remember that every companion needs his/her pre quest.

 

A pre quest can be everything. From kill some sh it, to do X, to talk with Y. Let us take an example from vanilla f4: pre quest for piper - do that newspaper talk quest about your experiences in the vault. The same you can find in the ck for every other companion, like strong, preston and so on. The one thing they all have in common are, that they make the npc as a follower avaible.

 

Only after this pre quest, the affinity quest will work, if you take the vanilla companions as template. From a very basic point of view, every (vanilla) companion has at minimum 3 quests: The pre quest, the affinity quest and the COMP"companion name" (example: COMPPiper) quest.

 

If someone follows the examples of the vanilla quests for companions in the ck, it should work (if you not forget to make 1 of this quests).

Edited December 3, 2017 by taryl80

[RadoGamer]

So looking back at this conversation and several failures and successes I may be closer to a tutorial which would have to be several videos dealing solely with affinity. The most important part of affinity is getting the script to transition from forcegreeting to the next level of affinity, as taryl80 said it can be anything from a complex quest to taking a dump for that matter. Once in play, affinity keeps going in the background no matter what your dialogue is doing and can cause problems if you don't tell Papyrus how to handle the changes it makes.

 

One of the fragments for that is used in the forcegreet affinity stages.

 

Alias_Cait.TryToSetActorValue(CA_WantsToTalk, 2) ;has forcegreeted
Alias_Cait.GetActorReference().EvaluatePackage()

 

followed in the next stage by the fragment

 

kmyquest.EndSceneFriend()

 

which calls to the affinityscenehandlerscript.

 

 

 

A very good tutorial I've found is by Kris Takahashi of Atomic Radio/Tales From the Commonwealth. This is an extensive tutorial on a companion from start to finish which includes most of the components needed to make affinity work. In the tutorial Kris points out a much easier way to do this if you don't want to mess with the forcegreet fragments in every transition.