[LE] Creating Dialogue & Creation Kit Advice

[CassandraWladyslava]

Hello! I have two issues I need help with!

 

I'm working on my first follower, a unique-voiced female Khajiit you can marry. Right now, I'm trying to find a source that could provide me the basic player/follower/marriage dialogue so I could use it as a base.

I've gotten some help with the follower lines, but can't seem to find the ones for marriage/having a spouse. I figured the scripts MUST be available somewhere. I also plan on creating a small quest around her, and having more responses in general. I figured I'd start off small, though.

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Another issue I'm having is controlling things in the Creation Kit. First off, the camera. When I'm in 'full mode' my character will be far away. So I zoom in...and suddenly I'm too far in. So I try to adjust it, and that just makes it worse. Is there any easy way to control the camera that I'm missing?


Also, is there an easy way to add things to her inventory? So far, the only way I know to give her clothing is to go to Inventory - Default Outfit (or whatever it's called) and just check the different outfits out one by one. If I say, just wanted to give her scaled armor, how would I do that?

 

 

Please remember, yesterday was the first time I opened up the CK XD; I only just learned how to import my face!

[Levionte]

So, dialogue is all based on conditions, right? You're going to put in a "hello" line for your follower, and if you don't have any conditions on it then every npc and their dog will try to say it (and most will fail). So you put conditions on it: only npcs that are female can say this line, only npcs with this specific voice type can say this line, only this one khajit npc can say this line, etc.. The conditions can be whatever you want, but you're going to add some to limit who can say your custom lines. You can then add additional conditions based on certain situations: don't say "hello" if you're sneaking because that will give us away, don't say "hello" when we're friends because I want you to say "hello, friend" instead, etc. etc..

 

So, marriage dialogue is just another condition. The vanilla game, specifically, uses a Marriage Faction as the condition they check for. When the npc is not in the marriage faction she'll say "hello." When the npc is in the marriage faction she'll say "hello, husband" or whatever. Adding marriage to an npc is simply a matter of having a second set of things like dialogue and behavior that take affect when the "married" condition you've set is fulfilled. To take that npc from a state of being unmarried to one of being married, all you need is a way to make that npc fill the requirement. In the case of the vanilla quest, you add the npc to the marriage faction.

 

The only respectable way to change things like an npc's factions is through script. You can put that script on anything you want. You can make a spell that does it when you cast on her, or a book that does it when you read it, or whatever you want. Most commonly, though, people tend to make it a later stage of some sort of marriage quest. I don't know of any way to hijack the vanilla quest with a new voice type without compatibility repercussions, which means you'd likely have to create your own version of the quest. To learn how to do this, I would suggest watching tutorials on making a quest in general - specifically how to setup stages and scenes.

 

 

The camera in the CK sucks and will always suck. I used to have some success rotating left and right or up and down and then adjusting the zoom to get different angles and close-ups on things. But it mostly just sucks. For npcs with custom faces, I'd personally recommend the Nifmerge method. Skyla does a pretty decent tutorial on how to set it up. Plus-side is you don't need to worry about what she looks like in the ck render window.

 

As you've noted, you can set outfits in the Inventory tab of the Actor entry. Beneath that should be a window in which you can right click > new item or add item or whatever it is, and then you can pick specific items from a drop-down menu that are not a part of the outfit. Should note that she won't actually wear items that aren't in her outfit until she's told to re-evaluate what she's wearing (like adding or removing items from her inventory). You can create a new outfit pretty easily. But if she's assigned an outfit, she'll do that thing vanilla npcs do where they may not wear items you give them via trade depending on how they compare to the items in her selected outfit.

[CassandraWladyslava]

First off, thanks for the response! It was very helpful!

However, I think there may be some confusion somehow. I'm asking for the actual script. As in the words. What is said between the player and the NPCs. So eventually (in the case of marriage), the player will be wearing an amulet of Mara and dialogue options will come, then they'll get married (or the player will back out) and more dialogue options will be added and all that goodness.

I've had a friend help me with the script for her as just a follower (ie - Player: I need you to carry some things / Follower: <witty response>). As I said before, I figure there must be a way to access NPC lines without my having to play through the game and copy them down. lol.

 

 

So, dialogue is all based on conditions, right? You're going to put in a "hello" line for your follower, and if you don't have any conditions on it then every npc and their dog will try to say it (and most will fail). So you put conditions on it: only npcs that are female can say this line, only npcs with this specific voice type can say this line, only this one khajit npc can say this line, etc.. The conditions can be whatever you want, but you're going to add some to limit who can say your custom lines. You can then add additional conditions based on certain situations: don't say "hello" if you're sneaking because that will give us away, don't say "hello" when we're friends because I want you to say "hello, friend" instead, etc. etc..

 

So, marriage dialogue is just another condition. The vanilla game, specifically, uses a Marriage Faction as the condition they check for. When the npc is not in the marriage faction she'll say "hello." When the npc is in the marriage faction she'll say "hello, husband" or whatever. Adding marriage to an npc is simply a matter of having a second set of things like dialogue and behavior that take affect when the "married" condition you've set is fulfilled. To take that npc from a state of being unmarried to one of being married, all you need is a way to make that npc fill the requirement. In the case of the vanilla quest, you add the npc to the marriage faction.

 

The only respectable way to change things like an npc's factions is through script. You can put that script on anything you want. You can make a spell that does it when you cast on her, or a book that does it when you read it, or whatever you want. Most commonly, though, people tend to make it a later stage of some sort of marriage quest. I don't know of any way to hijack the vanilla quest with a new voice type without compatibility repercussions, which means you'd likely have to create your own version of the quest. To learn how to do this, I would suggest watching tutorials on making a quest in general - specifically how to setup stages and scenes.

 

 

[Levionte]

Oh, that kind of script.

 

I'm not sure there's a great way to do it. You can open up the marriage quest in the CK and check out their scenes, but it may be a bit chaotic to look at. There are tools like BML's lazy voice finder that might be able to do it, but I've never used it for that purpose.