Noob Question - enable/disable

[PleasePrint]

I've recently begun playing with the Morrowind Construction Set, and have a question about NPCs who don't appear until certain conditions are met. I'm aiming to make scripts that spawn NPCs at certain times, but upon looking into how the game does it, I'm confused. . .For example, Natalinus Flavonius, who's apparently Disabled until hired for a Thieves Guild quest, at which point certain dialog Enables him. But in the CS, he's present in the cell he ends up in, and I'm not sure what it is that actually enforces his disability from the start of the game up until he becomes Enabled. Is there a default script that kicks in right off the bat that nerfs Natalinus, Taryn Faren, or any other stuff that doesn't exist until later? Thanks for any reply.

[cyran0]

Your instincts are correct. The script that disables Natalinus Flavonius is 'Startup' that is run when a new game is begun. For that reason, it it not the best approach for disabling your own quest NPCs. First of all, it introduces the potential for conflict with other mods that might make changes to the script, but also that it would require players to begin a new game for the disabling of NPCs to take effect. I prefer to place a script on my quest NPCs that initially disables them and then checks the quest's journal index for the condition that would enable them. However, if you are using existing NPCs in your quest it would be better to not add the script to the NPC, but to an invisible activator in the NPC's cell instead - again, to avoid conflicts with other mods. Alternately, you could enable them through dialogue as Bethesda does in many instances.

[PleasePrint]

Awesome - thanks. For the time being, I had placed a couple "disable" commands targeting my new NPCs inside Jiub's "CharGenName" script, which worked fine.