Adding topics to custom NPCs

[VikingII]

I am trying to add some general topics of conversation to my NPC’s more than the ‘GREETINGS’ that appears when I open the NPC dialogue button. I don’t want to add quests, but some life to their interactions with the PC and other NPC when they talk each other.

 

I noticed that my NPC with ‘player faction’ have only the GREETINGS topic, but if I add, for example, the Chorrol faction, they will have more topics related with Chorrol. Also their classes adds topics too, for example, a monk has only the GREETINGS topic, but a merch adds the ‘invest’ topic.

 

So I ask this:

1) How many things add topics to NPCs besides their faction and class?

2) Is it possible to add topics without adding a faction, change their class or involves them in a quest?

3) Can I mess up their behavior (or the game) if I add too many factions to a single NPC? (IE: every city and guild factions to one single NPC).

[Lanceor]

Basically, once a topic is added with the "AddTopic" function, every NPC who meets the conditions can use that topic. There are an unlimited number of conditions that you can be specified so the answer to #1 is technically "unlimited". In practise, add your NPC to appropriate factions and select an appropriate class for them and they will probably get relevant vanilla dialogue.

 

For #2, all topics are assigned to a quest - but it doesn't have to be a "real" quest. It can be a dummy or placeholder. Each quest has a priority from 0 to 100. How an NPC selects what to say is to go through all the available topics and pick the one with the highest priority that meets the conditions. If two or more quests have the same priority, then the quest highest in the list alphabetically takes priority.

 

Because of this, I create dummy quests with a priority of 100 for my NPC dialogue. So that I don't short circuit every NPC in the game, I make sure that all my dialogue topics have either a GetIsID or GetInFaction condition.

 

For #3... you probably won't crash the game, but you'll probably get very unpredictable and inappropriate dialogue. You wouldn't want your merchant NPC proclaiming that he's ruled Tamriel for 87 years for example. :P

 

Hope that helps. :)

[VikingII]

It helps a lot, thanks yuou! :happy: