Moving Vanilla NPCs = Quest Script Collapse?

[Kualan]

Hi! I'm the maker of the Game of Thrones Adaptation Mod: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/20925/

 

I've changed the Imperials into the Lannisters, the Stormcloaks into the Starks, Dawnstar into the Ironborn, Maarthal to the Riverlands, etc and added truckload of new NPCs, loading screen dialogue, quest text, journal text, etc etc. The next step is to give some of the NPCs I've replaced more appropriate locations, but some of them are quest characters and I would like to know if moving them would break certain questions.

 

The example at the forefront of my mind is the following (I'll use the vanilla names for the sake of those unfamiliar with GoT)

 

When siding with the Stormcloaks, the player must eventually oust Jarl Balgruuf of Whiterun from his throne after storming his palace. During the scene where this happens, his replacement - Vignar Gray-mane - turns up and formally seizes control. Poor Balgruuf.

The thing is, up until that point, Vignar Gray-mane has been hanging around in Whiterun. Although this makes sense in Skyrim's story for various reasons, in my mod it doesn't quite add up so well (the NPC he's been converted to is the bitter rival for the throne, and wouldn't be hanging out at his enemy's city). So my question is thus; if I move Vignar's location from Whiterun to, say, on one of the open world ships, is this going to mess up the scripting for his takeover of Whiterun, or will he simply "teleport" to the palace when he's needed for that scene?

 

Thanks in advance!

Kualan

[glockshna]

Hi! I'm the maker of the Game of Thrones Adaptation Mod: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/20925/

 

I've changed the Imperials into the Lannisters, the Stormcloaks into the Starks, Dawnstar into the Ironborn, Maarthal to the Riverlands, etc and added truckload of new NPCs, loading screen dialogue, quest text, journal text, etc etc. The next step is to give some of the NPCs I've replaced more appropriate locations, but some of them are quest characters and I would like to know if moving them would break certain questions.

 

The example at the forefront of my mind is the following (I'll use the vanilla names for the sake of those unfamiliar with GoT)

 

When siding with the Stormcloaks, the player must eventually oust Jarl Balgruuf of Whiterun from his throne after storming his palace. During the scene where this happens, his replacement - Vignar Gray-mane - turns up and formally seizes control. Poor Balgruuf.

The thing is, up until that point, Vignar Gray-mane has been hanging around in Whiterun. Although this makes sense in Skyrim's story for various reasons, in my mod it doesn't quite add up so well (the NPC he's been converted to is the bitter rival for the throne, and wouldn't be hanging out at his enemy's city). So my question is thus; if I move Vignar's location from Whiterun to, say, on one of the open world ships, is this going to mess up the scripting for his takeover of Whiterun, or will he simply "teleport" to the palace when he's needed for that scene?

 

Thanks in advance!

Kualan

 

I don't know much about quest scripting and things of the like but I know that the inn keeper in Riverwood was needed in several places around Skyrim for the quest line, maybe you can reverse engineer how they got her to be where she needed to be, although she was never permanently there to my knowlege so that might not help you. Good luck!

[David Brasher]

Teleport scripts like that often work off of a RefID. So if you moved an NPC to another cell, and if things are set up like they were in Oblivion, you would lose your RefID and it would be just as if you has dragged and dropped a new copy of the NPC into the render window from the object window. So what you can do, is inspect the RefID before and after the move. If things have been lost and broken in the move, then you can give the actor a new RefID and insert this RefID into the script properties where the old one was. I expect that the scripting grabs the actor with this RefID and teleports him to Windhelm no matter where he is and what he is doing. In some cases in Oblivion, you could jigger around with it and manage to give the new actor the old RefID if you could trick the system and get around all the error messages. In some cases, it was good to place a second copy of the actor and give it a RefID that was different by one character from the old one, and then go change all the RefIDs in the scripts by changing one character. Then when all the connections to the original NPC were severed, you could delete/disable it.

[steve40]

Well it's not just a matter of quest scripts. It could be his Packages that move him around, and it won't necessarily be by teleportation.

 

Anyways, in the scripts Vignar is manipulated using quest ReferenceAliases. If you did move him, it would have to be done in a way that preserved his reference ID so that the aliases wouldn't break. I would think that cut-and-pasting him from the Render window from one cell to another would preserve his reference in the game world. Even safer, simply move his in-game reference (don't create another of him) via script. Or, create a new copy of him and pretend not to notice that he has a twin brother somewhere else in the game (that you leave alone) :tongue: .