More Difficult Than I Imagined....

[Sabat9]

so my goal is to have a Protectron that sells beer and repairs equipment. I want the Protectron to start off inside a robot pod, to be activated with a terminal. Once he's activated, he can be interacted with to buy beer and repair equipment, otherwise he just patrols the cell, hitting various idle animations and xmarkerheadings on a continuous loop.

 

I started with setting up a terminal/pod/robot based off the Protectron setup you find in super-duper mart. I got that part working with little problem, the terminal activates the robot, who opens the pod and steps out. Of course, the scripts for the GenericOfficeProtectron include the "ticket check" which results in the robot attacking.

 

So far, any tweaks i've made to my robot result in him just standing in the pod after it's open. I made all new copies of the elements (AAAGenericOfficeProterctron, same thing with the AI packages) so i can mess with them without screwing up the original versions already placed in the game. I've played around with the AI packages, set up the patrol as outlined in the GECK tutorial, changed a few lines of scripts. I think the GenericOfficeProtectron has too many embedded packages and scripts to actually use him for this purpose, but at the same time he's the only MOB that i can get to be activated by the terminal and open the pod and step out. I probably need to create a new NPC purely from scratch.

 

With some reading, I now think i'm gonna have to get into the Dialogue settings and create some new vendor-type dialogue for my new Protectron. There's a thread that tangentally talks about doing this, but other than that there's a dearth of tutorials explaining how to create new NPC vendors.

I wonder if this is even possible, since the Protectron is classified as a "creature" as opposed to actually being in the NPC lists...

 

Anyway, i'm obviously rather lost at this point, so any ideas or links to good info on this would be helpful.

 

THANKS!

[spineynorman]

Well of course you can make a Protectron vendor, there's one in Tenpenny Tower. What I'm wondering is if that Protectron is a NPC and not a normal bot. You should try to reverse engineer that bot and add the new paths and aggression scripts to it instead of the other way around.

[ZableBlaze]

Try using an exsisting NPC like Wadsworth or that guy from Rivet City hotel.

[Platplay]

Well i haven't set a vender up so i cant help with that. But if you want the Bot to patrol/wander the area in the AI packages settings. Just add a wander. Don't forget to set a condition (or it will never fire). If you set it to wander add a large distance say 2000 (that's not really far, experiment to see how far you want it to go.) Possible to set the entire cell to wander location.

 

For condition, you can pretty much use anything... If you want it to patrol right on activation, look at the protectron script. It might have something like. "short Active" if so that's probably the variable that activates him. In condition (for the wander script package) set it to GetScriptVeriable, pic the robot as the reference, then Active as the variable. = 1.

 

That should make it when the bot wakes up to start patrolling right away. (the ticket is probably in Ai packages. just delete it...) (also make sure the bot is in a player frienly faction. Make one, or change its factions so its at least friendly to the player)

 

WARNING: make a new bot, when editing that bots id, change its ID slightly so you don't modify the original super duper mart bot (if you copied and pasted it the changes you do to it may still effect the original bot. I haven't played with the editor enough to give you a 100% answer on this. Change something on the new bot then check the original to make sure its not directly effected.) Unless thats your intent. You will need to edit the terminal as well to reference the new bot.

[Sabat9]

thanks for the responses, especially platplay's last post. Yes, that's all stuff i've been doing, but it's good to have it confirmed as the right way. One of my major problems was with my navmesh.

 

I'm at the end of a full day of modding, and something with one of the last changes i made screwed everything up completely, game crashes when loading with my mod active. I can't seem to track down the problem, although i can see error messages in FO3Edit. I just can't seem to figure out what's causing the crash even with this info. Really kinda sucks balls. My last backup-copy save was from yesterday, so let this be a word of warning to everyone....don't just save often, go the extra step and save a backup copy somewhere else on your hard drive, or even on a portable medium. DO IT NOW!

 

I basically just lost twelve hours of progress, but i suppose i did figure out a few problems and a few new things anyway. Heh, the worst thing is now i have to fix the navmesh and optimize the cell all over again...at least this time it will be quicker.

 

sonofabitch, what a rookie blunder, lol!

 

FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU...............

[spineynorman]

oddly enough FOMM makes backups. The GECK is really barebones.

[Khet]

Oddly enough the GECK comes with this really neat option called autosave that can be set in the preferences. Wierd, huh?

[jaysus]

autosave sucks even more as you never know at which point your latest save is and it also overwrites any still working esps...

 

your crash prolly derives from a broken script... they tend to create ctds

 

to create a new vendor you have to indeed make a whole new dialogue or copy one from another vendor... simply copy pasting an existing vendor and changing him wont works as theyll loose their specific dialogues even if they stay in the same class etc, as most dialogues are fixed to a special npc rather than a class

 

wait ill just quickly write a mini tutorial on how to create a new vendor npc... moment

[jaysus]

http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showtopic=90173

 

here you go :)