Need help understanding the Quest menu in GCK

[charwo]

OK, basically I get topics are dialogue choices, and conversations are NCP to NPC interactions.

Right now I have two issues, I don't understand how the topics are organized and need a way to see every possible dialogue choice in each dialogue box, because I need to see what all the speech options, hidden or restricted in a conversation path to figuring out what my options are. The second is how to create a new dialogue choice and integrate it into a dialogue point.

What I want to do create a new topic and not have my GECK CTD? and how do I put it in the dialogue tree I want it?

[dubiousintent]

* The basics of "Dialogue" are covered in the "Dialogue and Lipsynch" section of the wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article. The "conditions" refer to "conditional tests" of the value of specific related variables to determine which line of dialog should be used. A starting point would be the GECKWiki page "How to conditionalize dialogue based on multiple variables".

 

You need to check not only for the "Topics" line "script result" but also in the "Result Script" field entry to determine where a conditional variable value is set. See the "TIP Script Result vs Result Script" under the "Scripting" section of that same "Getting started" wiki article.

 

* You should always start troubleshooting from any error messages you can see. (They are your best "clue"; and why they exist at all.) Reporting such messages accurately is an essential first step.

 

Anytime the game "Crashes to the Desktop" (CTD) it's typically going to generate an error message in the Windows Eventlog because the game engine was not able to predictably handle the error. Please see the "Windows Error Messages" section of the wiki "How to read most Bethesda game error logs" article.

Logs generated by the game itself (not Windows) are found in the game folder, where the "FalloutNV.EXE" file is located. They generally have the ".log" file extension, or a filename with "_log" in the name and a ".txt" extension.

A "CTD" is a "fatal" error, meaning the program/game did not know how to handle the error, nor how to proceed from that point; and shutdown to let the Windows Operating System (OS) take over again from the "desktop". The only thing worse is the so-called "Blue Screen of Death (BSoD)", which means the OS itself encountered a similar fatal error and entire computer has to be "rebooted" ("reset" switch or "power off-for-10-seconds-and-on-again") to return to function. DO NOT attempt to resume the game again from the point of a CTD, as your system memory is in an unpredictable state and make cause "save game" corruption even if it does get past the point where it crashed before. Reboot first.

If your GECK is CTDing on you a lot, please see the 'GECK: Common Problems' section of the wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article.

 

-Dubious-

[madmongo]

The first thing you need to know is that Fallout's quest/conversation system evolved out of Morrowind. In Morrowind, most NPCs were not voiced, and conversations were organized by topic. Multiple NPCs could give you the same info for a particular topic, so it made sense to organize it this way.

 

 

When I make my own mods, I keep things organized so that an NPCs conversations are all in one quest, so it is definitely possible to have a nice, neat, organized system using Bethesda's quest system. But Bethesda and Obsidian don't do it that way. In particular, I have read that Obsidian has some sort of weird home-grown conversation system that would then translate conversations into something that the GECK can understand, which seems ridiculously and unnecessarily over-complicated and is probably responsible for some of the madness in some conversation quests (*cough* Cass *cough*).

 

In many conversation topics, you can easily see what the choices are at that level, since they will be linked in the Choices box to the right on the topics tab. If there aren't any choices, the conversation drops back a level, and here is where it gets really tricky, because if it drops all the way back to the top level then conversation options can come from just about anywhere. This is nice in a way because you can add a quest and have the NPCs dialog options show up right at their greeting, and as long as the NPC is speaking from the top level, the option will be there.

 

Here's an example. Let's look at Doc Mitchell. Some of his dialog is in vDialogGoodspingsGeneric. Other conversation options are in vFreeformGoodsprings. These make sense because he is an NPC in Goodsprings, But then all of his medical stuff is in VDoctors, which is where all of the doctor conversations are located.

 

This should give you a rough idea of how things are organized. Note that different quests were written by different people and are often structured very differently. I don't know if it was Obsidian's spiffy dialog system or just someone who had a weird way of doing things, but Cass's dialog is a spaghetti mess that is difficult to sort through, jumps around all over the place, and is almost impossible to mod because she rarely speaks from the top level, and figuring out where she is in her dialog quests is a royal pain. At one point I was going to re-write all of her quests to make her much easier to mod, but then I realized that I really don't like her all that much as a companion and I didn't want to expend that kind of effort just to make her more moddable.

 

There is a dialog tree option in quests that you can use to help figure out exactly how things are organized. I don't use it much as it seems to be a bit buggy but it can be helpful to figure out where different conversations branch to.

[ashtonlp101]

As Mongo said, most mod authors don't use the dialogue tree because it A: doesn't make much sense in its layout and B: doesn't work very well. Most of us use the "Topics" tab to write dialogue which is very messy, but once you figure out a "language" to organize branching dialogue it's not that bad. If you don't want to read, just look at Seddon4494's tutorials on YouTube for Fallout New Vegas and 3.