Quests, dialogue, speech and so forth...

[thegord]

Okay, I need help.

 

If there's a decent dialogue tutorial out there, I haven't found it. There are a couple from which I've been able to get the basic gist of quest/dialogue creation, but I'm just going to throw out the specific questions I have. This is for a scratch-created Brotherhood armorer:

 

1. How do I get him to offer repair services?

I've created a new quest, with a GetIsID==NPC condition, set to startgame enabled, script delay (default), and repeated topic enabled.

There are no quest stages and all tabs are blank, except for Topics.

Here I have one topic (NPCRepair; "Can you repair my gear?") flagged as top-level and priority 55, with another GetIsID==NPC condition and a showRepairMenu result script which has been compiled. There is no dialogue response.

I've added this to the NPC's dialogue choices, but when I activate him he says one of the generic Brotherhood greetings and the only option I have is "I have to get going now."

 

2. How does voiced dialogue work?

I realize that custom response dialogues aren't going to be voiced, and I want to avoid that. Thing is, I have no idea how voiced dialogue works or how I can determine what a safe (i.e., already-recorded) response is. Can someone explain this to me?

 

3. How do I remove the dialogue that's already there?

When I bring up the NPC's dialogue window, even though it's a scratch-made NPC it's already preloaded with the Brotherhood GREETING dialogues and all the other generic action dialogues (PLAYERFIREWEAPON, PLAYERIRONSITES, etc.) - are these simply added when the NPC is assigned an AI package (in this case, a default sandbox package)? How can I remove them?

 

Thanks in advance for any help or insight you're able to provide. I have questions about scripting, too, but I'm going to try to search a bit more before broaching those, and they'll be in another topic...

 

Gord

[Nick2kman]

your first Question i dont know much about i havent mested with services but if i was you id look at the NPCs stats and see if you have the service's checked also check the faction to see if that has it checked to.

 

Seconed voice from how i understand it works as a overlay that you can start havent messed with this to much ether you could just play with it in normal GECK, trie voiceing some files at and then saveing them at diffent levels and see what works

 

as for your 3ed question i have some expereince with when you look at other NPCs you can tell what conditions aplly to that NPC just make it so that only your NPC can say serten things, Oh ya Check the NPC your working on to see what your NPC will say, generic Dialogue is fun to add a condition to just say some thing the opisiot of like if TOPIC CONDITION (NPC ID So and So == 0) to your condition in that topic Because that condition will be always true to every one but that NPC. lastly you dont whant to Remove Dial at all from the game

[thegord]

Repair is checked in the NPC's AI Data tab. I'm not sure what faction has to do with anything.

 

No offense, but I wasn't able to understand a thing you were saying on your other two points. Using a bit more punctuation would go a long way towards making your posts more understandable. With regards to voicing, I can't "play with it" (even if I wanted to - which I don't) because I have no idea how voiceovers even work. I'm basically asking how to tell whether an NPC response is voiced so I can stick to using those, rather than using custom responses which won't be voiced. I am utterly clueless when it comes to voice-overs.

[Lingwei]

1. How do I get him to offer repair services?

 

You probably haven't added the topic, which is the first culprit you should always think of if you have a dialogue option not displaying when you have everything set up so that it should.

 

Give him a unique greeting, and in the results script of that dialogue topic write addtopic NPCRepair, it would also be a good idea to add a little dialogue when you ask him to. Something like 'Sure'.

 

I haven't played the game yet though, but shouldn't they have some sort of little offer repair icon like what Oblivion dialogue has.

 

2. How does voiced dialogue work?

 

I'm basically asking how to tell whether an NPC response is voiced so I can stick to using those,

 

Any new dialogue that you add without adding the voice acting for it will be unvoiced, while any dialogue that Bethesda added will be voiced. Simple no?

 

If you don't add any custom dialogue though then it will kind of hard to create new quests and use NPCs, so I'd say just get over it and get on with using custom dialogue. If people don't want to download your mod because it doesn't have voice acting then it is their loss.

 

3. How do I remove the dialogue that's already there?

 

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index...dialog_tutorial

 

You'll have to replace the Oblivion quests with the ones that Fallout 3 uses for it's generic dialogue though.

 

But as you will see in the tutorial you'll only want to do that if you really need to do it. If you don't really need to remove the NPC from the generic dialogue then don't bother. If you do remove them and don't have a greeting set up for them for every possible occasion then you will get an I HAVE NO GREETING greeting, which looks really bad.

[thegord]

Lingwei,

 

You probably haven't added the topic

I have. I was thinking maybe I needed to tweak the GREETING, so I'll try what you suggested - thanks.

 

Simple no?

The underlying issue is that I don't understand how the game correlates responses with voice files; I see that when creating an NPC response there's an audio button where you can choose an audio file to go along with it, but there don't appear to be any dialogue files in the list that I can find (it looks like it's just a list of death/attack/action sounds).

 

The mod I'm working on is fairly straightforward and there are no custom quests and such, so I don't see a point to not using voiced responses - unvoiced dialogue is a pet peeve of mine because it breaks immersion so badly. I agree that there's not really a way around it when working on expansive custom dialogue, but that isn't the case here.

 

As far as removing dialogue, I'm only asking because it's kind of weird to have an armorer who is semi-friendly in custom dialogue, and a typical Brotherhood asshat in his generic dialogue.

 

Thanks for everything, you've been a huge help!

[bonnonon]

why don't you make a NPC from another place, who isnt an asshat and than add brotherhood as a faction. Generic greatings should be different...

 

As far as voice acting goes, I am in the same boat. PM me if you ever find out :)

[thegord]

Bonno,

 

The NPC was scratchmade - it appears that as soon as you set the NPC class (in this case, BrotherhoodSoldier) the GREETING dialogue for that class is automatically added. The Brotherhood generic dialogue is pretty standoffish ("Nothing to see here, Outsider.", "Keep moving, Wastelander.") and sorta clashes with the fact that this is a friendly NPC who offers repair services.

 

I'm hoping that simply giving him a custom GREETING, as Lingwei suggested, will solve both problems.

 

As for voice, taking a look at the GenericBrotherhood GREETING topics, each points to a specific file, like so:

 

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/103/voicefilesdp9.jpg

 

So it would appear that the best course of action is to use something like FOMM to extract FO3's Voices.bsa and then explore for the files pertaining to whatever class your NPC is, listening to them and taking notes as to which files are for which statements so that you can then enter them into the Voice Filename field. I have no idea what the Voice Type box is/does, but hopefully I'll be able to figure it out.

 

If I ever get all this stuff straight I'll write a tutorial; one is sorely needed.

[bonnonon]

Thank you for the clarrification, I misread what you were saying.

 

Good luck and good night.

 

p.s. I look forward to a tutorial someday.

[thegord]

Edit: kljasghkjdghas this is pissing me off something awful.

 

I can't figure out how to add voicefiles for already-voiced content like "yes?" and "sure" (the GECK Quest & Dialogue tutorial states that it should be handled automatically, but it isn't).

 

I can't figure out how to link my repair topic. I tried adding it via script call (addtopic NPCRepair) and via the "Add Topic" box - both no dice.

 

I can't add any other topic besides GREETING to the base topics list; the selection box simply closes without the topic being added.

 

And the GREETING itself actually displays as a dialogue choice - the NPC uses the greeting "Yes?" and now I get two response choices - "GREETING" and "I have to go now."

 

I finished all the other work on my mod two bloody weeks ago. All I've been doing since then is trying and failing over and over again to add one or two lines of custom dialogue to two NPCs. I'm about ready to simply delete it all and say f*** it - this is ridiculous.

 

KLASGHKLHGSD :wallbash: :wallbash: :wallbash:

[Lingwei]

Well that's a bit different.

 

I've only worked with the Oblivion CS so far since I won't be able to play Fallout 3 for another few weeks still yet. But it's close enough for me to still be quite sure of what I am saying.

 

The underlying issue is that I don't understand how the game correlates responses with voice files

 

 

See the part where it says Voice Filename: GenericBro_Greeting_000B172C_1

 

That is the voice filepath for your mod.

 

The part that says Voice Type...this comes from Oblivion. Before I get to that though I'll need to explain how to set up new sound files.

 

In the fallout 3 data folder you'll need to create a new folder called Sound. Then go into that folder and create another new folder called Voice.

 

If you take a look at the Voice Type box under the part that says Path you'll see some familar words. Data\Sound\Voice\Fallout3.esm. Now look back at the first row underneath the part that says Voice Type. It says MaleAdult02. Now if you scroll the bar over to look at the right hand side you should see the path looking like this:

 

Data\Sound\Voice\Fallout3.esm\MaleAdult02\GenericBro_Greeting_000B172C_1

 

You should be starting to be able to connect the dots now.

 

When you create the dialogue for your mod you will need to create a new folder in the voice folder, it will have to be the same name as your mod e.g thegordmod.esp. So the file path would look like this:

 

Data\Sound\Voice\thegordmod.esp\MaleAdult02\GenericBro_Greeting_000B172C_1

 

Now back to the voice type and what it has to do with Oblivion. Since Bethesda used such a small amount of voice actors for all the NPCs in Oblivion they had to double up voice actors for different races. Argonians and Khajiit were lumped together under the Argonian folder, High Elves, Dark Elves and Wood Elves were in the High Elf folder, Orcs and Nords were in the Nord folder, Redguards were in their own folder, Breton Males in their own folder, Imperial Males in their own folder, and finally Breton and Imperial females in the Imperial folder.

 

Now back to Fallout 3. Bethesda is still using a limited number of voice actors, but more. So there are more variety (e.g I can see there are at least 6 different male voices). I don't know how these are selected since I haven't used the Geck yet, but an easy way for you to find out is to just check yourself. Open the new custom greeting you have given your NPC. If there is a getisid condition then the only voice type that will appear will be the one that your NPC is. For this example I'll pretend he is MaleAdult04. Now you need to go back to your sound folder, and in thegordmod.esp folder add a new folder called MaleAdult04.

 

Now check out the Voice Filename again. It will read QuestID_TopicID_HexID_1

 

All fairly simple. The _1 means that it is the first info of that topic. If you create a second line then that filename will be _2 and so on.

 

So now you know what the Voice Type and Path part mean. Once you get your mp3 you add it into the data\sound\voice\thegordmod.esp\MaleAdult04 folder. Then copy and paste the voice filename into the name of the mp3 file.

 

If you go back, click okay on the edit response window and then reopen the window again you should look down the bottom and see the part called mp3 that used to have a little N, now has a Y. This means that you have an mp3 attached to that dialogue response and it will play whenever that dialogue response is chosen.

 

I can't figure out how to link my repair topic. I tried adding it via script call (addtopic NPCRepair) and via the "Add Topic" box - both no dice.

 

So your only condition is "Getisid NPCID == 1"?

 

Are you sure you added the topic through the results script? It never worked for me if I added it through a quest script. Are you also sure that you gave him some dialogue for that part of the topic? If he doesn't have any dialogue then there won't be any dialogue option to display.

 

Edit, I just checked the geck wiki, turns out there is something to do with the option called Top Level. Perhaps play around with that somehow.

 

Also don't add topics through the addtopic box. There was a bug in it in the Oblivion CS and I wouldn't be surprised if it still isn't fixed in the Geck since it never affected Bethesda (but it does affect us modders).

 

As far as removing dialogue, I'm only asking because it's kind of weird to have an armorer who is semi-friendly in custom dialogue, and a typical Brotherhood asshat in his generic dialogue.

 

Giving him his own unque greeting will deal with the brotherhood dialogue problem. Alternatively you could try putting him in a different class if it isn't necessary for him to be a brotherhoodsoldier. You can also try adding people to different factions (e.g there may be some town specific greetings that will play if they are a member of a faction, not sure about this though since I haven' checked it yet).