Less Generic NPC Project

[blake]

http://members.cox.net/srikandi/dialoguetut/intro.htm

i have found a site with a pretty thorough dialogue tutorial for those who wouldnt mind putting the dialogue in as well as making it up, i figure ill be able to plug it in but if someone wants to divide the work between me and them that would be grand....

[Dark Master]

Okay, lets try to divide up some of the dialouge. @Blake, for convienance it might be better to have one .esm file for each town, but that doesn't mean that you'll have to do it all on your own, you could send the file back and forth via email, although that would mean that us dialouge creators would have to send our work to different places. Your help is much appricaited, and I will try to learn how to use the editor to help you out just as soon as I can, although I don't have an awful lot of free time at the moment (I work in Politics and there are elections on June the 10th in the UK).

I'd like to have a bash at these four characters over the next day or so. If you can post your email address, or send it to me in a PM, I'd like to send you a set of dialouge for one of the characters so you can try to put it in game, just to see the results. The characters are:

Seldus Nerendus-silt strider guy dark elf
next to silt strider

Rivame Samandas-commoner dark elf
wandering around

Svadstar-commoner dark elf
wandering around

Talmeni drethan-shipmaster dark elf
next to her ship

Hope to hear from you soon.

DM

[Dark Master]

My Morrowind disk is hiding somewhere, so I opened the ESP consturction kit just to try and work some stuff out, such as the dialouge that would be needed (ie what needs replacing) and it looks (don't quote me) quite straight forward... I'll be back with an update in a bit.

[blake]

blakefarthing@hotmail.com

uhm, label it with something morrowind related otherwise ill probably delete it. The dialogue system is way easier than i thought it was, so plugging it all in wont be a problem but there are alot of npcs so if anyone with as much as free time as me (i'm a student and it is summer) would like to help i wouldnt mind but one city a week should be cake...

[Dark Master]

I'll leave a 'taster' of something I've been doing tonight for the Silt Strider guy, Seldus Nerendus :

When asked about my trade he tells you the following:

I am a caravaner, I’ve been once since I was a child, I used to ride with my father. He used to operate the Sadrith Mora – Vivec route, but he was killed when the waters in Zafibel Bay became too dangerous and his mount collapsed only a few weeks after I got my licence to operate one myself, I was working down in Gnisis when it happened. The agency closed that route forever in his honour.

Its good pay if slightly dull work. Some of the land routes are more interesting, but the law says we should travel by the waterways whenever possible, its kinder on the beasts you see. One day I hope to be posted to Ald’Ruhn or Balmora.

[Dark Master]

I've got a tiny ESM file, 19kb unzipped, just as a sort of job advertisement. If you are interested in hosting this for us that would be great, essentially its a tiny plugin file for anyone who's thinking about joining the team, or just wants to see what we're all about. Go and have a chat to the Silt Strider opperator at Khuul. In the mean time, before we get somebody to host it, email me at gandalfthegrey2002@hotmail.com and I'll send you a copy of the file.

If you ask him about his background he'll tell you about his job and his ambitions, if you ask him about his trade he'll tell you about his family's history with the job that he's doing, ask him about services and he'll tell you how great the shipmaster is.

I have replaced: Background. My Trade. Silt Strider. Destination. Services. Specific Place. Someone in Particular. Khuul. Have a look. You may learn about the fire of Gnisis...

DM

[blake]

Excellent Work DM! if done right and if we get enough people on the team this could shape up to be one of the greatest things to hit morrowind since the new faces came out

[beornica]

oooo, guys, how exciting! Wish there was something I could do.....hey, I LIKE writing dialogue! Can I take four? Just designate to me, and I'll do it!
Hey, I think Molag Mar is next up, don't you? What a boring little town. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself....

[blake]

take your pic as long as its not one of the ones dm picked or you could and then we could see who had the better background... but that might lose efficiency so just pick 4 and post em so we know not to do them

[beornica]

Oh goody. I've got dibs on Aldi, Brurid, Endris and Helga, then. When I get the dialogue all together, do I just email it to you, Blake? Or to you, DM?

[blake]

do you have aim or msn or yahoo? if not you can just email it to me or DM...

[Dark Master]

You can email it to either of us, but it might be better to send it to Blake first, since I'm very busy at the moment.

DM

[Monolith]

hum, I don't know if it is possible, but try to add .jpg to the ending of the esm and attach the file to you post. That way everyone could download it right here. I'm going to have a look at the tutorial - then I'm going to change some of the dialogs at Dragon Fel - just for fun and to see how easy/difficult it is.

[Dark Master]

Still trying to figure out the technical side - so far I had to edit the main 'my trade' option for silt strider drivers and then put 'not_ID' and then the name of the guy I was editing. I guess I could put in 'Not Khuul' for background so that all of the NPC's respond with thier own story, but looking at the existing NPC project in Seyda Neen it seems that somehow everybody says their own individual dialouge anyway, without the generic dialouge being edited in anyway, and thier own dialogue seems to have the same functions and stuff as when I did it in Khuul and it was replaced by the original stuff.

Also last night when I had done all the dialouge I loaded up the game and went for a chat with the silt strider guy, he answered my trade fine, and I hit continue, and he finished what he was saying and we moved on to other things. I then spoke to him about Silt Striders and it hit a dialouge loop. I quit MW and compared the dialouge here to that of my trade, and the formatting was the same, so I just remade the Silt Strider topic so it didn't need a 'continue'. I loaded it back up, and my trade, which had previously been fine, and hadn't been changed in any way, went into a dialouge loop. Can anyone shed any light on this?

[Dark Master]

OK, I've finally worked out how you can give each individual NPC dialouge for the big generic topics: Background, my trade, Latest Rumours, Little Advice, Little Secret, Dumner.. in fact everything that is not unique to them. All the generic dialouge in the game is determined by certain conditions being met, for example the generic response to My trade is determined by the class of the NPC. The only way to add in a unique dialouge for all the different NPC's with the same trade would be to remove the original bit of dialouge, and add thier own, or so I thought. This would have led to to prolems (silt strider opperators around the island would not be able to talk about thier trade until we got around to them).

Through looking at the Less Generic NPC project in Seyda Neen I've worked out that if the NPC is set to 'no lore' they won't have the dialouge options for the generic topics. So what we do is we set the dialouge topics to each NPC, then we set that NPC to no lore. If that didn't make any sense don't worry. Anybody who wants to do dialouge, I'm now perfectly willing to put it into the game. Arno, are you still willing, if so, would you be able to write dialogue for:

Nelmyne Andules-commoner dark elf
in her shack

----in thongar's tradehouse----

Shotherra-assassin khajiit

Ondi-Knight in the imperial legion nord

Thongar-merchant nord


Beornica, the four you suggested would be great.

Dagon Wench:

Miron Garer-commoner dark elf
in his shack

Rivame Samandas-commoner dark elf
wandering around

Svadstar-commoner dark elf
wandering around

since I'll have problems making four characters if I'm going to put the dialouge in game as well. Next time you'll get more interesting people I promise, Its just that I've already started on the Ship lady (in fact nearly finished her).

The way to do it would be to:

1. Open up the Construction Set
2. Open Morrowind esm.
3. Click the speech bubble in the tool bar, and it comes up with a list of all the dialouge topics in game.
4. In the bottom left hand corner of the box that has appeared there is a smaller box with nothing in it, and "filter for" written above it, select that box and type the first three letters of your NPC's name. That should get you close, if not bang on the NPC.
5. Then select them, you will see quite simply all the dialouge that needs replacing, you don't have to change anything in the construction set, just use it to find out what need changing and write up the new Dialouge in MS word. (If you don't have word, use another program and save the file as .rtf)

You will notice that for certain things like latest rumours there are many different options, I only need (and that matter I can only work out) how to enter one latest rumour per NPC, also feel free to link your NPC's together, if one of them states in their latest rumours that they've heard NPC X is having an affair, that leaves some interesting possibilities for NPC X's little secret...

Once you have the file email it to me, with the name of the NPC at the top, and the topic with a line left and then the response. Kind of like this:

NPC: Barry



Background.

I'm Barry. Hi.

My trade.

My trade is interesting and blah blah blah.

If you have any questions (I know those instructions aren't terribly clear) don't hesitate to email or post them here, anybody else who wants to get on board I'd really appricate it. After Khuul I want to do Maar Gan, (23 NPCs) but some of the bigger towns will require a bigger team.

Thanks guys. We can do this!

DM