mr.devolver

Yeah, pretty much this. From my own experience, you don't want to rush the release, only to have to reupload the fixed version of it just because there was some stupid little bug you missed in the original version that you uploaded. It happens and it's frustrating for both the author and players.

Just relax, everything is going to be all right. We all are waiting for something new, something cool that would keep us entertained while we all wait for A19, I know how you feel, but let me share something with you. It's something that may give you a different perspective on this: We all like new mods, no one really likes to wait, there's nothing wrong about getting that off of your chest. It's ok, I do believe that we all deep inside do understand you well as we are all on the same boat with you. But have you ever tried to make your own mods while you wait for a new Alpha or even a new version of your favorite mod? It's kinda fun I must tell you. You will learn a lot of interesting stuff about the game, about modding and even some bit of programming and possibly 3d modelling. One of the things you will learn while modding is that it's not too easy, but it's still fun once you get the hang of it and you could create some awesome stuff in minutes depending on how complex your mod would be, but to make something more complex, it takes a long time and requires a lot of testing, so that the final product is as polished as you as a mod author want your mod to be and you usually want to do your best, because it's your work and you want it to stand out, even if it's just something simple, right? So you make sure it's just perfect before you even think about releasing it. Ultimately this will lead you to different thoughts: As you wait for something cool, you will often think that you may as well start making your own stuff for fun, to pass the time while you wait and maybe for others to enjoy too, because why not? We all love mods, right? And once you start making your own mods, you will probably see why some mod authors don't rush to release their mods too. More complex mods, especially overhauls that are basically like a lot of small modlets combined into one huge mod take a lot of time to create and a lot of time to test to see if everything works as intended. I hope this will help you think differently about this.

Calm down, I'm not responding on behalf of anyone, simply saying my opinion based on what I've seen here so far - there were requests, even some small bug fix suggestions with some direct hints at solutions that would probably require less work than what you're asking for and those requests and suggestions were not answered to this day, but of course if you still believe that your request will be an exception, by all means feel free to make a request. All I was saying is that the chance is low and there's no reason for irritated reactions. That is as constructive as it can get as I was trying to save your time, but do what you want.

Sorry, but if you followed the whole thread, you would know that it's been a while since this mod was updated for the last time. I think we shouldn't expect any changes, which is unfortunate, because this mod was a pretty nice one, but yeah, it's what it is right now and it probably won't change any time soon...

Yay, finally some good news! Thanks! PS: Inb4 Guppy's "About time..." post. 😇 @Guppycur

I could be wrong, but I don't think you're supposed to use the npc home block at the moment.

You know what's funny? Texture streaming is what's supposed to prevent you from running low on texture memory. It seems like the feature could use some bugfixing...

You should report any NREs that may pop up though, Xyth was on the hunt for NREs, I believe.

Also, remember when you said that you fixed the problem for me - the problem with your NPCs not teleporting to you when you die? It's still there.

@sphereii, I think I have found what's causing the problem with NPCs suddenly dying during teleport. Did you ever take an NPC with you into that underground cave with water, a zombie, some loot chest, two sleeping bags, some yuccas and mushrooms? Let your NPC follow you into that cave and once you're ready to get out, jump on the ladder, go up a little bit as if you wanted to get out, but wait on the ladder just under the hatch and look down. My NPCBaker kept trying to teleport to me several times and then he simply fell down and died. So I guess they die if they fall from heights or maybe if they try to teleport but have no solid ground to teleport on? I don't know, but the other clear example is when they die trying to teleport to you when you're flying in Gyro.

I think you do understand what I would like to achieve, but I don't think requirements can be used in dialogs.xml like that. I will probably try to throw some in quickly though. If it fails, it fails, at least we will know if we can improve the tool without making drastic changes. Also quests.xml is just a helper here, I could most likely do the quest without using quests.xml completely, but I wanted to learn how to actually use quests.xml, plus it gives you that "vanilla" feeling of doing quests, so that you as a player won't be confused (well not as much, because some improvisations that I'm currently using will probably still confuse some players if I can't figure out better solutions until release).

Is it possible to let the NPC despawn once he gets far from the player's vision? I could use that instead of letting the poor guy die. EDIT: By the way, random changes of the NPC voice lines are hilarious: Baker with a bow was shooting a zombie and tried to say "Ahh, fresh air..." and then as he shot the zombie: "Son of a b*tch!", he mixed them together and it was like "Ahh, fresh.. b*tch!" 🤣

Yeah, I thought so. Well, that's unfortunate because the way it works right now limits you in many ways. You can't really go wild with your quests with the current system. I mean, even such a simple concept like NPC jumps into the quest lines directly as you talk to him for the first time like "Hello survivor, I could use your help with this and that...", no instead you have to use "Hello survivor..." and then you have to magically let the player know what's on the NPCs mind like "Oh hey, I see you could use some help with this...", I mean, come on.. Where's immersion with this? Of course I know it's not your fault. I just thought maybe you could do some magic to make things better in this part, if it's not too hard and time consuming, that is.

Honestly, I don't know if changing NPCID is exactly what I would need. The actual effect I wanted to achieve was this: I wanted an NPC which would give you certain quest when you talk to him for the first time. Obviously I needed to craft the whole dialog around this quest to do so including the "start" statement itself. BUT I would like to somehow change that "start" statement once the quest is completed, so that I could force a "change of topic" of the whole dialog including the player's answer options. I wouldn't mind if it was all in one single dialogs.xml as long as it's possible, but I couldn't think of any way how to do this in the current state of things. I thought it would be possible to change the initial "start" statement directly in 7 Days to Dialog, but I couldn't find any option for that, so I kinda had to change my plans, I changed the start statement text to be more generic one, to be less quest related, but now it's just weird one as soon as you complete the quest and it's unfortunate, because it ultimately led me to a conclusion that I should let the NPC die once you finish the quest to make it less obvious that the player is "stuck" with this heavily quest oriented NPC with no further progress which is kinda sad and what's worse, for the players it kinda defeats the purpose of doing that quest too...

This is good to know, thanks.

I haven't tried to use this to hide what NPC tells you. I guess I need to consider two things here: 1) I have no experience with manually editing dialogs.xml, that's beyond my current modding knowledge, so I'm using 7 Days to Dialog tool for generating these dialogs.xml files for me. 2) In 7 Days to Dialog tool, there's no option for this that I would know about. So what are my options here? I guess I could try to blindly mess with the dialogs.xml file manually to see if I could hide the NPC dialogs under certain specific conditions, but at the same time I know this: IF this can somehow work, it would most likely have to be coded differently than in situations in which we need to hide certain player's answers and yes it would probably require setting up custom Cvars, BUT I also know that every time I tried to set up my custom Cvars I ended up cursing with absolutely no success which only led me to more frustration than progress which I would like to avoid from now on, that's not healthy at all... IF this was possible, wouldn't SphereII add it as a feature so that every user would have an easy way to conveniently do that without the need for manual changes in the final dialogs.xml file? This kinda bothers me, because I feel like he would do that if it was possible, so I don't know... I guess I could try to manually mess with the file, but I hate to do things that are destined to fail from beginning, if you know what I mean. That's why I wanted to ask more experienced people if it's even possible, to see if it's worth trying, you know?

A17 in mod.xml was most likely just a typo, or it could be simply that its development started in A17, but really when you look at the date of creation of this thread, top-right corners of the screenshots, you would have all the hints that this indeed was made for Alpha 18+.

This hides the response - one of the possible answers you can click in the dialog, but it doesn't hide or even completely change the whole dialog including what the NPC itself tells you in the first place. I'm looking for a solution for the latter.

They are still protected by default, because everyone likes different settings. If you wish to change it, then you will have to look inside blocks.xml of this mod, there are these lines: <property class="AdvancedPrefabFeatures" > <property name="Logging" value="false"/> <property name="DisableTraderProtection" value="false" /> <!-- Disables Trader Protection in their prefabs --> </property> There is a property called DisableTraderProtection with value false. You have to somehow change that "false" value to "true". You can do this directly in this mod (not recommended), or you can quickly craft your own mod that would change this value for you automatically. The advantage of the latter is that no matter how often 0-SphereIICore mod gets updated, it will be always updated correctly and you won't need to mess with those settings again every time new update may change them. If you wish to do it the safe way through creating your own mod, create an empty folder inside your Mods folder. Call it something like TraderProtectionDisabled. Enter the folder and inside create a new xml file called ModInfo.xml with this content: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xml> <ModInfo> <Name value="TraderProtectionDisabled" /> <Description value="Disables Trader Protection - Requires 0-SphereIICore." /> <Author value="ALT_Pain" /> <Version value="1.0" /> <Website value="" /> </ModInfo> </xml> Still in the same folder, create a new folder called Config. Go inside the Config folder and create a new xml file called blocks.xml with this content: <configs> <!-- Disables trader protection --> <set xpath="/blocks/block[@name='ConfigFeatureBlock']/property[@class='AdvancedPrefabFeatures']/property[@name='DisableTraderProtection']/@value">true</set> </configs> That's pretty much all there is to it. Of course this relies on 0-SphereIICore mod, so you must first make sure you have that mod properly installed for this to work. Enjoy!

@sphereii, @xyth... I've spent the whole day trying to build this pesky quest, not even a big one, really just something small, but one step further on my way to learn modding better. I have a question that doesn't let me sleep. Can we dynamically change NPCID of our NPCs to be able to show the player a different dialog when it's appropriate? For example after finishing some quest for that NPC, when the quest related dialog is no longer relevant!

Thank you bdubyah for this awesome update, I knew you could do it! You're my hero, I can't wait to try it!

SphereII, it would be awesome if you could also make a tool for generating all kinds of quests, one day when you're not busy that is. The quests are giving me headaches.

I would literally have to write one from scratch now to show you, because I ditched it as soon as I realized that path is closed for me... But now when I think about it, it was probably not as much the problem with cvars implementation as it was the problem with the way game handles this particular value. You see, when I tried to pass a simple random range like 200,1000 that didn't work either, so the issue may actually be something different than the cvar implementation. As for the simple range I tried, you can easily reproduce the problem I ran into by using this line here (non cvar version which also doesn't work): <set xpath="/entity_classes/entity_class[starts-with(@name, 'NPC')]/property[@name='HireCost']/@value">200,1000</set>

First I tried it by setting random range like 200,1000 - didn't work. Then I tried it by passing the cvar result of randomint(200,1000) and randomfloat(200,1000) - again, didn't work. But in case of cvars, I wasn't sure I was doing it correctly, since I don't have experience with cvars yet which is why I wanted to learn how to set them and pass them in xml.

I wanted to merge two localization files generated by 7 Days to Dialog, but they contained the same static keys that would conflict with each other and they also contained some auto generated keys that would conflict with each other. The chance my be low, but as long as there is 0.0000000000000000001% chance, it is risky to merge two localizations without first checking each line inside the first localization.txt for possible conflicts with all the lines in the other localization.txt you want to merge the first one with. As for cvars in 7 Days to Dialog, they are pretty straightforward. What I had trouble with is crafting and passing my own cvars in xml. I hope someone could teach me how to do that, because that would be just awesome and allow me to set more values more dynamically. For example, I wanted to let the NPCs set their own random hire cost. Didn't work, no matter what I tried, it always showed an error in the console telling me that the value was not in the correct format. Just an example of what I was hoping to be able to do with cvars, but kept failing to make it work... Also, I've noticed that in your Samara quest, you have two dialogs.xml. Dialogs.xml and dialogs2.xml. Is it actually possible to use both at once? I thought that custom xml names would be ignored by game? Well, at least that was the information I got here.