mr.devolver

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.

That wouldn't work, because auto generated keys would introduce duplicates. Yep, while I was waiting for your reply, I figured I could try to go with cvars (again those pesky cvars I'm desperate to learn how to use as there is not enough learning material on those!) and I'm more or less finished on the xml part, but I couldn't test it due to that issue with 7 Days to Dialog.

There is a major problem with 7 Days to Dialog. You can save two dialogs in one dialogs.xml, but only one dialog is saved in Localization.txt. This prevents you from merging two different dialogs into one modlet. It's probably possible to fix this manually, but since I have no idea how exactly these dialogs work, I guess I will have to stop working on quests for now.

And about that tag, is it possible to add/remove it to/from an NPC through xml based on various conditions? I was thinking about using append, but xpaths are only static changes right? I guess we can't use appends when certain requirement was met? Example: NPC has: <property name="Tags" value="entity,npc"/> I need to temporarily add my own tag related to quest (and then remove it after the quest is finished), so NPC would have: <property name="Tags" value="entity,npc,QuestTag"/> Normally I would do something like: <append xpath="/entity_classes/entity_class[starts-with(@name,'NPC')]/property[@name,'Tags']/@value">,QuestTag</append> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the problem here is that append is a static change that can't be triggered inside <effect_group> based on certain <requirement> there, so I can't really change tags of NPCs back and forth, right?

Thanks, if you could share it that would be awesome. By the way what does AOE actually mean? Still, if I may make a suggestion to SphereII, it would be awesome if he could add a feature AddBuffToNPC, or extend AddBuff so that you could choose who gets the buff - player or NPC, so that you could do both ways through dialog directly.

But that would apply the buff on the player, I need the buff to be applied on the NPC. If you wanted to apply buff on the player, you can do it through the dialog easily by using AddBuff action, but that applies the buff on the player and I can't see any action in the list that would apply the buff on the NPC.

@Xyth, @SphereII, as you know, I've been trying to add some basic quests that involve NPCs, but I ran into an issue. The problem is that I believe I need to give the NPC some buff through the dialog. I figured I could give the player a specific buff through dialog, but for this quest I think I need to do it the other way around, can't think of any other way. Is it possible?

I promise you it is VERY relevant to A18. If you follow Xyth's awesome video tutorials and use his template project which is updated and ready to go for A18. I know this because recently I created my Crowbar mod thanks to his tutorial, so it's as relevant as it can be. Feel free to go wild in your modding and of course don't forget to share your creations with us, we want a piece of that cake too!