BillBenMen

But... but... but the first lethal encounter out of the blue right after leaving Candlekeep! The shock, the sweat, the first understanding of the roughness of the world the PC was thrown into! You want to change *that*?
 
On a serious note: it's great to see people working on their mod ideas. Modding BG is great fun, and highly addictive. You've been warned.

 

I completely appreciate that it's the first 'real' encounter in BG and for new players, it's an essential part of setting the atmosphere. However a couple of problems I have are that Tarnesh isn't stupid - there are guards everywhere and he's literally standing in the entrance to the only Inn in miles. What does he expect after he's killed you if the guards are already willing to attack him? I have some alternate outcomes planned, as I've mentioned. I like the creative writing challenge and my main focus will be keeping the tone consistent in emulating the dialogue style. I went a bit overboard and was thinking 'If Tarnesh knows you're smarter than him, you can fail a check if you have high intelligence and he'll risk taking you out now as he knows if you have time to plan then he might be at risk'. Silly stuff but I'll see how it plays out, if I can write it well enough.

And haha, yeah I was reformatting my PC recently and going through my notepad+, had a dozen or so .d files still open in it...worked in a call centre back then and had the WeiDu readme opened in my browser for months. It's really interesting stuff.

What exactly do you mean with dialogue options. If you mean the so-called player initiated dialogue (PID) then making it compatible with other mods that add one of those is either complicated or not likely (e.g. BG1NPC adds PIDs for all BioWare NPCs in BG1). This doesn't mean you couldn't make your own version, of course. The player would have the choice.
If you mean additional dialogues the NPC starts, then compatibility would more be in terms of content-wise, but for scripting it would be easier. If you mean interjections into existing game character dialogues, making it compatible technical wise is easy but the question is always on the content side if other mods add interjections for existing NPCs, too.

Okay, so to clarify PID is the dialogue tree you get when talking to an NPC, both joinable and non-joinable? Would it be a good idea to 'build' on BG1NPC project and then remove the underlying layers for the sake of compatibility? I'm mainly interested in non-joinable NPC dialogue, if there is a difference.

I've got no interest in interjections at the moment, I'm not confident enough to effect the flavour of enduring characters, just individual encounters. Though I suppose for immersion and consistency I'd have to amend or add some interjections if I change anything big.

 <blockquote class="ipsBlockquote">2)If you mean checking whether an NPC has an item in the inventory or even equipped, it is possible to do that.

EDIT~I think it chopped off the last part of my post for some reason?

I was expressing lots of gratitude, just about to hit bed but will update later. Cheers pal!

Thank you so much! On the bus atm so will come back with input this evening, but I had an idea last night - if Tarnesh was somehow to be bluffed or intimidated, that's not him done, and I can't remember if he knows he's working for the iron throne directly but he certainly is more concerned about the power of his masters than CHARNAME, but if he were somehow dissuaded, he'd just ambush you and bring company, or give a child a few coins to lead you away from the guards or away from the fighter and the druid who are waiting just inside. Could make for a harder encounter as it'd be a surprise to the player and it'd be out of sight of the guards. Plus veteran players are aware he's there and cheese him or don't confront him until ready anyway.

Coincidentally, it's been exactly a year after I began this generic project, I've done sod all with it (quelle surprise, written some dialogue but that's about it). I remember the outlines of what I learned from trawling through files and the relevant parts of the monstrous weidu readme, but I was wondering if I could get some specific help/get pointed towards a starting point/similar project? I'm sure this has all been asked before but there's a lot of stuff to sift through in the search function.

My first goal is to add a non-combat, dialogue based route for Tarnesh. I know this isn't lore friendly as such, but it's a proof of concept thing really (plus, creative writing exercise I guess).

I know the best way to learn is to cannibalize other mods that do similar things, but I'm finding some aspects of this quite tricky due to the multicomponent nature of the mods I've looked at, and I couldn't find any simple mods that did these individual things on which to build my vision. I remember using UB as my initial template, but there's so much going on that it was hard to separate the relevant parts. But it's better than nothing.

Things I want to do:

1) Add additional dialogue options to existing NPCs (think this one is pretty simple, but I recall worrying about conflicts with other mods)

2) Include stat/alignment/item requirements for some of these dialogue options (very simple IIRC, except maybe item reqs being a bit more complex?)

3) Alter quest rewards (Super simple)

4) Add my strings to dlg.tlk in a way that's compatible with other mods (I think this was where I started getting really confused last time)

Existing mod components I'm using as a springboard from UB:

3. Angelo Notices Shar-teel: Checks for a certain character in party, injects dialogue into an existing NPC.

15. Flaming Fist Mercenary Reinforcements: Spawns additional NPCs after dialogue trigger (presumably, I can't remember precisely)

28. Prism and the Emeralds Tweak: Does a lot of things that may be quite useful. Possibly overcomplicated but should be decent.

That's about it for now. Will be putting in more research over the rest of the month so I can ask better/more direct questions, and will probably post again if this gets no traction because what's the point helping those who aren't looking to help themselves?

Cheers for any input or pointers.