Hello, I am very new to using G.E.C.K. so sorry if this is an easy thing.

First, the goal is to make a small town mod for myself.
But I need to start small first, with just a house, It would start with a stick in the ground (or whatever stock object i can find) and you activate the stick and it asks you which of a couple of houses you want to build there. Then it puts down a construction site, and after a certain amount of time a working house shows up and the construction site disappears.
Ideally it would be more complex, with npc workers, but what I have so far is beyond me so i need to start small.

Here's what I am trying right now, I create an activator and throw a script on it, then I put the houses and construction sites down where they should be, I set them to initially disabled, and link them to the stick activator, and the script activates them in the game.

And here's where I'm stuck, I made an activator (a piece of paper for this test), put a script on it based off of a light switch script on the wiki that I thought would make the object appear and disappear:

scn aTestActivatorSCRIPTref houseBegin OnActivate	if house == 0		set house to GetLinkedRef	endif	if house.GetDisabled		house.Enable	else		house.Disable	endif	ActivateEnd

Then I made an object, and gave it a reference name, set it to persistent reference and initially disabled, and linked the activator to it.

When I try it in game, I can't select the activator, so I must have done something wrong, but I can't figure out what.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

P.S. while I mostly want to figure out this basic deal, If someone knows how to do the rest of the stuff, like the timing, or npcs, I would be very grateful.

When you say you can't select the activator, do you mean that you get no rollover text, or do you mean that nothing happens when you activate it?

What is the object that you are using for the activator (that is, what is its original Object ID)? Some meshes don't have collision on them, so there's no way for the game to tell if you're looking at it or not. Press F4 to show collision in the GECK.

Also, have you gone through the tutorials? They really help a lot for newcomers to the GECK, and would probably be a better place to begin learning how/what to do. Contact me on your favorite form of IMs if you want some more specific help on your other aspects... or I can help you here when you get to those parts.

Thank you for the quick reply,

I get no rollover text, sorry for not being specific.

The object I am using is one i made myself using a model of a piece of paper, clutter\office\paper01.nif , I basically copied "DunwichBuildingNote09Activator" and used the script I had above.

I went through a quest tutorial, bear hunting or something, but it didn't cover activators. and I skimmed the vault 72 one to get the basics down, probably should have actually done it I suppose. Is there a place to find other tutorials for making quests and other non-blender stuff?

That's what I feared, then.

That paper looks like it was part of some debugging that the devs were doing. In any case, it doesn't have any collision on it, so the game doesn't know that you're looking at it.

I would try a switch for now. Something like GenElecSwitch01, for testing.

As for other tutorials, I don't know of any, though I imagine they exist. Maybe someone else can point them out?

Yup, that was my problem, nice call. I totally can toggle an object on and off now. Now to figure out the timing stuff.

There are paper notes that are activateable. Like in the Germantown police station, in the cell next to Red is a piece of paper you can activate.

Another problem might be you have the paper 'inside' another objects collision so its effectively 'hidden' from the player. Press F4 to see a ray trace of all the collision zones in the GECK. Make sure your paper collision is outside the one its sitting on.