I'm working on a mod that requires some changes be made to the dialogue options of some vanilla NPCs...

I have written a bunch of dialogue for custom NPCs that I have created, but I'm confused when in the GECK looking at the dialogue quest for vanilla NPCs - I see the topics, including multiple responses in places... but nothing seems to have any prompts. At the same time, most (not all) topics don't have anything listed for choices.

Am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong? Is there some other way to combine/track all of the dialogue stuff that the vanilla game uses?

...am I just ignorant?

I just went into the GECK and randomly pulled up Alice McCafferty and she had a ton of choices appended to some of the Topics she has under the Topics tab. Re: Prompts. What information are you looking for in the prompt field?

For example, I'm looking at Actor Data -> Quest -> vDialogueCasinoCashier (00144f34)

Looking there, most of the topics don't have choices associated with them.

As for prompts: My understanding is that that is where one finds what the player says to the NPC, that prompts the specific response text from that topic. At least, that is the way that it has worked for the dialogue that I have put together for NPCs I have made from the ground up.

Is there some other way it is handled?

I took a look at vDialogueCass as well, and see things all over the board - some topics with choices, some without. Some with prompts, some without -- but mostly without prompts. I'm just not understanding how, if I wanted to change what the player said to get to that topic... how do I go about that?

You don't need prompts to do that. In fact I never use prompts, except if I want to use a variable that I am toggling in dialogue, like for setting an NPC essential or something like that, otherwise I always just use the space at the top of the page for player dialogue.



Re: topic with choices

Not every topic will have one or more choices; that isn't an unusual finding. Not every topic has something connected to it. Sometimes you only have one statement and it doesn't go anywhere.

Oh, so the "Topic Text" takes the place of the "Prompt"?

But that is limited to one per Topic, rather than per Response, right? (Trying to understand, as this is very different than what I was shown in the dialogue walkthroughs that I found - at least what I was able to find on the subject)


But I'm seeing this on topics that are not marked as "goodbye", and that I know are not conversation enders. When that is the case, and there is nothing in choices, where does it go? Does it default back to showing Top level topics? Or is it based on priority?


(By the way, thank you very much for taking the time to help me understand all of this...)

Yes, the Topic Text can be used as the player's dialogue. But you can also add a prompt if you have a topic text but I've only done that a couple of times. I didn't find any tutorials until after I figured out how to do most of what I do. I copied what I found in the GECK. It may be that using prompts is vastly superior and I should have been using them all along. But you don't need to use them. That's what I was trying to say. So you can find the player's dialogue at the top if it's not in the prompt.

If you are trying to write big conversations there is a better way to do it now in the NVGECK. It's called the Conversation Editor, and I still haven't figured out how to create the first topic in it, but once you have a topic you can open it up there and add to it. It's vastly superior to doing it in a Quest. It's the new button under the File, Edit, World, choices in the buttons. It's at the far right. It's the right justified paragraph.




If there is no goodbye and no choices then the player stays in dialogue with the NPC and bounces back out to the top level topics., yes.


Oh, and you're welcome. Although it seems like you know what you're doing.

OK, that makes a bit of sense now that I've looked at it.

I can understand the "looking at what is there and teaching yourself" -- I've done that extensively with FO3Edit/FNVEdit, but have really only touched the GECK a tiny bit for scripts, and am just starting to learn a bit more. Looking at everything from a F*Edit point of view, the GECK has been somewhat confusing for me - thus actually looking for a tutorial to help get me pointed in the right direction.

As far as using prompts, from what I'm seeing I suspect it does have some benefits -- at least in a mod I've been writing with several hundred lines of dialogue (for one NPC), it has been handy since so often the response to a particular topic is different based on different criteria - and using prompts has allowed me to change the player speech at the same time (all within one topic).

Example: response #1 being something like, "This costs 4000 caps" with a prompt of, "How much for that one?" -- response #2 being something like, "We already agreed on 3000 caps. I'm not going any lower." with a prompt of, "How much was that one again?" --- obviously with a quest variable being checked to see if a discount had already been negotiated or not. With having a lot of those sorts of situations, being able to do several under the same topic has helped keep things a bit more streamlined.


Holy cow batman!

...ok... so I have something new to really learn this weekend. Part of me wishes I'd known about this two weeks ago... but I'm really not sorry that I'm learning more of the 'nitty gritty' side of it. But this looks like it will be enormously helpful for the next couple of mods I'm going to be working on.


Gotcha. Good to know -- don't know how often that would be handy in my custom NPC mods, but certainly helps me understand what is going on with the vanilla dialogue that I want to tweak...



All an illusion, I promise you.

I think I first started looking at dialogue about nine or ten days ago - but I spent pretty much all of last weekend hip-deep in it. The parts that I know, all make sense - but as this exercise is proving to me, there are other ways to do things and/or other pieces of the puzzle that I have no clue about!

That's basically the entire point of prompts. In the Construction set only the topic text was available and it would always display the same (since Oblivion dialogue mostly consisted of one word topics). In Fallout 3 they introduced prompts to allow you to get different responses for different conditions like a skill check. For New Vegas they implemented the change that the skill check will display how many points you need. The Conversation Editor also allows you to choose a 'dumb' dialogue prompt, however that's only a cosmetic change. You'll still get the proper dialogue response unless you go through individually and write dialogue for smart and dumb topic responses.

And like llamaRCA says, using the Conversation Editor can be really helpful, especially for the conceptual understanding of how your dialogue choices related to one another, plus it is easier to create choices (you can either right click on either the player or npc line and choose add child to create a new line (clicking on a player line creates an npc line and vice versa). Then you can right click on one of your player lines and click copy on one of the npc lines to create a choice. I hope Bethesda will bring it over to their next games' CS. Still it is useful to know how the old topic editor works as well since you need it to get started.