My dialog for the first two quests in my mod is garbage. Its a mishmash of greetings and goodbyes and info's, and at times my characters dont have greetings so their dialog is blank. Its bad. But I noticed that all the characters in the game, have sort of a 'main menu' in their dialog. They can great you like 3 random ways (Yea?, Hello, Hey there!, etc) or possibly a few more depending on where you are in a quest related to them. (Like Moira) But then it always leads to one spot. The menu where you can buy stuff if they are a merchant, say goodbye, possibly ask about them/their past/ or what they do. And then quest related things pop up as they are needed. How can I achieve this? I tried looking at how they set up Dad. As he is a great example. He has a few random greetings, but then you can always ask about Mom, Project Purity, and things like that, as well as the current quest stage, and say goodbye. But nothing really is linked together, so I figured if I had a topic, without a quest condition, only a GetIsID, then the NPC would always be able to say it after the greeting. However, I cannot seem to get this to work. I dont want to link my greetings to all the possibly things, as there will end up being like 200 of them. Plus I dont see Bethesda dialog linking, except for certain places.

So I concluded this. If a topic is linked to another topic(s), then from that one, you can ONLY go to those. However, if it is linked to nothing (and not a goodbye) then it takes you back to the 'main menu' where you can access all the topics that arent linked from stuff, and the conditions are met. However, I tried setting this up where I have the greeting topic, and a goodbye topic. Not linked. But when talking to the NPC's the greeting sometimes wont pop up (even though its only condition is a GetIsID) and when it does, it does not have the goodbye option.

So my quest is this. Can anyone help me in setting up a main menu type thing? That way for my whole mod, I only need the 2-3 random greetings, then possibly a few quest specific ones, and then I just swap out all the topics in the main menu. Instead of having what I currently do, which is a unique greeting for almost every quest stage (like 40 total greetings) and you cant really ask the NPC's what you should be doing. So if you miss some dialog, you are screwed and have to wander around till you figure it out. If I had the 'main menu' set up, I could simply put an option in there to say like 'What should I be doing right now?' and the NPC tells you what to do, depending on the quest stage. I currently have the two greeting working, my NPC randomly says one of the two. But then dialog just closes, like it was a goodbye. So what flags to I need checked where? I currently only have the Random flag checked on the two greetings. I look at some vanilla dialog, and none of the greetings are linked to anything. So how did Bethesda do it!? Can anyone help me?

Sorry if this is confusing, but if I can set this up, it would make my mod less confusing. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Gunmaster95

Ok I think I figured it out after much trial and error, and alot of reading on the wiki. In order to make the topic show up no matter what (not be linked from anything) you must check Top Level. Then, any greeting that is also not linking directly to something, will show all Top level topics, or the generic things. So I now have the greeting working, and it links to a goodbye, then I can fill it in with any topic I need. This way my dialog is entirely centralized around this menu, and I dont need to make 4000 greetings and dialog trees for each quest stage.

Yup, you basically figured it out. After a greeting, the top-level topics are displayed. After a topic that is not linked with choices or set as a good-bye, the top-level topics are displayed again. This way you can cycle through a dialogue tree many times and use a single good-bye from the main menu as you call it. You should have read my tut as I explained the top-level concept in detail in there. Once you have a top-level topic, you can vary what is said by using conditions on different infos within the topic. That allows different dialogue paths from the same menu options for different stages of a quest.

Yea I actually did download your tutorial and it helped me a bit with figuring that thing out. And I am using conditions with the 'What should I do now?' topic, so depending on the quest stage, the NPC describes to the player a different objective they must do. Now my dialog for the two main characters is much more rounded, and not nearly as sloppy and horrible seeming as before.