While I have a feeling the answer has been in front of me the whole time, I can't seem to make this work. I've been working on a quest, my very first, so it's rather difficult for me right now. My problem is I can't seem to make the text appear to give the quest right off. I've followed the instructions pretty well in Calislahn's dialogue tutorial, but whenever I talk to the guy I made the quest giver, he doesn't greet me with the topic I want him to greet me with. The guide says to set it to Function Talked To PC = 0, well, I have, and instead of greeting me with the opening I gave him, he greets me with "Have you no decency, put on some clothes!" (The game save I am using to test it my character has no clothing or armor in her inventory, though I have run off to get some to see if that made a difference...but it didn't) I had to actually add the topic specifically for him in his background, otherwise the text for the quest would never show up, but I'm not wanting it like that, I want it to be the very first thing he mentions to me. Also, since I am able to get the quest from him through the background method I used, how do I make it so that he will not speak to you about the quest again for a set period of time if you decline? Adding disable to the results only makes him disappear, but I was unable to figure anything else out. I would also like to know if once accepted, if I could make the topic that appears to start the quest vanish once accepted, to replace it with a different topic once certain items are acquired and certain enemies killed?


The greeting he is supposed to give me is written up like "Excuse me, %PCClass, is there any chance I could give you to help me locate my @family heirloom#?" Followed by the choices given "Not interested, bug someone else." or "Certainly, if there is a reward involved." I've got the choices working just fine, along with the journal updates after accepting the quest. At least I understand something about the dialogue.

Which Greetings section did you make your Greeting in? And is it filtered specifically for him correctly?
Remember that dialog is scanned from the top to the bottom, and the first dialog that fits the filter criteria gets used.

You can use the AddTopic and RemoveTopic function, to add/hide Topics whenever you like. They can be used in the Dialog Results box, or with some simple scripts on the objects/creatures in your quest.

Oh, that must be how I botched it then. I only set the greeting up in the topics section. I suppose that explains why he wasn't greeting me properly. Would also explain why I had to place it in his background topic to get the topic I wanted in the first place. I read over the greetings bit in the tutorial I'm reading it seems, otherwise I'd have known that. I went back and used ctrl+f to find greetings, and it says Greetings 1 and 5 are for quests, so I'm guessing either of the two will work. Simple mistake which made things far more complex than they had to be. Thanks for the help there, I almost certainly never would have noticed that and just given up entirely on my project. Appreciate it. ^^

I use Greetings 5. That way the NPC will still react correctly if you are naked, diseased, a vampire, etc.
I only use Greetings 1 if I need to guarantee that the Greeting occurs no matter what the Player is doing.

Pluto, there is no RemoveTopic function. The only way to keep an NPC from talking about a specific topic is to filter out all of the responses so they don't show. Once an NPC "knows" a topic (either through AddTopic or dynamic linking), it's known and won't disappear as long as the NPC has a response for it.

Well, now I have a new problem relating to it. I have the greeting written up the same, only this time in the right spot, so he greets me with that. My problem now is that he only once used the greeting with the topic highlighted in blue, now when I went back to add the quest items and other quest NPCs, when I talk to him it's not highlighted nor is there a way to get the quest. I tried the addtopic trick, but it didn't work. I'm actually getting an error when I talk to the guy now, something about dialogue compilation failure, still able to play, but unable to do the mini quest for my test run. I have him set up to give me a note demanding payment, upon accepting the quest, and it didn't start bugging out on me until I did that. Now the construction set won't even save the hyperlink attempts. Once I click Save and return, the @# around family heirloom is gone. Actually, I just went and checked, that seems to be true for all topics in the construction set, not a single word has @# around it. Clearly I screwed up somehow, but I have no idea how. >_< Especially since all I did was create the new topics and greetings, and didn't mess with it for anyone but my quest giver and the quest boss.

Hyperlinks are unreliable, I would not use them. It's much better to just create the Topic in the Topic tab, and then filter accordingly.
Double check that you have the topics filtered correctly. It's hard to know what might be wrong without actually seeing your esp.


Oh yeah. It's been awhile, so I had forgotten how I "removed" topics.

I took the advice of not using hyperlinks, that worked just fine. Except it's still giving me a dialogue error "DialogueComplie Error" Or something close. It also mentions errors in Greetings 5 despite when you allow the game to continue running the choices still work fine, I can get the quest from him and the item he wants, I just want dialogue errors upon talking to him to not be there. It doesn't matter how many times I talk to him, the game still gives me that error.


Edit: Nevermind, I figured that problem out and got a miniature quest working, just to see if I had any hope of being a quest designer. Thanks again for the help. ^^