Ok,

I have never blown up Megaton in any game I've played but I've given it a go this time round and I must admit the evil route is quite freeing!

Anyway I decided to try and make a mod that adds dialogue options to certain NPC's that the player may want to save from the explosion. I started by testing on Nova, I've almost got it working, but not quite.

What I wanted was a dialogue option to appear in the choices at the stage of the Power Of The Atom quest where the player has rigged the bomb, but before he/she travels to meet Burke.

I added a dialogue only quest and made an option saying something like "Nova , you should leave I hear someone is going to explode the bomb" . Then I created a reply for her where she says that she will move. In the result script I removed all of her megaton packages, made a travel package for her to go to Rivet City and added her to the RC Residents faction and removed her from the Megaton faction.

The new packages and the removed ones worked perfectly and sure enough she travels to Rivet City , however all of her dialogue options disappear after I initiate contact. I was hoping her dialogue options would switch to the Rivet City dialogue options.

Here is what I did, in her Greeting topics in the Megaton Dialogue quest I added to the Choices box my "NovaMove" topic where I ask her to move.

What I was hoping would happen is that a new line would appear in the default choices but instead just the one option appears


I used these conditions on the NovaMove topic
GetIsID - Nova
GetStage MS11==40
Set to Say Once

So close to working, but I did expect her dialogue options to move to the Rivet City ones but instead she gives the default greeting and then dialogue is ended

Any ideas?

Would be a nice addition I think and I thought it would be interesting to see how the game behaves if NPC's end up somewhere else permanently. I've also replaced Walter with another Scrap dealer for those who destroy Megaton and she is working well.

Rivet City has no generic residents and there is no generic Rivet City quest, only the main RC quest. All of the RC Residents are unique NPCs except for the Security force. So all of the RC dialogue is scripted for specific NPCs except for some of the security force dialogue. You would have to make up some of your own dialogue for her or make her part of the RCSecurityFaction and/or the RCGenericVoiceFaction - though I did not research what that faction will yeild.

Ah ok pkleiss

Thanks for the tip, I may send her somewhere else , not sure Nova would really fit in as a Security Guard

Neil, she doesn't need to be a Security Guard

What you would need to do though, if you wanted to have some of Danvers' lines available for Nova, would be to recreate all of the dialogue that you do want yourself in the GECK by extracting the voice files out of the FO3 BSA voice files, creating new topics for Nova which recreate that existing dialogue exactly and attaching those voice files to the new, but just recreated, topics. You can also do the same thing with her Megaton topics that you would like to keep; like GREETINGS and HELLOS or GOODBYES that would be useful to have that you have made disappear. Or anything really. You could have her stay in the business if you could figure out where and how to do that. I mean, you could get creative and move into using Audacity (or something like it) and cutting/pasting files and using LipTemplate to lipsync and then move them back into the GECK and that's fun too as you have made entirely new dialogue, but I don't know how much work you want to do for her.


Oh, you would do all of this creation in your new quest.


:) llama


EDIT: That's how to make dialogue you want. I'm not sure what faction-y kinda thingies you need to set up. I haven't dealt with that yet. And, I just want you to know, I so love this idea btw.

Thanks llama

I was trying to keep the audio file with the greeting topic but no luck. All I could see to make it work was recording lines myself, I couldn't find anywhere in the dialogue options for extracting Nova's lines into the new quest topics.

Glad you like the idea , but I guess the problem for me is guessing which Megaton residents people may want to save! I may need to add the option to them all.

Glad to help.

Ya, it's a problem. There will be players who love Simms, Jenny Stahl, etc. You won't have to worry about Jericho and Moira, as they are already taken care of elsewhere. I don't know, though, are you thinking you'll do something as complete as what you are doing for Nova with everyone? Maybe it could be as simple as the Cherry quest with Dukov for the ones you don't really care about. I think all she does is change clothes and hang around RC and never really says much at all. It's kind of a bore for the player , though. Oh, and don't forget Gob. There will be a general outcry if he doesn't get sent back to Underworld. That has been the lost quest forever that people have so wanted. You'd be a hero if the player could be responsible for getting him back to Underworld and Carol. OMG.

Good Luck!

Hi Llama

Yeah I'd send Gob to Underworld, but from my early tests I don't think it will be as easy as it is with Cherry moving to RC. Basically Nova, Lucy West, Gob etc etc all are supposed to be dead if the player has destroyed Megaton. I tested Nova and Lucy with the SCC companions mod to hire them and move them out of Megaton before blowing it up but it started creating crashes and other glitches. I guessed it was because they were still part of a Faction that had been destroyed by the bomb. So they had no dialogue left hence a crash when I tried to speak to them. Which is why I thought I should change their factions and AI etc

Ugh. Ya, working with existing NPCs is a lot of work since it seems like you have to undo so much to get them to do what you want them to. At least, in my very limited experience of one mod, working entirely with an existing NPC, that seems to be the case. When I get frustrated I think about how much easier it would be to work with a shiny, new NPC. I"d completely forgotten about Lucy West! You have a ton of NPCs to do. What a lot of work!

I don't think this can work? Those packages are defined in the object definition of the NPC, right? I don't think removescriptpackage can work in this way?

You could just make a new "Nova" and let the old one get killed. That might make it easier than extracting her from her old ways. No one would know the difference.

Thats an idea, the enable / disable command !! It would mean me finding a way to add her voice files to her new ID but its certainly an idea to try

Example of using existing dialog sound/lip files for new quests and NPCs:

1. find the original sound files:
open up a topic in the DialogueMegaton quest. For this example, a GREETING from Nova - Well, hello there, Miss Dangerous. What can I do for you?

Highlight the sound file name and CTRL-C (copy) in this case its DialogueMegaton_GREETING_0001D76C_1.

Launch FOMM and click the BSA Unpacker button. Browse to your DATA Directory.

The files you are looking for are going to be in one of these two BSA files - either Fallout - MenuVoices.bsa or Fallout - Voices.bsa. Open one of these

files and paste the sound file name into the lower-left search field. If the file is in this archive, they will display on the right - both sound/lip

files.

In this case the files are in MenuVoices. Highlight the two files on the right and click 'Extract'. Browse to a temporary directory that you will stage

these from.

For this example it is C:\sound. You'll notice that the files get extracted into C:\sound, along with their original directory structure (which we won't
need). In this case:

C:\sound\voice\fallout3.esm\femaleadvlt02\dialoguemegaton_greeting_0001d76c_1.ogg and
C:\sound\voice\fallout3.esm\femaleadvlt02\dialoguemegaton_greeting_0001d76c_1.lip

Rename the ogg and lip files to something you can identify later. In this case I just renamed them to HelloMissD.ogg and HelloMissD.lip

Repeat the above process for all the sound/lip files you want to use later.


2. Using the extracted sound/lip files in your own quest:

Open up a topic in your new quest, the one that is using the same text 'Well, hello there, Miss Dangerous. What can I do for you?' of course

The Geck creates a filename and path for you - you cannot change this. Make a note of the path. In this example, it's this:

Data\sound\Voice\MyNewPlugin.esp\femaleadvlt02

You need to create this directory structure because that's where your mod is looking for the sound files.

All of your sound files for femaleadvlt02, used in your mod, will go here (regardless of which NPC is using it)

Copy HelloMissD.ogg and HelloMissD.lip to this new direcory.

Highlight and CTRL-C (copy) the sound file name in your topic - in this case MYQUEST_GREETING_00001BF4_1

Right-click HelloMissD.ogg, click 'Rename', then CTRL-V to paste the new name. Repeat for HelloMissD.lip

In the topic, you should be able to double-click the 'femaleadvlt02' line in the 'voice type' window, and the sound will play.

If you change the name of your esp plugin, you need to create a new sound directory and copy or move all the sound files to the new directory. The geck

always want's to use the plugin name in the voice file path.

Thanks RickerHK. I'll give it a go

@Tarrant : The remove scripts and adding new packages work perfectly, I've done it before on a mod I did for RR Companions Vault mod, its a quest where a new NPC I created Joannie Ewers asks you to help her run a vault. After the quest is finished and "Blood Ties" is done I made a dialogue available for Brailee Ewers in Arefu where she gets her head together leaves her hubby and moves in to the vault with her daughter Joannie. The packages all swapped over fine, the problem with this is as pkleiss pointed out I moved Nova to a place that has no faction based dialogue, unlike Megaton.

So, what RickerHK has explained for you is what I suggested you do for Nova earlier. What you are doing is taking the voice files and making them your own. You finish doing that through the conditions you use on each topic once you have created it. So, you would use GetIsID to make the topic "belong" to the original Nova or a new Nova if you created a new one. The restriction you are working with is that Nova is voiced advltFemale02 so you'll want to use those files, but you can go through all of those if you want to and use which you like. I find the easiest way to do that is to find other characters who use the same voice type and read their lines in the GECK to find ones I want to use and then listen to them in the GECK if it will let me, listen to them in Audacity if it won't and if I like them go extract them and use them.