I want to make a spell that creates a zombie that can talk and accept commands through dialogue. It needs to work like the vanilla reanimate spells (so it can animate most corpses), just with the zombie accepting conversation.

Rather than try and make actual zombies activate, I've ended up using resurrection and a bit of sly inventory control, and that seems to work OK. There's just a few little niggles that I can't seem to get right.

• I can't seem to get the zombie shader effect to apply to my fake zombies. I've set the effect up with the same shader options as the vanilla Zombie spells, but it doesn't seem to do anything. I'd appreciate any pointers on how to make this happen.
• I'd like to make my fake zombies count against the commanded actor total, so summoning one of them dismisses another summoned creature. And so that TwinSouls allows two of them

Any help would be very welcome

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Alternatively, if anyone knows how to add dialogue to a standard zombie, that would work too. Or at least to let the zombified actor receive OnActivate events.