NPC to Creature, Creature to NPC

[Allannaa]

Greetings,

I'm making a little Oblivion mod, currently for personal gratification and to learn modding in general.

The trouble is, the quest giver of the thing needs to be a talking female wolf. (Otherwise what the heck, it's just another "gimme a house and a few gold" mod.) Obviously, Oblivion "Creatures", such as animals, can't talk or do dialog or conversation with a player.

So my first solution was to try and re-make a generic female wood elf -- after all, she'd have the voice I was after, and it shouldn't be a big deal to replace her skeleton with a wolf skeleton NIF, right?.... boy was I wrong. Every time I try this, the TESCS crashes -- because of course "humanoid" forms have all kinds of things like fingers and so on, that animal forms do not have.

So, rather than give up and throw things (okay, I threw things. Anyway...) I thought well, I can go to Character > Race, and make my own from there. So I tried that, got everything all yippy skippy, was able to replace all body, head, eyes, and so on, with the appropriate NIFs and even the appropriate textures. I thought I had it made, because the TESCS didn't crash....

... Didn't crash until I tried to drop the thing into a cell to test it.

I honestly don't understand what I'm doing wrong. Or is it simply that there is flat-out no way to do this, at all, short of modelling it and importing it and so on? The talking wolf is vital, as I say, because otherwise there's nothing really all that special going on here.

I should mention, when I tried this with a renamed, re-IDed "timber wolf", I got her to pop where she should, follow the script that she should, and do everything she should -- EXCEPT -- I couldn't get a way to do conversation. You know, the standard, "I can help you, if you'll help me" thing, followed by the player being able to say (click on) "Sure, why not?" or "Get lost, I'm busy".... the kind of thing that every quest starts with, in other words. I couldn't even get it to work as a "message box" type thing -- because either there's no way to give a choice like that, or, I just don't know how.

I also hunted through the forums (it makes a great excuse for avoiding washing dishes, for all you moms out there. You just say, I'm working on my mod, you'll need to load the dishwasher for mommy!) but didn't see anything related to this. If there was and I missed it, I'd love a link to point me there!

Sorry if this is convoluted and confusing. What the heck, right now, I'm pretty confused!

[HeyYou]

Try just scripting the wolf to bring an invisible npc into existance behind the player, (or, positioned such that the player appears to be talking to the wolf.....) and doing a forcegreet.

[greenwarden]

I was just going to say something similar- use a "dummy" NPC was my guess.

[Critterman]

I've known many people who have tried this actually. I can recommend a few ways of doing this...

1. You make a fake dialogue through messageboxes. Example: Once you activate the wolf a messagebox will come up with the wolf's greeting and the buttons will be the player's topics and choices. This is probably the best idea IMO.

2. You somehow make an invisible NPC and make it stand in front of the wolf or force the conversation with the player if they get too close and then the player will think he is talking to the wolf but is in fact talking to an invisible NPC. Problem with this is the way the camera zoom will work, the zoom will zoom up too high for the height of a wolf. And this wouldn't work very well for if you wanted to talk to the wolf after the initial meeting, as the invisible NPC can't follow in front of the wolf everywhere...

[Nollemaster]

When you summon a daedra lord, he or she will talk to you. I believe that's a conversation.

You could look at that script

[Critterman]

When you summon a daedra lord, he or she will talk to you. I believe that's a conversation.

You could look at that script

Yes, but the daedra lord is classified as an NPC in the CS, where as a wolf is a creature and unable of conversation.

[Zaldir]

I don't know if this might help, as I haven't read through the whole page, but it seems they figured out something near the end of the page. (Always start on the bottom, I say )

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