[SKY] Buying Furnishings for a Faction

[dottedgirl]

So in my current mod, I would like the player to be able to buy furnishings for the faction that the quest adds. Stuff like tables, shelves, beds, etc. Quite similar to buying furnishing for a Player-Owned House, or like you can do toward the end of the Dark Brotherhood quest line.

I'm just wondering how I go about doing this though. I'm assuming that I want to make fully-furnish the faction first, then somehow 'turn off' the furniture that I want to be purchasable then have it 'turn on' after the player purchases the furniture (which will most likely be done through selecting an option in an NPC's dialogue).

How would I go about turning off/on the furniture?

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

Hi!

That's actually much easier to do than it might seem, and you are on exactly the right line of thought.

1) Create the fully furnished faction as you said, then select each piece of furniture you want to be "turned off" at the start. You will see an option for "initially disabled"; tick this box. As it sounds, this makes the furniture invisible and untouchable to the player and A.I, as if it wasn't there. (we will be re-enabling it later)

2) You will need to give every single piece of furniture that you want to have "turned on" a unique reference name. This is so later, when you create a script to enable the furniture, you will be able to point the script directly to the objects you want enabled/disabled. This can be done from selecting the furniture, and in the box that appears, entering the reference name you want it to have in the "Reference Editor ID" input box. It is wise to use naming conventions here- for example, if you want to have the furniture purchasable in two seperate upgrades, name them "upgrade1a", "upgrade1b" etc, then "upgrade2a", "upgrade2b". Using conventions like this saves A loooooooot of hassle, trust me

3)Now you will need to create your script to enable the objects. You can do this through dialogue- there is an option to execute a script when a certain piece of dialogue is said by a character. This will essentially be:

upgrade1a.enable()

upgrade1b.enable()

getplayer().removeitem (gold, 1500)

(note, I wrote that from memory and havent scripted in a while so it might look a bit different!)

You can find tutorials for step 3 on this website or around the web, looking at the wiki pages for dialogue and object scripts would probably help to. When you get up to making the script I can give you a few more pointers (I'm just presuming you've not scripted before, sorry if I'm teaching granny to suck eggs )

That's basicly it! Obviously that is a very simplified set of instructions and if you've not done this sort of thing before, you may need to look things up or find tutorials. It may turn out there are extra steps you need to take, maybe to make the A.I. recognise the furniture or ensure the furniture doesn't redisable itself, but you will have to discover those through testing...such is the nature of modding!

Hope that helped, and happy modding (I'm sure there is someone around here far better than me at explaining these things, if I was useless )

Useful wiki links:

http://www.creationkit.com/Reference

http://www.creationkit.com/Disabled

http://www.creationkit.com/Dialogue_Views_Tab

http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Dialogue

Mysterious Mr. Bear :D

[dottedgirl]

Awesome instructions!

Now, I'm assuming that I can follow the opposite procedures (in a sense) to make objects disappear after a quest step? For example, clearing some rubble so the player can access a previously un-accessible area?

[WillieSea]

2) This is the very hard way to do it.

Simple way is to do it the way player homes do it.

a. Place an xmarker in the cell and give it a reference name for easy id of what it enables. (kitchen, bedroom, whatever)

b. Each object you want enabled with kitchen for example, you click on the tab called 'enable parent' and link the object to the correct xmarker you created above.

3) you can now use the xmarker to enable ALL of the objects that are linked to it by parentage.

[Mysterious Mr. Bear]

WillieSea is (of course) absolutly right- I don't know why I didn't remember this, considering he taught me the same thing when I was doing all this kind of stuff

The way this system would work would is much simpler. Lets say you still want the two upgrade system from my post.

You create an Xmarker object (it's a type of static that can't be seen in game) and name it Upgrade1, and set it to "initially disabled". You then create Upgrade2 in the same way.

You then select every object you want to enable for the first upgrade one by one, and like willie said, go to the enable parent tab and link it to the x marker "upgrade1". (if this concept confuses you, which it did me, it is covered in the reference wiki page I posted earlier).

Then, your script just needs to say "upgrade1.enable()". This will enable the xmarker you created- which will in turn tell every object that you have linked to it to enable. Think of it like this- when you set the xmarker as the enable parent to all of your objects, the objects become the children. Then, instead of having to tell every object individual to enable itself, you just tell the parent- and it tells the children for you.

Again, sorry if I am over explaining, I just remember being very confused by this concept at first... And your right, yeah! You can get rid of rubble by just reversing the procedure.