Author Topic: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple  (Read 15239 times)

Offline Kulyok

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NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« on: August 31, 2008, 04:21:55 AM »
(Originally written for magrat, but if it can help you, all the better.)

All programmers know this trick: learning from someone else's code is quicker than using heavy textbooks.

So, if you choke on tutorials, your way forward is clear: borrowing code from other modders.

Here's for PC-NPC interaction. For NPC-NPC interaction, watch my hands.

So, you've got a banter between your new NPC and - surprise! - Anomen. Naturally, you want to show this arrogant wannabe where his place is. Right? Right.

Let's call the new NPC Johnny. His banter file will be called BA#John - A# for prefix, so nobody else steals our filename. (But we will steal their code, you remember.)

Anomen: ~Verily, it is fair weather, friends.~
Johnny: ~As if. The sun is stinging my eyes, it's hot, I'm hung over. And I am not your friend.~
Anomen: ~I was not talking to you, Johnny. Helm knows, you need admonishment.~
Johnny: ~Right. And you are our father figure. Be a bad daddy to <CHARNAME>, though, seeing how you keep staring at her butt.~
Anomen: ~Foul beast! If you are going to repeat the word within my earshot, I'll --~
Johnny: ~Gods, Anomen, we were just talking about the weather! Everything is about <CHARNAME> these days, eh?~
EXIT

First and foremost: every banter ends with an EXIT. Not END, but EXIT. Half of my errors are about this sweet word. The other half, of course, is about missing these little beauties: ~. One before, one after:

~Verily, it is fair weather, friends.~

Easy enough? You bet.

Now, you will need one small file: interdia.2da. Find it in your /override folder, and copy it somewhere, so you can access it at any time.

What do you need it for? Well, you have Johnny's banter file(BA#John, or BA#JOHN, in case you've forgotten), but you need Anomen's banter file, and then, later, Cernd's banter file, and Keldorn's banter file. You can't do a banter without banter files, right? That's why they are called banter files. interdia.2da will help you.

It looks like this: ANOMEN      BANOMEN      BANOME25
BANOMEN is Anomen's banter file for SoA, BANOME25 - Anomen's banter file for ToB. We're writing a banter for SoA, so it's BANOMEN.

To tell the compiler what to do, we use
== BANOMEN instead of Anomen:
== BA#JOHN instead of Johnny:

And our banter looks like this:

== BANOMEN ~Verily, it is fair weather, friends.~
== BA#JOHN ~As if. The sun is stinging my eyes, it's hot, I'm hung over. And I am not your friend.~
== BANOMEN ~I was not talking to you, Johnny. Helm knows, you need admonishment.~
== BA#JOHN ~Right. And you are our father figure. Be a bad daddy to <CHARNAME>, though, seeing how you keep staring at her butt.~
== BANOMEN ~Foul beast! If you are going to repeat the word within my earshot, I'll --~
== BA#JOHN ~Gods, Anomen, we were just talking about the weather! Everything is about <CHARNAME> these days, eh?~
EXIT

Sweet. And now, the simplest and the scariest-looking part: the "head" of our banter.

It always looks like a simple logic operator: IF ~many conditions~ THEN. Now, what conditions?

Well, this is simple: Johnny and Anomen have to be in party and able to talk, right? And Anomen, who starts the conversation, has to see Johnny to let Johnny insult him. So, it's like this:

IF ~InParty("Anomen")
InParty("A#John") // not "Johnny", but "A#John" - we got to have a unique prefix. There's only one Johnny, right?
!StateCheck("Anomen",CD_STATE_NOTVALID) // "not CD_STATE_NOTVALID" is a cool state that means "able to talk"
!StateCheck("A#John",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
See("A#John")~ // Anomen starts the banter, so we don't have to write "Anomen sees Johnny", but just "Sees Johnny"
THEN

Let's put the head and the rest of our banter together.
We have to call our banter something:

CHAIN IF ~InParty("Anomen")
InParty("A#John")
!StateCheck("Anomen",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
!StateCheck("A#John",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
See("A#John")~ THEN BANOMEN A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1
~Verily, it is fair weather, friends.~
== BA#JOHN ~As if. The sun is stinging my eyes, it's hot, I'm hung over. And I am not your friend.~
== BANOMEN ~I was not talking to you, Johnny. Helm knows, you need admonishment.~
== BA#JOHN ~Right. And you are our father figure. Be a bad daddy to <CHARNAME>, though, seeing how you keep staring at her butt.~
== BANOMEN ~Foul beast! If you are going to repeat the word within my earshot, I'll --~
== BA#JOHN ~Gods, Anomen, we were just talking about the weather! Everything is about <CHARNAME> these days, eh?~
EXIT

CHAIN is the word that has to stand in the beginning of each banter. It means "several banter files are going to talk now, pay attention".

Anomen begins the conversation, so we have to put BANOMEN right after THEN. Note how I deleted
"== BANOMEN" from the first line - we don't need two "BANOMEN"s in a row, do we?

And A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1 is the unique name of the banter. You can use any name here, as long as it is special(and you see it only once in your banter file).

And this is it? Almost. The last bit is also the most important one: we want this banter to happen exactly ONCE. Not two, five, or ten times - this is called a bug report.

Well, if you read this tutorial, you know what I am going to do. I am going to set a variable:

CHAIN IF ~InParty("Anomen")
InParty("A#John")
!StateCheck("Anomen",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
!StateCheck("A#John",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
Global("A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1","GLOBAL",0)
See("A#John")~ THEN BANOMEN A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1
~Verily, it is fair weather, friends.~
DO ~SetGlobal("A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1","GLOBAL",1)~
== BA#JOHN ~As if. The sun is stinging my eyes, it's hot, I'm hung over. And I am not your friend.~
== BANOMEN ~I was not talking to you, Johnny. Helm knows, you need admonishment.~
== BA#JOHN ~Right. And you are our father figure. Be a bad daddy to <CHARNAME>, though, seeing how you keep staring at her butt.~
== BANOMEN ~Foul beast! If you are going to repeat the word within my earshot, I'll --~
== BA#JOHN ~Gods, Anomen, we were just talking about the weather! Everything is about <CHARNAME> these days, eh?~
EXIT

- The banter only runs, if "A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1" variable is 0. After Anomen speaks to Johnny, "A#AnomenTalksToJohnny1" is 1. So, the banter will run only once, and will never ever run again. Which is just what we want.

So, this is it! Copy-paste, change name and text, repeat.

P.S. What if Johhny was starting the conversation? Then we'll have

CHAIN IF ~InParty("Anomen")
InParty("A#John")
!StateCheck("Anomen",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
!StateCheck("A#John",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)
Global("A#JohnnyTalksToAnomen1","GLOBAL",0)
See("Anomen")~ THEN BA#JOHN A#JohnnyTalksToAnomen1
// We check if Johnny sees Anomen, and Johnny starts the conversation
~Hey, you, knighty! Say it again!~
DO ~SetGlobal("A#JohnnyTalksToAnomen1","GLOBAL",1)~
== BANOMEN ~Verily, it is fair weather, friends.~
== BA#JOHN ~As if. The sun is stinging my eyes, it's hot, I'm hung over. And I am not your friend.~
== BANOMEN ~I was not talking to you, Johnny. Helm knows, you need admonishment.~
== BA#JOHN ~Right. And you are our father figure. Be a bad daddy to <CHARNAME>, though, seeing how you keep staring at her butt.~
== BANOMEN ~Foul beast! If you are going to repeat the word within my earshot, I'll --~
== BA#JOHN ~Gods, Anomen, we were just talking about the weather! Everything is about <CHARNAME> these days, eh?~
EXIT

Offline magrat

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Re: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« Reply #1 on: August 31, 2008, 07:41:47 AM »
Awesome :D  Thank you!  It's kind of reaffirmed what I had been doing, and makes much sense!

Onwards!
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
  - Oscar Wilde

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Hopelessly Ever After

Offline plainab

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Re: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« Reply #2 on: August 31, 2008, 11:06:22 AM »
Nice and to the point. I'll probably refer to it often.
Just one thing:
Shouldn't there be a gender check for the protagonist since they're specifically mentioned as HER within the example?  ;D
My working mods:
an AI Party Script for BG2 game engine DOWNLOAD LINK ONLY!
Interactive Tweaks for BG series with some IWD support. DOWNLOAD LINK ONLY!
Rest For 8 Hours an IWD mod
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My contributions: BG1Fixpack, BG1Tweaks
On Hold: Solestia an NPC for SOA
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Offline Kulyok

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Re: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« Reply #3 on: August 31, 2008, 11:11:56 AM »
Well spotted! Yes, there are additional conditions, but that's for the advanced users. :)

Okay, in case you need those: add to the banter's "head"

Gender(Player1,FEMALE) - and banter only triggers, if CHARNAME is female.

Also, there are other conditions: for example,
Race(Player1,HUMAN) - if CHARNAME is human,
Global("AnomenRomanceActive","GLOBAL",1) - if CHARNAME flirts with Anomen(but he hasn't confessed yet) and so on.

I usually refer to this pretty list of triggers:
http://iesdp.gibberlings3.net/scripting/triggers/bg2triggers.htm
Be warned, though: it looks scary!


Offline AnnabelleRose

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Re: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« Reply #4 on: June 21, 2009, 03:46:06 PM »
Just so you know, I reffer back to this topic a lot.

Thanks for sharing it (and expect a thank you in the readme for my wip).
"A good pipe and tobacco will make you a patient philosopher or a philistine depending on how you are bent." - Ted's Pipe Shop

Offline Kulyok

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Re: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« Reply #5 on: June 22, 2009, 12:16:12 AM »
Thank you. Oh, now that you've reminded me, I've got some new material; will post it in ".d for beginners" topic soonish.

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Re: NPC-NPC banter without tutorials: quick and simple
« Reply #6 on: March 19, 2011, 11:04:17 AM »
Thank you very much, exactly what I needed  :D

 

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