Hello everyone! I have been playing C:DDA and lurking in the forums for nearly a year now. I just registered to ask a few questions about NPCs and quests.
How are conversations stored? Is it possible to write dialogue trees by just messing with json files? Or does it require compiled code changes? Can we assign conversations to just particular (and perhaps unique) NPCs?
And what about quests?
Basically, I want to try my hand at creating conversations and quests as you can do in some of the mainstream CRPGs (thinking of Bethesda RPGs and and related Construction Sets). I know there is no such interface for C:DDA, but I wouldn’t mind learning how some code fragments work if that is all it takes.
Why am I asking about this? In particular, I was thinking of a Morrowind mod called LGNPC (Less Generic NPCs Project - see here: http://lgnpc.org/ ). If you ever played Morrowind, you would know that most of the NPCs have the same dialogue beyond a select few. This mod sought to make every NPC unique. They created long walls of text and very minor quests for every single NPC in select towns. It was a joy to just visit these towns and converse with the NPCs there. There was a lot of creative writing going on, and the average quality of the text was quite high.
If it were possible to do this in an easy way (say, by altering easy-to-understand json files), it would let many players who don’t have coding skills to add some extra content to the game that would make it better. We could actually have content mods and perhaps even nets of quests. People could write their own scenarios by linking NPCs together with quests.
Finally, is it possible to add readable books to the game? I’m not talking about skill books that your characters read. These would be books that would show text on the screen, preferably allowing line breaks. The idea is again to add new content to the game to increase immersion. For instance, you could find the journal of another survivor, or a book that contains some details on the canon events.
Sorry for the long post!
