BomburPL's Showcase

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BomburPL
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This is my first post on the Forums, so I need to say Hello to Everyone!
At first, I need to note that English is not My primary language, so even though I consider my English as good, I may make some grammar mistakes

Well, after reading TR Handbook and Showcasing Guidelines I am a little bit confused. If I want to apply as a quester, what do I need to do? Do I need to take one quest from Quests & Dialogue forum and then implement it? Can I “claim” a quest from there somehow?

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10Kaziem
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Hello! Thanks for your feedback, we’re working on updating those guidelines so they make more sense.

1) If you would like to write quests and design them, feel free to either help out with some of the existing ones in the claims browser or in the quest forums. Or if you have a new idea, write it out and post it on the forums.

2) If you would like to actually implement the quests in the Construction Set, what you need to do is this:

Show us an esp with an implemented quest that you made. The quest can be one from the forums, or one you make up on your own. (You do not need to officially “claim it”) We need to see that you have all the dialogue, etc correctly implemented. Kevaar is our most recent join-up in the same vein; his showcase is here: http://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/kevaars-questing-showcase if you’re looking for inspiration. Other questing people can hopefully show up here and also offer you some more answers.

Does: concepts, textures, youtube vids, admin stuff e.g. PR, handbook, assets, small website things. Activity level: wildly unpredictable. Still active. Find me on Discord.

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BomburPL
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OK. So I have took this unifinshed quest from the forums, finished it and implemented it to the game. The quest may seem a little bit too short, but that is because I have placed quest objects very close to each other (if it is necessary, I can move the antagonist to the cave or something simmilar)

This file was created using
Morrowind.esm
Tribunal.esm
Bloodmoon.esm
TR_Data.esm
TR_Mainland.esp
TR_Preview.esp (I couldn’t find any other file containing Old Ebonheart)

Everything added by my mod starts with prefix “SC_” (like Showcase)

Walkthrough
1. In Old Ebonheart’s docks, You should see a newly added Khajiit Skooma merchant called Dar’hejo. After a little conversation with him about “a little sweet” and “noisy Imperial” You will recive a quest from him called “Moon Trade”
2a. [Finishes Quest] You can turn him in to the guard (a unique guard called “Imperial Guard”) either by speaking with him about “something to report” or by selecting “a little sweet”, then “arrest You” and in the end “You misunderstand me” option
2b. If You want to side with Dar’hejo, You will need to kill the guard by speaking with him about “a little sweet”, “arrest You” and “Dar’hejo is paying me to take care of you”
3. Now, to continue the quest, speak with Dar’hejo about “favor”, “special help” and “certain Dunmer”. You can tell him that You can’t help him [Finishes Quest] or You can accept the quest by asking "Do You have any plan?"
4. From now on every night a unique dunmer called Selris Ulvathril, his Slaves and his bodyguard will appear next to the city walls, east from the southern city gate
5. Find him and kill him as quick as You can (he will start killing his own slaves)
6. Return to Dar’hejo and get Your reward

Reward: Nothing; 100 gold + 50 for each saved slave + 40 disposition with Dar’hejo

AttachmentSizeDate
Binary Data Clean SC_Quest_MoonTrade.ESP26.48 KB2016-05-06 21:59
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10Kaziem
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Hi Bombur! A reviewer will be by soon to check out what you’ve got and critique it.

Does: concepts, textures, youtube vids, admin stuff e.g. PR, handbook, assets, small website things. Activity level: wildly unpredictable. Still active. Find me on Discord.

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Kevaar
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I haven’t taken a look at it ingame, but I like how you handled hunting down Selris. Much more interesting than my original “walk into his house and kill him” idea!

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Not
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I’m going to take a look at this and review it. I can already say I like the concept and am thoroughly impressed with all the different ways this quest can end.

Not another memory

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Not
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Okay so, REALLY stupid question I have here; did you use the latest versions of TR_Mainland and Data?

Not another memory

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BomburPL
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I did use the one that You can find here: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/downloads/resources

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I’ve played only halfway through and not a quest reviewer, but three things I noticed:

  1. I get an error on startup and in the CS: “Script '' in file 'Clean SC_Quest_MoonTrade.ESP' has not been compiled.”
  2. “You” is not any different from other words – you don’t capitalize it in the middle of a sentence. I also don’t think it should be “a sweet”, rather “something sweet”.
  3. The quest ends really really abruptly when you talk to the Imperial Guard – you absolutely should have to confirm that you want to tell him about the Khajiit. In general, I feel that the quest could use a bit more padding in the earlier part. I would have liked to go search for the guard instead of having him stand 3 steps away (and ask his fellow guards to find out which one has a special anti-drug investigation going).
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BomburPL
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Thank You for your post Anonytroll
Following your advice, I have made an update that changes the dialogue and fixes the script problem. Sorry for this, as I said earlier, English is not my primary language. I also think that guard placed 3 steps away from the khajiit is fine because the first part of the quest (at least in my understanding) was going to be something little that will earn you Dar’hejos trust
EDIT: I have also started working on a new major update

Changelog:
* Fixed “Script has not been compiled” problem
* Fixed capitalized “you” in the middle of the dialogue
* In the topic “Something to report” You can now cancel your testimony

 
AttachmentSizeDate
Binary Data Clean SC_Quest_MoonTrade.ESP28.25 KB2016-05-17 19:21
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Rot
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Sorry again that this got forgotten, here’s a quick review,

Cleaning
There are some dirty cells, but more importantly dirty vanilla dialogue entries: Greeting 5 “You really ought to consider investing in some soap, %PCRace.” and “Smelling that badly should be a crime.”: see tesame cleaning,

Dialogue
I found all greetings at the bottom of the dialogue list, but I’m assuming that’s because I didn’t have the original Mainland.esp file used with this, so that the position changed, and that they were originally between the two dirtied Greetings entries – if that was not the case: dialogue shouldn’t be placed at the top or bottom, especially for common topics like greetings, because it causes issues when adding the quest to the main files. So putting them inbetween two existing ones is indeed the way to go (though in this case they’d have been between two lines of the “rancid cuirass” quest, which comments indicate should remain at the top – so the added lines should be under instead)

The guard says “I am Imperial Guard” on topic Background. That’s a general issue whenever creating NPCs that don’t have an actual name. It’s easily fixed by giving them the variable “nolore” in their script.

The grammar is a bit off in some of the original dialogue, as you’ve already said, that sort of thing can always be fixed later;
Dialogue in the player’s choices still have capitalised “You”s, but you’ve changed the rest;

Design
Getting rid of the guard by having him attack and killing him in the middle of a city (without repercussions, to boot) is too much of a problem. It’s not like it’s a back alley! I’m not sure how this could be improved (in another location entirely?)

If you choose to report the Khajiit to the guard, he gets disabled right away. In general it isn’t proper to simply make things disappear in front of the player like this; the easiest solution here is to give him a greeting with forced “Goodbye” after you report him and wait until detecting that the player changes locations (“CellChanged == 1”) to actually disable him.

In the same way, the slaves and the smugglers (or their bodies) would better be disabled on CellChanged. As to them just appearing there at 8 PM under the walls, it’s not perfect but in my opinion it’s acceptable;

Scripting
Aside from those design details, the scripting seems flawless, well done!

Some comments: (none of this prevents the quest from working)
It’s good practice to indent scripts so they’re easier to read for you or others, in case something needs to be fixed or modified. Indentation can be done by pressing the “Tab” key before a line, and looks like this:  

 

  A lot of “If” condition blocks could be regrouped together or with “Elseif”, (for instance “SC_bodyguard” has four blocks with the same condition “if ( GetJournalIndex "SC_Moontrade" == 30 )” which could be a single one)
In more intensive scripts optimisation can be important to avoid slowing down performance, that’s not really the case here – again none of these prevent the quest from working.

.
.
.

Attached: your latest file, adapted for the newest TR files (TR_Mainland.esp + Tamriel_Data + file for Old Ebonheart – should also work with Preview instead); I haven’t cleaned it, the only possible modification is changing the position of Greetings between the two dirty vanilla lines. For any further editing those files will be necessary,

I like the general idea of the quest, but for the reasons pointed out in the discussion and others (killing a guard in the city? what happens to slaves who come into Old Ebonheart, do they get taken care of by the Cult?) it might not be best in Old Ebonheart, so before requesting any deep changes I’ll let Kevaar and others weigh in,

AttachmentSizeDate
Binary Data SC_Quest_MoonTrade_0.ESP28.23 KB2016-11-05 18:09
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BomburPL
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Hi and thanks for your review!
I’ve allowed myself to change some things in my mod. Here is the new, clean version of the showcase
Changelog:
- Edited all of the scripts so that they are easier to read and better optimised
- Nearly all disable/enable operations are preceded by “if (Cellchanged == 1)”
- Threatening a guard is now a crime and will net you a 1000 gold bounty
- You can now bribe the guard, provided that you have at least 70 disposition with him (there is a 40% chance of succes)
- Added “NoLore” variable to khajiit slaves and an imperial guard
- Changed the positioning of the dialogues
- Minor fixes and improvements
EDIT: Whoah, I have just noticed a serious overlook! There was no script to take the gold from you if you were trying to bribe the guard. The newest version attached to this post should be fine 

AttachmentSizeDate
Binary Data Clean SC_Quest_MoonTrade_0.ESP29.57 KB2016-11-12 19:06
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Reviewed latest file: yes, this is much better,

(Some minor comments on scripting – for future reference, no need to apply them to your file:
– the scripts use “GetHealth == 0” and “GetHealth <= 0” to detect that NPCs have been killed: this may almost always work, at least the <= 0, but it’s possible for a NPC to die with negative or even positive health (that happens if there is a damaging or healing spell affecting them during their death animation). For this reason we always use “OnDeath == 1” instead (keep in mind OnDeath only == 1 for one frame; after that it goes back to 0, so if we need to check whether the NPC is dead later, we either use GetDeadCount or a local variable)
– the khajiit mentions a discount, but the only thing affecting his prices is his disposition. So if he already had 100 Disposition before the quest, there would be no difference. A better way to do discounts is to lower the NPC’s “Mercantile” skill. For this NPC the skill is already low, but changing it from 50 initially to 1 afterwards reduces prices, independently of Disposition.
– to check if the player has enough gold before giving him a choice like that, you can also use “if” conditions in the dialogue resultboxes. Not necessary here but good to know
)

Regardless, based on this I’m recommending you for promotion for scripting – since the dialogue was taken from another thread. The few bits of dialogue you added only had some grammar issues and missing punctuation, so maybe you’ll write some yourself later? In the meantime I know that some people like to write very detailed quest plans with a lot of dialogue alreay made, which you could take; besides that you can already check &/or comment on the quests currently being designed: here

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Hey there! We discussed this briefly in Discord.  Boils down to this:

I think Rot’s review shows you’ve got the CS side of things down pretty well, and I’d be comfortable making you a quest dev as far as working with the CS goes.

BUT.

Most of our quest claims also involve writing out dialogue. And since you recycled the dialogue I wrote, we haven’t seen what you can do in that regard. So, could I lean on you to write up some dialogue for another quest? I’d suggest taking one of these quest designs and seeing what you can do with it: Holy batman that was a long link. Fixed.

You wouldn’t have to implement it all the way (unless you want to make more work for yourself, of course laugh), just write the dialogue.

 

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BomburPL
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Well, since i don’t use english every day, writing dialogue is going to be my weak point. In the asset browser, I’ve seen some quests with dialogue already written. I know they are the minority but if I ever get promoted for quests, I will try to stick to those…
As for the dialogue I’ve written – i chose to it for this quest
I suspect that this is going to be badly written and with losts of grammar mistakes but I’ve tried to do my best
In the meantime, I’ve also been rewriting some of the old scripts so that they use a lot less variables and be shorter but i am now struggling with some troubles so i will put them for later

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Plain text icon TheVoiceToCalmMeDownDialogue.txt3.51 KB2016-11-15 19:44
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Seems fine to me, again only some grammar mistakes, the add or remove a letter sort, and some punctuation to shift, nothing that can’t be easily dealt with on a proofreading basis. (e.g. I’d edit the first entry so
 

 

I’d maybe add more choices, e.g. give an option to tell the Telvanni to stuff themselvesn, but that may be a bad habit of mine –
though looking now at the design, if you plan on actually implementing that quest, I’d go with it as proposed, with the Telvanni just telling you to go fetch these ingredients (and by saying nothing, implying that they’re to make the voice – also makes choices useless) and only confirming that they’re for his own benefit afterwards if asked (because that’s both simpler and more fun).

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Kevaar
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Hello, Bombur! I apologize for the amount of time this has taken—I’ve been doing the holiday crunch at work.

As far as your dialogue, a few grammar mistakes that Rot caught, but other all it looks pretty clean. Couple comments:

*When it comes to the PLAYER using emotes (the stuff in brackets, denoting they acted rather than spoke) the format of Morrowind has been to put these into sentences without the brackets. We also try to keep emoting for the NPCs to a minimum as the dialogue should be written to imply their actions, but when there’s no other way, these are usually formatted with [ ] brackets. Minor, just something we like to keep matched to the formatting of the vanilla game. 

*The dialgoue is more simplistic than I’d like for a quest writer, though I understand is partly the language barrier. So I’ll just leave off with this bit of advice: think of how people would naturally react and what they would naturally say. Example: instead of saying “It is dangerous to go there, as the crazy old man attacks everything on sight! Oh, and please, should you go there, leave the poor man alone, he pose no threat to you.” , saying something “He attacked Alfred the other day with a pitchfork, and James with a knife the next! What could drive him to do such a thing? Can you check on him? With gear like that, he should pose no threat to you.” Show, rather than tell. Think details. You want to avoid it looking like you took the dialogue out of the quest outline itself.

I’m going to give you a developer badge so you can start helping out on the scripting side of the quest claims—when you claim it, just leave placeholder dialogue for someone to go over later, and note down when you relinquish the claim back to us that the dialogue is unfinished.

That said, I’d be glad to keep going over dialogue with you if you want to start writing the quest claims as well.

Congratulations on your promotion!

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re: emotes, Morrowind isn’t quite consistent on them and for the player’s side TR uses brackets a lot, especially when dialogue choices need to include both speech and descriptors, e.g. with things like “[Lie]” to indicate it’s a lie for clarification or RP purposes; or [Strength] etc. for stat checks;
For NPC actions, another option is to use “MessageBox”, which will appear as bold white text in the dialogue box. Obviously that only works when you need an emote at the end of their dialogue line or before a “Continue” …

Congrats & welcome!

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BomburPL
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Thanks for the promotion.
I will start looking for a quest to claim now. If i have any questions regarding claims browser or modding, that are not answered in TR Handbook, i suppose i can ask them here, right?
EDIT: Ok, here are my first questions… Is there any official naming convention for quests? I couldn’t find it here. When i am implementing a new “latest rumor” and there are already some responses for that specific town, can i change the values of “random100” of these topics?

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Naming conventions: they might be a bit murky (numbers aren’t automatically generated by the claim system anymore which means that new names can’t be consistent with the previous convention);
based on the latest quest I find here, and for the OE quest you’ve just claimed, I would at least use the prefix TR_m3_q_OE_ (and just TR_m3_OE_ for the journal ID).

On latest rumors/random100: the values will need to be changed, but when you’re adding them to a large place like OE, there will be other quests (in development by others or not yet merged in the common file) which may also edit rumors. I would add the rumor at the top of other dialogue for that town, and write in the merge instructions what should be done with the overall conditions when you’re finished with the quest. (“merge instructions” are all the things that you can’t do yourself in the .ESP and will have to be done directly in the Mainland or OE section files when the quest is added to them– either because it’s the sort of edit that doesn’t work from ESP to ESP, like deleting things, or because there could be conflicting edits, like with these common topics)