Custom quest support

For all talk about quest development - creation, testing, and quest system.
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Jay_H
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Jay_H »

Do you know if there's any way to use the "add NPC face" command and have it correspond to an Argonian or a Khajiit or some other non-western race? I surmise Dark Elves are possible through Helseth, Barenziah, and Morgiah, though I'm going to have to try that out later.

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Interkarma
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Interkarma »

Unfortunately there's no racial support for Argonians and Khajiit as NPCs via the Person resource. There are no racial flats to represent them when that NPC is placed to the world. Their name banks are a bit iffy too.

It would be possible to insert this as an override option into the "add face" action for escort quests. But you'd have to be careful not to inject NPC into world or they will show up as Breton. Would probably have to name them manually in quest as well to keep the right flavour.

If somebody drew static flats for them in male/female variants, it would be possible to support this properly down the road. Some better name banks would be nice too.

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Jay_H
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Jay_H »

Interkarma wrote:But you'd have to be careful not to inject NPC into world or they will show up as Breton.
Nah, I'd only use faces in any case. Flats would be a whole different ball game. I'll wait a year or so and see if people expand on this :)

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Jay_H
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Jay_H »

Something's changed with how quests initialize. When I fail to properly define symbols, the game no longer gives me a message of failure to initiate. Now the quest will start, but none of the tasks will light up. Player.log will also flood hundreds of the same error, leading to a 2+ meg file in about a minute. This quest is enough to trigger it.

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Interkarma
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Interkarma »

Thanks, will take a look today.

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Interkarma
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Interkarma »

There are two parts to this I think.

First is likely to a change made when Hazelnut started rolling out guild services. The temp way I was handling questor instantiation has been refactored a bit. That's OK though as it's paving the way to real guild services in future.

The biggest problem here is the second bit where the error cascades endlessly and fills up log. This happens because the quest system keeps trying to execute action after the exception is thrown.

I've changed any actions guilty of this to shut themselves down with SetComplete() before throwing exception. This logs the error and prevents the cascade. You just need to keep an eye on the output log for now (or the Unity console if writing quests and testing in Editor) to make sure you see the errors. As quest will actually appear to function but failing actions will shut themselves down.

I'm not quite ready now, but sometime in the near future I want to improve how errors are handed off the quest debugger. I'd like quests to be able to properly shut down on a compile/execution error, and for information to be logged directly to the quest debugger. This is why I have the part/full/off cycle of debugger right now, I plan to add a log in there somewhere. And the little status text up the top can display something like "execution failed" with the bad task highlighted.

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Jay_H
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Jay_H »

I just got to thinking, don't some quest monsters spawn inside cages, like with metal bars? I worry that someone might get trapped in one with a "teleport pc" command with no way out. I don't even know how classic handled this, since "An Unexpected Journey" was certainly classic.

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Interkarma
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Interkarma »

You are correct. I've been trapped in cages as part of testing this action, so it's genuine problem.

I just don't have a better solution right now, and not sure how classic handled it.

Would you happen to have a classic save game made right after the teleport action was fired? If I can see exactly where player was instantiated to dungeon, perhaps I can glean something new.

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Jay_H
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Jay_H »

Give me some time and I'll test it in classic. It might not be this weekend, but it'll be the next thing I do.

...Moving out all irrelevant innkeeper quests in Daggerfall will be the first step :D

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Jay_H
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Re: Custom quest support

Post by Jay_H »

I was wrong! I got it done right now. I made a save immediately after getting teleported (and casting free action. You'll understand when you see it.) I can send out as many of these as you find relevant, so let me know if you want more.

http://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxjB9-1 ... sp=sharing

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