[MOD] Ghaksha the Orc Companion

[imsobadatnicknames]

Need a dungeon-crawling buddy? Ghaksha's got your back!

After the work I did on my mercenaries mod, I thought it'd be fun to see how far I could push the idea of Daggerfall companions.

So, this is Ghaksha.




You'll randomly find her in taverns in cities, and if you click her, she'll give you a quest to help her avenge her brother (have in mind that if you tell her no, this quest can never be started again). If you agree to help her, the quest has no time limit, and once you finish it, she'll start randomly showing up in dungeons sometimes to help you fight the baddies, and she'll also sometimes send you letters or even gifts!
Have in mind that, as most quest enemies have infighting disabled by default, she probably won't fight any enemies created by quests.

1.1 Update:
Made a minor change to make her come to help you more frequently. Version 1 had a cooldown timer with a random value between 0 and 60 days, and she'd only spawn once this timer had reached 0 and you visited a dungeon. In hindsight, 60 days is a little too much, so I changed the cooldown to 0-20 days.

1.2 Update:
Ghaksha will now eventually become an orc sergeant and then an orc warlord. This is tied to your level progression.





Installation:

1. Download the file.
2. Unzip the file inside StreamingAssets/Questpacks
3. If you're starting a new game, it should start working right away. If you're using it on a game you already started, you'll need to open up the console and type startquest GK000 to get it running. If this doesn't work, your version of DFU might only be able to start quests inside StreamingAssets/Quests from the console, so try moving the contents of the folder to StreamingAssets/Quests and try again.

Permissions:

As this questpack can easily be edited and used as a framework to create new companions, I give anybody the right to do so as long as you credit me as the original source. I honestly only chose an orc bc, as the gender of human enemies is randomized on startup, it'd be a little jarring if your companion had a different gender every time they showed up. But if that doesn't bother you, feel free to createsorceer companion or a barbarian companion or whatever.

You can download this mod from the nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/113

Or just get it from this post!

[Knightwalker41]

Hey @imsobadatnicknames yesterday I finished the beta of "Belwen the Vampire Companion" (Attached is a Windows version, console command on existing game is "startquest BW000")

20200821011821_1.jpg (271.79 KiB) Viewed 2551 times

It's my first try so I stuck to the template but I changed all the text and added extra messages. I was thinking next (if this is succesfull) I would do the same but maybe with a spriggan.

I ran through a test in-game and seems to work ok but I have a couple of questions.

1) How often should the Companion be re-appearing after the start quest completed? For testing, after I completed her starting quest, I went to many different towns and dungeons but couldn't get her to appear. She works fine summoning her via the console though. I'm not sure if I've done something wrong or if it's normal or if it's a mod conflict (Warm Ashes, Battlefields...). What would I need to change to make it more frequent (at least for testing)?

2) I was also thinking of creating some "Conjured/Magic Companions" (Imps, skeleton, dragonling). Would it work if I changed the starting quest so the companion was asking for help in a Mage Guild or Alchemist shop instead of a Tavern? would the template still work if I cut out the letter writing part for these companions?

[imsobadatnicknames]

Hey @imsobadatnicknames yesterday I finished the beta of "Belwen the Vampire Companion" (Attached is a Windows version, console command on existing game is "startquest BW000")

20200821011821_1.jpg

It's my first try so I stuck to the template but I changed all the text and added extra messages. I was thinking next (if this is succesfull) I would do the same but maybe with a spriggan.

I ran through a test in-game and seems to work ok but I have a couple of questions.

1) How often should the Companion be re-appearing after the start quest completed? For testing, after I completed her starting quest, I went to many different towns and dungeons but couldn't get her to appear. She works fine summoning her via the console though. I'm not sure if I've done something wrong or if it's normal or if it's a mod conflict (Warm Ashes, Battlefields...). What would I need to change to make it more frequent (at least for testing)?

2) I was also thinking of creating some "Conjured/Magic Companions" (Imps, skeleton, dragonling). Would it work if I changed the starting quest so the companion was asking for help in a Mage Guild or Alchemist shop instead of a Tavern? would the template still work if I cut out the letter writing part for these companions?

There's no problem with changing the original location of the companion. However, placing a companion specifically at a mages guild and ONLY at a mages guild is impossible as far as I know, as the quests consider fighters guilds, mages guilds and knightly orders the same type of bulding (referred to as "magery" in the quest element table), which means they would appear in any of those three types of buildings.

Also, you can cut the letter quest entirely without affecting the rest of the mod!

Regarding the question of how often she should be appearing...

GKSUMMON has this in the quest object definition:

Code: Select all

Clock _delay_ 0.00:00 60.00:00

This timer, which has a random value between 0 and 60 days

Later on, we have this:

Code: Select all

_found1_ task:
	when _enterdungeon1_ and _delay_
	start timer _appear_

_found2_ task:
	when _enterdungeon2_ and _delay_
	start timer _appear_

_found3_ task:
	when _enterdungeon3_ and _delay_
	start timer _appear_

_found4_ task:
	when _enterdungeon4_ and _delay_
	start timer _appear_

enterdungeon 1 through 4 activate when you enter any of the 4 types of dungeons in the game.
When _delay_ has reached 0 AND you enter a dungeon, a new timer, named _appear_ will start, which will make ghaksha appear after 5 to 10 minutes (this is to give you time to actually enter the dungeon before she spawns)
So, it will take up to 60 days for ghaksha to appear when you're in a dungeon. Now that I think about it, 60 days is probably too much, you could probably reduce it to 15 or something.
Anyway, something that I noticed while doing testing for Lazerran was that the game can be kinda bad at detecting when you enter a dungeon if you travel there using vanilla travel (i normally use Tedious Travel but deactivated it to test Lazerran). Sometimes I would have to enter the dungeon's location, then exit and then enter again for the enterdungeon task to fire up and Lazerran to give me the "I'll stay here" message, so that might be what's happening.
But yeah, in retrospect, making Ghaksha take up to two months to appear was probably too much, maybe you should reduce the timer for Belwen and test it that way :p

I checked your code and there doesn't seem to be any changes to the way Belwen is summoned compared to Ghaksha, so it should probably be one of the issues I mentioned above.

[Jay_H]

However, placing a companion specifically at a mages guild and ONLY at a mages guild is impossible as far as I know, as the quests consider fighters guilds, mages guilds and knightly orders the same type of bulding (referred to as "magery" in the quest element table), which means they would appear in any of those three types of buildings.

The quest location "fighters" is used for Fighters Guilds. "magery" should direct to Mages Guilds each time AFAIK.

[imsobadatnicknames]

However, placing a companion specifically at a mages guild and ONLY at a mages guild is impossible as far as I know, as the quests consider fighters guilds, mages guilds and knightly orders the same type of bulding (referred to as "magery" in the quest element table), which means they would appear in any of those three types of buildings.

The quest location "fighters" is used for Fighters Guilds. "magery" should direct to Mages Guilds each time AFAIK.

Then I think I might still have that idea from some outdated quest documentation. However, I think it depends on the region? In my current game once I decided to move to Sentinel I've seen NPCs from my Populated Buildings mod that are only supposed to appear at mages guilds regularly appearing in fighter's guilds and knightly orders, which I never saw happen anywhere in High Rock. Might be an old issue that has only gotten fixed in woodland/mountain regions, then.

[Knightwalker41]

Thanks so much guys!

For Belwen's quests I'll lower the counter from 60 days to 15 days and I might change the legal rep hit from 20 to 5 or 10, and mention "I am asking you to commit murder after all."

[imsobadatnicknames]

Thanks so much guys!

For Belwen's quests I'll lower the counter from 60 days to 15 days (when I find where that is ) and I might change the legal rep hit from 20 to 5 or 10, and mention "I am asking you to commit murder after all."

The 60-day counter in the GKSUMMON file is the first line right after "QBN:", on the block of text that's right before "quest start-up"

Code: Select all

QBN:

Clock _delay_ 0.00:00 60.00:00
Clock _appear_ 0.00:05 0.00:10
Clock _end_ 0.02:00
Clock _teleport1_ 0.00:20
Clock _teleport2_ 0.00:20
Clock _teleport3_ 0.00:20
Clock _teleport4_ 0.00:20
Clock _teleport5_ 0.00:20

^This block of text specifically

Just change "Clock _delay_ 0.00:00 60.00:00" to "Clock _delay_ 0.00:00 15.00:00" on your file and you should be good to go!

Also yeah, the -20 reputation hit in the Ghaksha quest seems a bit harsh, but she DOES ask you to murder someone in a position of power, so I figured the hit should be pretty high unless your quest also involves murdering a noble, I definitely think you made the right call by deciding to reduce it :p

[Knightwalker41]

Thanks again. As soon as I submitted my post I realised you already told me at the start what I asked and then I tried to edit my post to seem less foolish but it was too late D: TGIF

Hmm... that in itself could be a good companion starter quest "Please help me retrieve a reply letter from xxx that I sent them before I properly read their first letter to me explaining everything. Hopefully they haven't had a chance to read my reply letter yet..."

[imsobadatnicknames]

Thanks again. As soon as I submitted my post I realised you already told me at the start what I asked and then I tried to edit my post to seem less foolish but it was too late D: TGIF

Hmm... that in itself could be a good companion starter quest "Please help me retrieve a reply letter from xxx that I sent them before I properly read their first letter to me explaining everything. Hopefully they haven't had a chance to read my reply letter yet..."

Hahah yeah, that's actually a pretty cool idea.

Honestly, I might take a break from DF modding for a while, I've released a lot of stuff lately and I really don't wanna end up burning out, so it's really nice to see that you're taking my companion system and running ahead with it, you seem to be having a lot of fun coming up with different stuff for it

[Jay_H]

Then I think I might still have that idea from some outdated quest documentation. However, I think it depends on the region? In my current game once I decided to move to Sentinel I've seen NPCs from my Populated Buildings mod that are only supposed to appear at mages guilds regularly appearing in fighter's guilds and knightly orders, which I never saw happen anywhere in High Rock. Might be an old issue that has only gotten fixed in woodland/mountain regions, then.

It should be a universal change. See this from the DFU source code: https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... es.txt#L87

Code: Select all

--      NOTE: Building type 11 is technically just a guild hall but classic quests use this type for Mages Guild exclusively
--      Daggerfall Unity has extended support for more guild halls by allowing p3 to specify factionID of target guild hall
guildhall,          0, 11, 0
magery,             0, 11, 40
fighters,           0, 11, 41