Integrating Arena-style pop-up messages when entering public locations?

[Cliffworms]

“On this cool autumn night, [Inn’s name] seems especially inviting. You smell apples baking in the kitchen and look forward to your first draught of ale…”

One thing I love about Arena are the messages you get when entering shops/inns/palaces/guilds that describe the overall mood of the place depending on the time of day, weather and season.

Daggerfall has messages when entering shops to inform you both of the mood in store and also of how rich/poor it is.

Would it be possible to make a mod that would randomly choose a descriptive message depending on the time of day, weather and season upon entering a public building? Not only for stores, but also for palaces, taverns, guilds and temples?
Looking at the tutorials, I didn't see if it would be possible to make. If it is, where would I start?

For those interested, a list of all the messages for taverns : http://www.projet-french-arena.org/wiki ... late0002-1

[Jay_H]

Currently, Daggerfall Unity is capable of detecting entrance to exterior locations in general. Here's a breakdown:

Exterior: specific and general
Interior: specific only

There's no ability to detect, "If a player enters any tavern, fire the next action." There is the ability, "If a player enters any city, fire the next action." It'll take some more work behind the scenes before this would be possible.

A very scattershot method would be to have a quest constantly running that chooses local specific buildings at random and tries to dress them up with flavor messages. It would be imprecise and perhaps even CPU demanding, depending on how much it's trying to generate at a time.

That said, at least exterior locations can be dressed up in this manner for now

For reference, the condition to use is:

Code: Select all

when pc enters locationType

Alternatively, when exiting such a place:

Code: Select all

when pc exits locationType

Time of day is a valid condition, but not a specific day, weather event, or season.

[Kamer]

Hmmm I might could just add this in Warm Ashes. When an event doesn't occur, it will instead spit out a comforting message. I'll keep this in mind because that is one thing I love about Arena.

[Cliffworms]

Thank you for the information Jay_H.

Indeed a quest constantly running in the background could take too much memory. At least if I ever go around creating quests, I can add such messages when having to meet a NPC at a specific tavern.