Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

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Infragris
Posts: 2
Joined: 22 Dec 2016, 18:16

Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by Infragris »

Hello,

This feature would be important for mods adding new islands, provinces, or worldspaces. The current dialogue system has a large number of Morrowind-specific topics and answers that are not filtered in any way, so every normal NPC has access to them. Many of these topics mention Morrowind and Dunmer-specific things, like "Almalexia" or "Morrowind Lore" (problems with this are also visible on Solstheim) - things that an NPC outside of Morrowind should obviously have no knowledge of. Currently, the only way of dodging this issue is to add a special NoLore script to every single NPC in a new landmass and duplicate relevant dialogue entries entirely, which is not very optimal. The reverse problem is also true, as all generic dialogue added for a new province has to be tagged with geographic variables so that it doesn't show up in Morrowind, which is a time-consuming and complicated affair. This also affects certain other behaviors, for example auto-added spells like Summon Bonewalker or Almsivi Intervention showing up with mages and vendors outside of Morrowind.

Ideally, there should be a way to tag every NPC or cell added by a certain mod so that they do not use vanilla dialogue or other definable behaviors at all, and additionally prevents new dialogue/spells/whatever created for this environment from infecting the vanilla game.
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DestinedToDie
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Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 09:08

Re: Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by DestinedToDie »

I know it's a lot of work, but would it be possible to edit Morrowind dialogue so that these topics stay specific for Vvardenfel?

I think technically the tools are already there. It's just that existing Morrowind dialogue is not structured in a way to account for extra provinces.
Infragris
Posts: 2
Joined: 22 Dec 2016, 18:16

Re: Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by Infragris »

As far as I know there's no condition that can easily do this task: you can filter dialogue on speaker ID, race, faction, etc. and on the actual cell name (either a specific cell, like Abandoned Shipwreck, or a generic prefix that works for a group of interiors, like Balmora) but you cannot filter on a region or province unless you use it as a prefix for every cell in the mod, as Bloodmoon did. Even then, messing with all these dialogue entries would be a guaranteed conflict with every other mod that touches vanilla dialogue, and a massive data bloat for the plugin. It would also be a hellish task, prone of bugs, dirty edits, and a lot of manual labor. This would also do nothing for other effects, like the spread of culture-specific spells (though a more robust scripting engine could presumably handle this with a global script instead of one running on each individual NPC).

How does OpenMW handle cell names? Later games in TES and Fallout had different designators for the cell name in the CS and the actual name the player could see: if we could filter on a hidden string in the former we could sidestep some (though by no means all) issues. The ideal system would be something like the region painter where a certain area can be designated as an island/province/Daedric realm and subject to different parameters: exclude certain flagged spell effects from being auto-added to NPCs, for example, or pull from a different dialogue file. This is probably spurious nonsense, though.
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silentthief
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Joined: 18 Apr 2013, 01:20
Location: Currently traversing the Ascadian Isles

Re: Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by silentthief »

Infragris wrote:Hello,

This feature would be important for mods adding new islands, provinces, or worldspaces.
Just to confirm, can openMW handle multiple worldspaces like Oblivion does? I know original Morrowind cannot -- only the one exterior, and multiple interiors (which sometimes *act* like exteriors but start to have issues such as noticable lag if made too large).

ST the confirmist
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DestinedToDie
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Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 09:08

Re: Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by DestinedToDie »

The Oblivion branch has separate world spaces. Main branch does not.
ThezKing
Posts: 10
Joined: 27 Dec 2016, 21:26

Re: Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by ThezKing »

The weather is limited to different locations, as far I know. May we could use this "regions" instead of creating new?
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silentthief
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Joined: 18 Apr 2013, 01:20
Location: Currently traversing the Ascadian Isles

Re: Province/Worldspace-based dialogue filtering

Post by silentthief »

ThezKing wrote:The weather is limited to different locations, as far I know. May we could use this "regions" instead of creating new?
perhaps if there is a way to read the region as a variable, and then make dialog choices based upon that -- then yeah this might work well.

Perhaps a feature request?? - as this is kind of outside of the normal MW dialog setup

ST
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