How can NPC's wordiness be regulated?

[ericp07]

Hello,

 

When my NPC meets new people, I want her to be somewhat reserved in her speech, and become more talkative as she becomes more familiar and comfortable with the PC (and any other traveling companions). I'd like to do this efficiently, from a coding standpoint, and I'm wondering what is the ideal way to set up such a concept and implement it in dialogue files.

 

I see two possibilities, and I'd like to know if there are more. One approach would be simply to write two or three versions of many dialogue exchanges, to account for brief, moderate, or verbose spoken lines, especially in NPC responses. My prediction is that this is an inefficient approach, as it might involve too much duplication (and corresponding file bloat). Maybe not the best choice. Another approach that came to my mind recently would be to us a variable as a condition for how wordy the NPC's lines should be, based on a "friendliness score" that I'm already using to regulate the progress of the PC-NPC romance. I like the concept, but haven't begun to experiment with it yet.

 

Have any mods already incorporated a workable solution for this? Are there other approaches besides those I've described?

 

Please discuss and advise.

Thanks!

Eric

[Ardanis]

If you use 'bottlenecks', it should be fine. Dialogue flows, then shortly explodes to three states, then tights up again.

Also, file size is not so much important to worry about, it's not a constantly running script.