Why Won't my Summoned Cow talk to me?

[dbianco87]

I'll preface this by stating I am a rank amateur at scriptwriting/programming.  I have been making little item mods and such for my own use however for a long time.

Anyway, I've been working on a silly mod that adds a summon spirit animal innate to the game.  I basically took the innate form of animate dead, and made some tweaks so that it summons a cow instead.  I want this cow to be interactable through dialog, however whenever I try to talk to it the very simple .dlg file I wrote does not fire, even if I use the force talk command in game.  I've tried a few things but I haven't been able to figure out why the dialog won't fire:

 

BEGIN ~DBCOW~

IF ~~ THEN BEGIN 0 
SAY ~Moooooo!~
IF ~~ THEN REPLY #14 /*~Scratch behind Bess' ears.~*/ DO ~SetGlobalRandom("CowTalk","GLOBAL",1,10)~ GOTO 1
IF ~GlobalLT("MilkNumber","GLOBAL",3)~ THEN REPLY ~Attempt to Milk Bess.~ GOTO 1
IF ~Global("MilkNumber","GLOBAL",3)~ THEN REPLY ~Attempt to Milk Bess.~ GOTO 2
IF ~~ THEN REPLY ~Do nothing.~ EXIT
END

IF ~~ THEN BEGIN 1
SAY ~Bess appears relieved.~ 
IF ~~ THEN DO ~GiveItemCreate("dbmilk1",LastTalkedToBy,0,0,0) SetGlobalRandom("MilkNumber","GLOBAL",1,3)~ GOTO 0
END

IF ~~ THEN BEGIN 2
SAY ~Bess appears to be tired~
IF ~~ THEN GOTO 0
END


The .cre for the cow definitely points to this dialog file.  Any ideas?  For the cow .cre itself I copied a random cow that I found in the games files, renamed it and made an .eff that points to it.  I then chose the .dlg I compiled from above for the cow's dialog script. 

NOTE:  I am not looking for advice on general improvements.  I know about cdstatenotinvalid and such.  I just want this dialog script to run so I can make many hundreds of additions improvements to it over a period of time.  it does not fire at all in its current state which is the entirety of what I am asking about.

[Greenhorn]

Well I can't help you regarding Bess, but mate title of your topic is the killer.  No offense meant of course in the case you don't share my sense of humor and I'm convinced that some of the resident WEIDU wizards will help you soon to sort out this problem. 

[jastey]

41 minutes ago, dbianco87 said:

IF ~~ THEN BEGIN 0 
SAY ~Moooooo!~

A dialogue state needs a true trigger if it is supposed to start a dialogue with it. If you change this to

IF ~True()~ THEN BEGIN 0 
SAY ~Moooooo!~

You should be able to start the dialogue by talking to the cow then.

Some cre files do not support dialogues, though. I had problems to make an invisible helper cre talk at some point. (I ended up using a cow for testing to make sure the "invisible" cre was there at all and that worked, so I guess cows can talk. )

[dbianco87]

4 hours ago, jastey said:

A dialogue state needs a true trigger if it is supposed to start a dialogue with it. If you change this to

IF ~True()~ THEN BEGIN 0 
SAY ~Moooooo!~

You should be able to start the dialogue by talking to the cow then.

Some cre files do not support dialogues, though. I had problems to make an invisible helper cre talk at some point. (I ended up using a cow for testing to make sure the "invisible" cre was there at all and that worked, so I guess cows can talk. )

eureka!  For some reason I thought ~~ and ~true()~ would be functionally identical.   That is apparently not the case! Cheers.