Opinions needed for a new tool

[Guest Seifer]

Hey there Peeps

Noticing as there has, as of late, been a sharpn interest in romances I've been toying with the idea of coding one up. I need your opinions on two things:-

 

1) Is your general opinion that the actual tool would be wothwhile?

2) What features and options do you feel would be most worthwhile?

 

Seif

[jester]

What should a romance tool consist of?? Is it like a content management system for non-programmers? Just add text and tick appropriate character and chapter.

[icelus]

I'll have to agree with jester and issue a sincere "quoi"? To what kind of tool are you referring?

[Grim Squeaker]

What I think people really need is a decent romance tutorial. They need to know what script blocks they need and what timers etc they need. How the lovetalk numbering system works. How to do 'on rest' and 'morning after' dialogues etc.

[icelus]

Ah... tutorial... yes. One is needed, agreed.

 

For some reasons, I was having visions of IDU and IDW floating about, and I became afraid--very afraid.

[CamDawg]

Rastor wrote one and posted it over on the FWP boards, though I haven't looked at it.

[Grim Squeaker]

Rastor wrote one and posted it over on the FWP boards, though I haven't looked at it.

If I recall then it was a little bit confusing. Personally I think a few of us should just come up with an uber NPC based tutorial, based on our experiences with coding our own mods.

 

We could even come up with some sample NPCs (similar to one day NPCs - they would be quite hollow really) that we could include at the end of it, one from each of the people writing, so that people can see decent examples but also see where our coding style differs and they can see the various different ways they could do something, and at the same time see exactly how to do the bread and butter of a mod.

[BigRob]

Sounds good to me. I've got the feeling that I'm gonna trip over a lot of coding issues when I finally get around to it.

[jester]

Seif looks a bit worn out, I have to add.

 

This comprehensive tutorial would be a great idea. Some clues could be introduced to the questions raised (and answered) in Sillara's beginning modders thread over at FWS. Especially timing seems a tricky issue to me.

 

EDIT: I meant that thread in case you were wondering.

[Kismet]

I've been reading this question and have been see-sawing on my answer.

 

While I think tutorials are great, I also think the modder should have some understanding of how dialog files work and how they interact with NPC scripts, otherwise when it comes time to support their mod they'll be absolutely clueless when problems arise (and they always do). There are already tutorials out there on creating NPCs, what the various NPC dialog files do, how to write banters, a huge guide on scripting, not to mention IESDP and all the tutorials and examples in WeiDU itself, yet they still seem to think that writing romantic dialog and flirts are somehow really different than writing other kinds of dialog. In that thread, Sillara is there looking at my flirt example and asking how to have her NPC respond to a PC reply rather than just ending the dialog! For some strange reason, because it's a flirt she seems to think that it must be handled differently.

 

If you're going to write a tutorial, then emphasize that dialog is dialog is dialog; that scripts and dialogs go hand in hand; that "lovetalk" isn't a magcial variable that suddenly makes a dialog a romance talk regardless of what you use in your script. I'd suggest using heavily commented code explaining why you chose to use any particular triggers/actions as well as which triggers/actions are optional and which are required. Providing links to IESDP actions and triggers at the appropriate places would probably be a good idea. Explaining the various .ids files that get used is a great idea too, that all valid actions can only be found in actions.ids and all valid triggers can be found in triggers.ids and that when when you use a trigger like AreaType() the only valid options are in AreaType.ids.