modding existant bioware NPC

[Guest Schein]

Ok, I am new to all this, and just planning on trying out something fairly unspectacular to test the basics right now. What I want to do right now is just to have Minsc start a convo with the PC a certain amount of time after he's broken out of his cell in SoA and joined the party (different convo depending on PC's gender).

 

From the tutorials faqs and whatnot I've read (all pertaining to creating your own full fledged NPC though, not to modding an existant one), it would seem to me I have to write a script for him to do that. Now for newly created NPCs you're supposed to link your .bcs file to them as the override script in the .cre file, but what do you do for an existant NPC who is still supposed to go with his other scripts as intended and with possible other modded scripts? Or is it possible to do what I am trying to without a new script?

 

Basically all the script would do right now is check if minsc is in the party, check that a one time global variable is at 0, if that's so, start a timer and swap the one time global variable over to 1 so that it doesn't do the whole thing again... then when the timer runs out, start the convo w/out reseting the timer.

 

Which brings me to my second question... I've read through faqs and tutorials to do with the timers but none of them seem to explain what the numeric value for the timer translates to in actual time. i.e. if i set my timer for 1000, what's that in actual or game time (doesn't have to be exact just a rough idea for orientation)?

 

Sorry if I've somehow missed/not found already existing answers to these questions. I've been looking around for a few days now though, so I figured it was time to just step up and ask people Thanks in advance for any input on the subject!

[jcompton]

APPEND_TOP your piece of timer/start dialogue code to Minsc's script.

 

Timer values are given in seconds.

[cmorgan]

There is also a good explanation of timers, both real and in-game time, etc in the IESDP...

 

http://iesdp.gibberlings3.net/scripting/timers.htm

[Guest Schein]

Aha, thank you, I'll try that and now I actually know what to set my timer to heh.

[Guest Schein]

I couldn't quite get the APPEND_TOP to work for the script, possibly didn't use the right wording or something... used APPEND in the .d file for the dialogue though and that worked. Then I stumbled across EXTEND_TOP for the script and now, amazingly enough, in-game Minsc congratulates me to my mini success hehe. Thank you guys for your help