I was having a conversation with TOYB the other day about dialogue in High Rock, and it occurred to me that this is relevant to Black Marsh too.
One of the problems with making dialogue specific to Black Marsh is that it is necessary to override the global scripts which produce rumours and the like, which are only relevant to Cyrodiil.
TOYB proposed creating a duplicate of each race, with identical characteristics, so that completely new dialogue can be implemented for each one without interfering at all with the vanilla dialogue. Since relatively few NPCs in BM currently have dialogue, this would still be easy to implement at this stage.
Thoughts?
I'm not good at Dialogue, at all. I tried to make it work so I could test an NPC, and it didn't work at all. I got that "I have no greeting" message.
Soooo, I can't really comment on what I think about this approach - I'll leave the decisions to the others who know Dialogue.
KP
I have similar problems getting Dialogue to work. However, I believe that this approach will avoid many of the problems.
Rumours are generated through quests with INFOGENERAL topics.
Conversation dialogue (HELLO, GOODBYE etc.), Combat dialogue and so on is arranged through the generic quests.
Duplicating races will disable the majority of the vanilla rumours/generic dialogue.
There is also a set of dialogue that only uses a class condition --> It will be displayed, heard. Another set has no conditions. --> It will be displayed, heard.
ST implemented another system because we already used NPC's with vanilla races.
I'd love to be able to offer some insight as this is sort of my area but I, too, am a little clueless in this regard. I know that SACarrow seemed to be doing an excellent job of things at ST and I've often relied upon innovators such as brucevayne in the past to handle the technical side of voice work.
From my understanding of what is proposed here, we are basically disabling all dialogue only to recall the actual sound files using our own set of parameters....yes? Of course, we should be able to use my generic sound files for Khajiit, Nord and two classes of Imperial but we certainly do need to access the majority of the vanilla sound files....it's a vast galaxy of work if you're planning to introduce new sets for each race....
TheModaxJago wanted me to do that for the Sarpa but I had modding to deal with at the time when development of his model was a hot topic. Personally, I'd be prepared to keep everything blank at the moment but, if we're planning on introducing new rumours as well (as opposed to just quest-related dialogue that mimics race sets), are we better off not implementing ANY dialogue for now?
I suggest we leave it for the while, seeing as this is clearly something that will require a fairly huge amount of work. And ideally we would like to have new rumours if possible...
It might be one of those things that only gets implemented beyond the beta....
I guess so. We could just put quest-specific dialogue in for now, that overrides everything else?