Dialogue help

[Meraklauthsin]

I am having issues with a new mod i am attempting. I have been a basic cs user for the better part of a decade. however i only just recently started doing more in depth modding and have hit a snag.

I am trying to create a mercenary hire mod, similar to the Clavius Horatius mercenary from tribunal. however i cannot get my dialogue to appear on my generated npcs. i have mostly copied the text, but it does not appear for a test character. if someone could assist me, i would be grateful, as tutorials have done very little. Or, recommend a mod(s) similar to my intentions and where to download them as i do know how to adjust npc's on a basic level. I remember planet elder scrolls having several such mods, but apparently that site is now dead.

[Darkelfguy]

Don't know if you still need help, its been a while since you made this post, but I thought I'd offer what assistance I could.

The important thing to know about Morrowind's dialogue system is that it's basically a Stack data structure (if you're familiar with Computer Science terminology). Essentially, Morrowind looks for the first dialogue entry that meets the requirements for a particular scenario, starting at the top of the stack and working its way down.

For greetings, which are the first thing an NPC says to you when you talk to them, you should always, ALWAYS, use Greeting 0. This puts your NPC's dialogue at the top of the stack, so Morrowind will find and use it first before running into less-restrictive dialogue entries.

Now, to explain dialogue entry requirements for a bit, you see those Speaker Condition fields in the dialogue box? Those are some of the requirements for a particular dialogue entry to be spoken. The ID field is basically the NPC ID, if you fill that field out with a particular NPC ID, only that NPC in the entire game will speak that line of dialogue. Likewise, the Race, Class, and Cell conditions work in a similar manner, only NPCs that meet that condition will have that line of dialogue. It should be noted that if you fill out the NPC ID field, you don't need to fill out any of the others.

You can set additional requirements via the Function/Variable boxes on the right, and these are primarily used for quest dialogue in particular. Just remember, always put the most restrictive dialogue entries at the TOP of the stack, and the least restrictive entries at the BOTTOM of the stack in order for everything to show up correctly.

Now it should be noted that in order for new dialogue topics, such as ones you create, to show up, they need to be first spoken by an NPC, preferably in the greeting dialogue. If that isn't possible, use the addtopic keyword in the Results box to add a new topic to an NPC manually. This will make the topic show up in the NPC's topic selection panel, and each new topic is essentially its own stack data structure, so it'll operate much the same way as the Greetings.

That's about all I can explain via text really. If you need more help, I can make an example quest dialogue mod to give you. After all, for learning dialogue and scripting, it's a lot better to learn by example and experimentation than by text.