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Ok, so I create my damn frickin' NPC... we'll call him George. So I put George in his "home" and make set up some basic textblocks to test how he responds and what not... make sure there's no crappy ansi bugs or anything. Compile the data and fire up the board... I pay him a visit... greet him and get George doesn't understand you! What the hell? Anyone have a detailed guide on creating NPC's for side quests?

The greet text shouldn't be the text block that gives you the message, that is, if you plan to be able to ask this NPC about certain things. Take the sleazy shopkeeper for example:



Sleazy Shopkeeper's Greet Text is 838. Even though in the line beside that, it shows what he says to you, that's not actually what that textblock is.



Textblock 838 lists what you can ask Sleazy Shopkeeper about,



help:840

brooch:841

orb:844



and is linked to text block 839,



The grizzled dark-elf grins slyly at you, an uncanny glint of intelligence in

his eye betraying his "old-man" routine. With a healthy, powerful voice he

says, "What a remarkable interlude in my over-dull morning. It has been quite

some time since I have seen outlanders in the City... at least, ones not bound

and gagged, on their way to torture or worse."



He smirks, and looks you up and down in an appraising manner.



"In fact," he continues, "since you have come this far, you must be at least

marginally skilled. Or exceptionally lucky, but luck can only bring you so

far... either way, you may be of some use to me. If you would be so inclined.

It is possible that our interests may co-incide? Obviously, you are here to

put an end to our damnably glorious Queen. Or at the very least, to ruin her

ineffective plotting."



He spits on the ground in disgust.



"Indeed, I have no love for, or loyalty to the Queen. If your plans include her

or any thwarting of her plan, I may be able to help you."





Which is what he says when you greet him. It's also the same text that's in the line of text next to where you appoint the greet text at.



Don't know if that helped..but just try. Try adding this in front of each line of text in his greet text (linebreak)[0;32m.

Okay we'll start for a greet text on your NPC, say 1000 is the textblock number for it. You add it as the greet text in monster editor to start. Now there's a couple ways to do the textblock for the NPC. 1 is to have the textblock say a greeting like "Hi how's it going?" or two you can have the greet text set for specific answer. This would be like 'ask NPC blah' the textblock for this would read

Blah:1001



where 1001 would be the textblock diplayed and or run when you ask the NPC blah



Setting an NPC can get a lot more technical, my suggestion is if you are a fast learner is to go through the quest organizer and look how all the textbloxks are layed out. I learned a lot from editing the quests for new races and fixing the quests like smash and stealth ect.

Bah.. Plat beat me to it. Oh well I didnt have much time to write anything real helpful hehe.

Shizzle. Thanks for the help guys. Got the bastard responding... with PART of his damn message. Will have to tinker and paste and tinker and paste until I get the rest fingered out.

A quick side note. If you edit the dats in a seperate directory than your WG directory you can copy in the update file and run 'apply update' from the sysop menu in majormud without taking down the board.



BUT if you ADD new textblocks i believe you have to copy in wcctext2.dat also. Someone wanna correct me if i'm wrong?

Originally posted by BlackHaze

A quick side note. If you edit the dats in a seperate directory than your WG directory you can copy in the update file and run 'apply update' from the sysop menu in majormud without taking down the board.



BUT if you ADD new textblocks i believe you have to copy in wcctext2.dat also. Someone wanna correct me if i'm wrong?



update file will add and update records, just wont delete them. when you install a mud upgrade ... all it does is copy in a new update file and then let the update process put the new stuff in (otherwise it would erase all the user interaction in the dats like items in rooms and such). tho as i write this it hit me, the textblock records don't have any user interaction so therefor could possibly be handled differently by the update file, but doubtful.

Not sure, for some reason i thought you had to copy in the textblock file also. I probably had an issue with it in the past.

A quick side note. If you edit the dats in a seperate directory than your WG directory you can copy in the update file and run 'apply update' from the sysop menu in majormud without taking down the board.



BUT if you ADD new textblocks i believe you have to copy in wcctext2.dat also. Someone wanna correct me if i'm wrong?



Out of curiosity, what are some of the limits on the edits that you can apply via live update and what are some of the edits that you MUST take your board down to apply? again I am a bit new to this.



Thanks :rant: :werd: :yeah:

Out of curiosity, what are some of the limits on the edits that you can apply via live update and what are some of the edits that you MUST take your board down to apply? again I am a bit new to this.



Thanks :rant: :werd: :yeah:



only if you /ADD/ textblocks do you need to copy it in.



==> http://mmb.forumshq.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5519







talked to panterrax and he says the update file always errors on inserting to the textblocks

my theory: it's most likely because theoreticly metro would never have to insert textblocks from the update file because when you install mud the normal way it overwrites the textblock file everytime (just like it overwrites the .dll). so the dll prolly doesn't even have the functions to do it, and it shits (the reason it did it in this case is because in the last investigation i copied in my old wcctext2.dat file)

investigation results: copy in stock wcctext2.dat







IE: the mud dll probably doesn't even have the code (or it's messed up) to insert additional textblocks since they would never need to anyway.