Oblivion Tutorial Quest Making Part 3: Making an Advanced Quest.

This tutorial requires you to have followed the first and second tutorial in the series

Introduction

In this tutorial I'll show you how to make the mission you created in the second tutorial more exciting. We will do this in 2 ways. First we will add a lot of bad guys to the cave, second we will make package you can add to any NPC to make them follow the player when the quest starts. So lets begin.

Adding more bad guys.

First lets support mods like OOO, Francos, MMM and Fcom by using their leveled list. We can do that easily by using the default leveled lists our selves. Those mods edit the default leveled lists so they will change our quest automatically. Yes that is a dirty modders trick but its one of those odd exceptions that is the lesser of 2 evils. The Alternative involves editing every monster placed in any cell in the entire game. So its just easier this way.

First we need to make sure our new monsters do not fight the monsters already in Horn Cave. So lets load up horn cave and check which monsters are used. Go to the Cell view and find horn cave and then select and object in that cell to make it appear in the window. Find a big red M in the cave and double click on it. The one I found was called LL2BanditCaves25 and that is a leveled list of LL1BanditMelee100, so lets go to the Object window, right below creature is leveled creature, select that. Look for LL1BanditMelee100 and open it.

When you do you will see it uses BanditMeleeMale and few others, so basically these are all normal bandits. Which is the correct way to find out which faction of bad guys are being used. I thought id show you that trick even though we can just place more LL2BanditCaves25 leveled monsters :)

To be safe lets just copy one from the cave shall we.

Find a big red M in the cave and select it, Hold down CTRL and press C copy it, now Hold down CTRL and press V to paste it. Select the newly pastes Red M and double click to open it. Tick persistent object, tick initially disabled, then click on enable parent. Select "Select Reference in window", select the chest you added to horn save, the one you called MQTiberschest with the and Old Chest.

What you did is you make the monsters parent that chest, since both the monster and the chest are initially disabled, nobody will see them. But when the chest is enabled by the player talking to the count of leyawiin about the Sword of Tiber Septim, the monsters will appear when the chest appears and will vanish when the chest is disabled again. That's how parent objects work. Cool stuff isn't it :)

Now place as many monsters as you want, make them persistent, disable them, make the chest their parent objects.

Try not to edit any of the original monsters in the cave, that would be bad.

Now when the player does the quest, he enters the cave, his favour OOO type mod will decide what monsters to spawn and how many the player should face, so you've getting to do some pretty advanced stuff for a noobie. My question to you right now is, how hard was that to do ? Exactly its bloody easy so why do quest writers not do it more often.

Guards for the player.

Lets make some guards shall we.

Do to the Object window and find the NPC called LeyawiinGuardCastlePostDay01, double click on it, change the id to Leyawiinbodyguard1 and leave the name alone. Ok that and say yes to create a new form. Now click on the factions tab and move the window somewhere out of the way. Next go to the character menu and select factions in the construction kit. Scroll down to the Ps and select Playerfaction, drag and drop that in to the guards faction window.

Now close the faction window and go back to the guard, select AI to open the open the AI object name window. Delete all the packages you see listed in the white part of the window. Now right click and select new, in the window that appears enter name for the Id, lets call it MYQUESTWaiting1, Package type = wander, Defensive combat ticked. Click on the Location tab and tick location then, select Near Editor location, radius 1000.

Now ok it.

Select new again, enter an ID MYQUESTStarted, Package type = follow, defensive combat ticked, select the target tab, tick target and any object, then find player in the object ID box. We want this package to force the guards to follow the player. Now go to the conditions tab. We want this to work only at MyQuest stage 20 so select new, find Getstage and select it, in Function Parameters select MyQuest and then select == and finally change the 0.0 to a 20.0.

Now ok that.

Finally move the new package to the top of the list so MYQUESTStarted is first and MYQUESTWaiting1 is second. Any packages at the top run first and the packages at the bottom run when nothing else will run. Since MYQUESTStarted runs when ever MyQuest is at stage 20, the rest of the time MYQUESTWaiting1 will run. Meaning the NPC will wonder around the location you placed it in.

Once an hour the game checks if an NPC needs to change packages, so the guards will not swap to the new package right away. If we want this to work right away we need to edit the quests. First we need a REF item...remember what a REF item is....where is ours ?

If you said, we have not placed one yet then you win the prize, we have to do that now. In the Cell view select worldspace and find Leyawiin World. Select a location inside the town, but not inside the castle. Go to the NPC list in the Object window and find your Leyawiin guard, his name is Leyawiinbodyguard1. Drag and drop him in to leyawiin twice, so you have 2 REF guards. Now, click on each one and give them a Reference Editor ID name of MQLeyawiinguard1ref and MQLeyawiinguard2ref. Disable both guards and select parent for both. Now find your chest in horn cave and make the chest the parent of both guards just like you did for the bad guys.

Now when the best appears, so will guards and so will the bad guys.

Now open up the quest window and find your quest. Go to the Quest stages Tab select 10, you will see these in the results script window.

MQTiberschest.enable
setstage MyQuest 20

below setstage MyQuest 20 add these lines.

MQLeyawiinguard1ref.evp
MQLeyawiinguard1ref.evp

So it looks like this...

MQTiberschest.enable
setstage MyQuest 20
MQLeyawiinguard1ref.evp
MQLeyawiinguard1ref.evp

What we just did is we have forced the NPC Guards to evaluate which package they should be running. Since they only have 2 packages and only one will work at stage 20, they will start following the player. Please note this is a little tricky sometimes and sometimes does not work very well. Especially if you use an command that adds a package to an NPC.

If you have problems, try adding those to the script instead like this.

Heres your script from tutorial 2.

scriptName MyQuestScript

Short my_quest_wants_this_done_once

begin gameMode
if (my_quest_wants_this_done_once == 0)

AddTopic Myquest1

set my_quest_wants_this_done_once to 1
endif

If (getstage MyQuest == 40) && ( player.GetinCell ICMarketDistrict == 1 )
MQTiberschest.disable
setstage MyQuest 45
endif

end

Change it to look like this.

scriptName MyQuestScript

Short my_quest_wants_this_done_once
Short update_guards_once

begin gameMode

if (update_guards_once == 0) && (getstage MyQuest == 20)
MQLeyawiinguard1ref.evp
MQLeyawiinguard1ref.evp
set update_guards_once to 1
endif

if (my_quest_wants_this_done_once == 0)

AddTopic Myquest1

set my_quest_wants_this_done_once to 1
endif

If (getstage MyQuest == 40) && ( player.GetinCell ICMarketDistrict == 1 )
MQTiberschest.disable
setstage MyQuest 45
endif

end

That will also work and force the NPCs to re-evulate their packages. If you add them to a script like that, you do not need to add the evp lines to the result script box at all. I actually prefer doing that via a real script, it just seems to work better I found.

Anyway which ever way you do it, it should achieve the desired goal and force the NPCs to choose a new package and since only the follow player package will be available, they will run towards the player and follow him until he opens the chest, then at the end of that hour, they will return to leyawiin. When the player enters the cell that causes the chest to disappear, the guards will vanish too. Removing all traces of the missions extra bits and restoring horn cave to its former glory.

The only trace you will see that the quest ever happened is the Sword of Tiber Septim in your hand and quest log that got made for it.