Help with making a custom animal follower.

[Lorelai]

Hello!

 

I'm trying to make a custom animal follower and I'm following DARKF0X127's tutorial here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGszaPLobhg

 

Now, what gets me confused the most (since I pretty much have zero experience with quests and scripting) are two parts:

 

1. At around 8:00 into the video he starts altering the DialogueFollower quest by adding new topics for dismiss, follow etc. 

Question is, does this actually "edit" the quest, as in, will it override any other mod that comes before it and remove other entries that mod has added (Topic info count as it's displayed in *Edit)? Or does it work like when placing references, in the end, all new topics will be loaded?

 

2. (this might be crap how I explain it) At around the 23:00 minute mark he explains adding a script to the actor and he adds in a new property to display a message (my guess is when follower is dismissed by the looks of it). Now, he says that the message used will be the "dog" one, because that's the only message, and to avoid having a "dog leaves your service" message for, say, a bear, he proposes actually editing the base message.

But I don't want to do that, as that might cause issues along the way.

So, question is - Can I not make a new message, with "X leaves your service" and then just edit the DAFollowing message property to include my new message? 

 

Thank you all in advance! 

[PrinceShroob]

1. If all you do is add new dialogue entires, and make sure to remove any topic infos you've accidentally edited, then there should be no conflicts. It will not edit the quest record.

 

2. If you made a new message, you'd have to edit the script properties in DialougeFollower, I believe, which would edit the quest record and script, which would be highly incompatible.

[Lorelai]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! 

 

I was mostly concerned with point 1 as that is one serious quest (as far as I know, heh) that I don't want to mess with. So just adding new topics is cool then!

 

2. Yeah, I think I'll just stick to the basic WEDog script then and leave it at that. But maybe it works, since I'm making a new script attached to the Actor. On the actor I go to script --> New Script and copy/paste there the lines. 

Blah! This is so confusing! 

 

Sorry if I said something that makes no sense whatsoever!  

[Arthmoor]

Shroob, you're quick

 

1. Adding entirely new dialogue entries is safe. For example, the courier deliveries for Hearthfire are handled by two additional topics that were added to the vanilla courier topics. So long as you don't cause edits to go too high up the chain, you're fine.

 

2. It's hard to tell from a crappy Youtube sized screen, but it looks like the script he modified and did property stuff to is being added to an Actor record, not to the Quest record. So there shouldn't be any danger of touching the vanilla dialogue quest. That script appears to go on your new actor being used as a follower.

[Lorelai]

I always watch them in full screen and at 1080p otherwise I wouldn't understand a thing. 

 

Yup, script is new and being added to the new Actor that's used for the follower. Then he's editing the properties. What I want to do (so as to not edit the original vanilla one) is instead of leaving DAFollowing message to use the default script value, create a new Message and edit in the property.  

 

So I guess it's OK to do that. 

 

EDIT: Hmmm...might as well leave that to default since it seems Dawnguard edits the "Dog" message and changes "Dog" to "Pet". I'm guessing it's because of the Trolls.