Joinable NPCs..?

[GaStuSage]

Just getting started with the editor, and have been perusing the internet and these forums for a couple of days now. I will apologize in advance if the questions I present here are posted everywhere and I have failed to find them. On to the meat of this post...

Been playing around with adding recruits and am almost confident I can place them in the recruit pool and see them in game (been doing a lot of reading, and poking around in the editor... I think I've got the gist - time will tell). What I'd like to know is if it's possible to add NPC characters on different maps that could be recruited after doing them some small favor or quest and how you would go about doing this. Dialogue is needed of course, and I am still unsure of how to implement the speech files with the correct triggers and actions to accomplish this.

Also, I seem to be having trouble with changing character sprites in the editor. I was trying to make a recruit that used a civilian sprite but it kept reverting to the tribal sprite. Is there a way to make sure you can use any sprite for recruits, or some prefab sprites that could be used to change up how some of the human sprites appear in game?

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to take the time to answer.

 

[raics]

This is how you add a recruit to the pool during a mission:
- create a new recruit, let's say it's a dog and the entity is called 'poochie.ent'
- create a new line in campaign.txt in recruits section to add the entity to the recruit pool and give it some tag, 'dog' for example so the line will look like this:
{dog;add;entities/recruits/poochie.ent},
- at some point you will need to create a trigger that fires off when the quest conditions are met, you will most likely use it for the thank you speech, you just need to add an another action to it, modify recruit pool and specify the tag 'dog'

Sprites are tied to the races, so a 'wolf' race will always revert to wolf sprite. You can create a civilian recruit or set the race to special humanoid and use any sprite at all, but that may be problematic if the sprite lacks animations to use weapons, and there are armor restrictions too, so a civilian won't be able to use brotherhood leather armor, for example.

 

[GaStuSage]

Thanks, raics. You've definitely given me some direction here, but I'm having other troubles right now.

I can add recruits successfully both on a map and in the pool. But, my descriptions added to the core/locale/game/characters.txt aren't showing up in my game at all. I have the display names right in the entity editor with no name listed under custom name, along with the correct display name listed on the characters.txt, and have all their entries as their appropriate .ent file in the core/tables/campaign.txt. All portrait file names are added to the appropriate male and female .txt docs as well. I've imported the campaign.txt file to the bos.cam with the campaign editor. I also have the game installed in it's own directory out of either the Program Files, or (x86), as I have Windows 7 and know that it doesn't always play nice with these types of games when run from those directories. I'm scratching my head and wondering where I'm going wrong.

The only thing I can think of is: do I also need to import the character.txt to the bos.cam, and do I do this the same way I import the campaign.txt to the bos.cam?

 

[GaStuSage]

I forgot to add that what does show up on my recruits in game is the display name that refers to the zar file that they are associated with, as their character name...

 

[GaStuSage]

Serious face palm action here... just got done messing around in the entity editor and realized that I had listed the display names of my recruits in question with the .zar extension. No wonder the descriptions weren't showing up. Everything is fine now; descriptions working perfectly after deleting .zar from the end of my display names in the entity editor.