Fallout 3 quest scripts
Introduction
So if you are new to scripting you should know a few things first:
- there is a website about FO3 scripting right here
- there is a FOSE-documentation on the web:link
- you should check those websites for functions you could use in your script first, BEFORE you start scripting the actual script (this step often saves you a lot of time)
- even if your script seems to be pretty good, the game-engine will most likely cause some problems, it is not the smartest
The Quest scripts
- if you want a script to run while the player is doing something else, or the player should not be bothered to do something for the script to start, the Quest-Script is your friend
- first you have to create a new quest in the GECK (watch a different tutorial for that)
- create your script (make sure you save it as quest-script, default is object!!!)
- open up your new quest again and set your script as the new questscript
- now there are some fields that are mandatory for your script-running-behaviour:
- if the priority field is left empty, your quest-script most likely will not run at all, you should set this to 50 or 60 for a normal execution
- if your script is not required to run really often, you should leave the script-delay alone, otherwise you need to try it out, what's best for you
- there are now a few things you should NOT do in a quest-script:
- you should not show a message every time the script processes, this will cause serious problems since you are rowing up dozens of messages (this is even worse if you use message boxes)
- the game-engine seems to have problems if you disable/enable things in the same script-run (most likely the object will not be en-/disabled correctly)
So here is how you do it
use a condition for your showmessage line, like
if sDoOnce == 1 --showmessage blabla (the -- are only for better reading this article, do NOT copy them into your script, the same for this text in brackets) --set sDoOnce to 0 endif
- only enable/disable the same object once during the script, like
if sState == 1 --enable myREF --set sState to 2 elseif sState == 2 --disable myREF endif
(the "ELSEif" part here is important, if it only would be "if" myREF would get disabled in the same script-process and everything would be messed up)
- and for God's sake use sensible names for your variables!
- another important issue is that you cannot stop QuestA in its own script, so you have to create another script (e.g. an object script bind to a token (armor without biped slots))
So it should look like this:
QuestAscript:
begin GameMode --player.additem QuestAstopToken 1 0 the "1" is the number added, the "0" disables the add-message, the ";" marks the rest of the line as comment end
QuestAstopTokenScript:
begin OnAdd Player --stopQuest QuestA --player.removeitem QuestAstopToken 1 0 ;you should remove the item after it has stopped the quest to ensure proper working end
other useful sites:
