[v1.7.0+] Chat/Quest Tweaks

[Zizzo]

There are a few quests whose quest log descriptions never seemed quite right to me, and a few chat dialogs that I always thought could use a few small improvements. All of which recently finally reached the annoyance threshold to get me to write an addon to fix it — in this case my new Chat/Quest Tweaks addon. Here's what I've got so far:

• In quests, "There and back again" has been a long-standing niggle for me, since it never tells you what to do when you've found the first quest item but not the second. (That's a policy I've tried to stick to over in the T2 module: the quest log entry for an unfinished quest should always include an answer to the question, "What do I need to do next?") Also, it checks the quest internally for isCompleted() rather than isSuccess(), which means it never does show the last line you're supposed to get when you finish the quest. I've reworded things some there.
• I'm still convinced the "A mysterious staff" quest log description is buggy; whether I die in the ambush or kill Ukruk, the description still seems to end with the "They asked about the staff" line (missing, again, the what-to-do-next part). I've rejuggled the sequence of quest checks and tested to make sure it works.
• Over in chat dialogs, in the Sher'tul fortress butler chat, it always seemed to me that the "I am not your master" option should be before the "What is this place?" option, just to make the narrative flow better.
• I knew I'd seen Aeryn suggest that you should go talk to Zemekkys, but I hadn't seen it in a long time. Took a bit of digging, but I found it: it's in a part of the Aeryn chat that's only shown if you got a sun paladin escort before going east (which would explain why I hadn't seen it in a while… ). That strikes me as questionable: the player still needs to know to talk to Zemekkys, after all, whether or not they ever got a sun paladin escort. For now I'm just unilaterally setting the "seen a Sunwall person" flag when we load that chat. Also, I figure the "Tell me more about the Gates of Morning" option should go away once you've done it, like some of the other options do.
• For Stire the Alchemist in Derth… okay, I'm a sucker for cheezy wordplay.

I'll add things here as I run into them, or if anyone has suggestions or requests.

[And looking ahead, for now I'm counting the quest log changes as a bugfix, which as always means I'm reluctant to include this addon in ZOmnibus or ZOmnibus Lite.]

[Implementation notes:]

Code: Select all

Hooks:
  Chat:load [to tweak chats of interest]
Superload:
  mod.class.Player:
    on_quest_grant() [to change log descriptions for quests of interest]

[Zizzo]

Frequently Asked Questions:

What specific changes does this addon make in the quests and chats that it alters?

This thread describes those changes in more detail. See above for the changes made in the initial release, and below for any further changes.

[Zizzo]

Thought of something else, going out as v1a: y'know those chats that have a big ol' question mark instead of the NPC you're chatting with? Well, turns out there's a convenient place we can jump in and fix that at the last minute. Here's what I've got so far:

• The Aeryn chat giving you the Charred Scar quest, of course.
• For the Temporal Warden chats in Temporal Rift, I borrowed one of the images used for Point Zero townsfolk:

  

  temporal-warden.png (131.21 KiB) Viewed 8464 times

Let me know if there are other similar chats that I missed.

(This may still trip over that weird bug that sometimes shows the most recently used talent in the chat dialog in place of the NPC portrait; I haven't tested for that specifically.)

[rexorcorum]

Aha, so we've missed some of those. I guess, I'll have to upscale this guy a bit as well, having a blurry chat portrait surely hurts my eyes.

[Syovere]

Honestly, I'd thought the Temporal Warden being unseen at Daikara was intentional, since at least the first time(s) you do that you've never seen any others or had access to any (non-addon) chronomancy class.

Still love seeing these little polish things though.

[Zizzo]

Aha, so we've missed some of those. I guess, I'll have to upscale this guy a bit as well, having a blurry chat portrait surely hurts my eyes.

(shrug) If there's a better image I can use, it's easy to change.

In the meantime, v1b fleshes out the "Trapped!" quest log entry a bit with a description of how you completed the quest. (In particular, the "asks you to meet him again in Last Hope" bit is easy to miss in the log scroller, so I figured it would help to add it to the quest log entry.) [If you've already received the quest before you upgrade, it won't get this change; We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™]

[Zizzo]

Hmm, in retrospect, our new There and Back Again quest log entry is a bit wall-of-texty. v2b.1 adds some text color to that one and the lost merchant quest, in the style of the Sher'tul fortress quest.

[Zizzo]

(This may still trip over that weird bug that sometimes shows the most recently used talent in the chat dialog in place of the NPC portrait; I haven't tested for that specifically.)

Went and tracked that down, and it turns out that it's not so much a bug as a sort of unintended intended feature. Basically, if the NPC provided to the chat dialog doesn't specify a .image field, and the player is currently using a talent [as determined by ActorTalents:getCurrentTalent()], the chat dialog will ignore the NPC for portrait purposes and build an "NPC portrait" from the current talent. Which I guess is useful for chats invoked by talents? (shrug)

All of which means that we're actually "fixing" that "bug" by adding portrait images to chat NPCs. So I did a sweep through the code for every chat I could find that doesn't specify an NPC portrait image. Here's what I found:

• The chat to select your Worldly Knowledge reward tree. Apparently we don't count as "using" said talent at chat time. We use the talent image for this one (which, ironically, is also a question mark, but at least a more thematically appropriate one ).
• The chat at the end of the arena unlock quest. This NPC is supposed to be the same Shady cornac man we talked to in Derth, so we reuse his image here.
• The chat at the start of the Arena campaign, where you select 30 or 60 rounds. No obvious choice here; I went with the corresponding achievement image.
• In the Arena campaign, the chats for starting and winning a boss fight, and for starting and winning the final fight against the master of the arena. These were the tricky ones; the obvious choice for the NPC portrait, after all, is the boss/master NPC themself, but we don't have access to those from anyplace useful, so I had to do some ugly meatball surgery on the Arena actor generator.

That's all going out as v1c.

[rexorcorum]

Yey, superb work, as always, Zizzo! No more Attack talent portraits granting you 2 generics in Derth's Arena!

I will look into the images at some point and nudge DG to move it upstream

[Zizzo]

Yey, superb work, as always, Zizzo! No more Attack talent portraits granting you 2 generics in Derth's Arena!

*blush* [bows]

In the meantime, I actually made it to the Slime Tunnels in a recent run (took a Speedrunner in the QUICK campaign but still… ), and I noticed that the Orbs of Command quest log entry was pretty anemic. v1c.1 beefs it up a little, with notes about which Orbs you've used and an extra note when you've used them all.

[Zizzo]

v1c.2 makes a small tweak to the various Brotherhood of Alchemist chat dialogs. Y'know how, normally, after you get a potion, you have to go back into the alchemist's shop and say "I've returned to offer more aid"? It just seemed to me that it would make more sense to say when you receive the potion, "Hey, while I'm here, got any more potions I can help you with?" Easy emough to add, and I figure it saves a step.