New Skills...

[darth-ackbar]

Hey everyone, I was just wondering if it would be possible to make new skills available? As an example, when you level up, you can choose from all the normal ones as well as say crafting.

Do you think it would be possible, has anyone done it before? I've been looking through some skills-related .2da's but I can't imagine it would be that simple

Also, is there any way to let party members use the persuade skill?

[VarsityPuppet]

No, there is no way to add new skills. New feats maybe, but no new skills.

And adding new feats is rather complicated at that.

[Istorian]

I'm pretty sure the persuade skill is only for the PC. That's because if you look at any dlg file in which a party member speaks too, you'll see that their dialogue is in red, meaning the game treats them as an NPC, which they are! So, I think they can't persuade someone in dialogue.

[Fallen Guardian]

Well, you could stage a situation in which the attempted to use the persuade skill. Much like BioWare did when they made Bastila use force persuade on Holdan if you brought her along to discuss dropping the bounty on Dia's head.

[Istorian]

Ah, yes, that is true, I apologize. You can create pseudo-persuasion by your party members in the dgl files, and have them triggered by certain responses of the PC.

[JCarter426]

Enabling Persuade for NPCs should be pretty simple. In npc.2da, there is a column "npccanuse" (the very last one) - it's set to 1 for all skills except Persuade, so setting that to 1 should allow you to select this skill for NPCs in the level up screen (though they will never get it if you auto level up, because that system is handled differently). I believe "droidcanuse" works similarly, so change that if you want to as well. From there you just need to set up dialogue trees with conditional scripts, as mentioned above.

Creating new skills is trickier. Theoretically it should be possible, but skills are handled through a constant defined in NWScript, and you can't add any. It might be possible to get around that, but I can't say for certain how. And I have no idea if it's possible to edit the GUI to include any new skills, either.

[Darth InSidious]

I tried adding a new "dummy" skill (Bluff - it would only really appear in dialogues, so only be used for numerical checks in scripts, really) and adding it to the GUI a couple of years ago. The whole GUI came out white, and illegible.

(A specialised GUI editor would be rather nice, in which you could actually edit materials visually. At present, you have to edit them in a gff editor.)

[JCarter426]

I suspected that might be the case. It wouldn't surprise me if the GUI required the skill constant, too.

[darth-ackbar]

Thanks for the replies everyone. @JCarter, I found an npccanuse slot in skills.2da if that's what you meant. I did try that with Bao-Dur last night really quickly and I couldn't select persuade. It might have been that I didn't save the changes to the 2da properly so I'll have another go.

In terms of how I'm going to implement party members using persuade in-game, I can't really say because it would be spoilers for SFR

With adding them to the GUI, DarthInsidious tried a few years ago it seems, but has anyone tried since, have modding tools for editing GUIs developed since then? Theoretically it shouldn't be too hard, should it?

On a side note, is anyone developing a visual GUI editor, because that would be rather nice.

[JCarter426]

Ugh yeah, sorry, skills.2da, confused myself there.

Oh, and remember when you edit a 2DA you have to restart the game entirely.

[darth-ackbar]

I just tried again with the npccanuse option and it didn't work