Creating a Custom Merchant for The Player’s Camp – Part 1

I thought it would be fun to take a look at something a bit more complex and useful.  This is going to actually be a multi-part tutorial, and will be lots of fun!

In this tutorial series we are going to add a new NPC merchant to the player’s camp, and then populate that merchant with items including custom items.  As with other tutorials, this module is designed to extend the Single Player campaign, and shows you some more ways you can hook into that campaign.

This tutorial is a bit more advanced from the basics and does involve creating a 2da file.  If you have done A Start: Creating a Module to Give Your Player an Item then I firmly believe you can do this tutorial, but it will be important to follow along closely. If you have not followed that first tutorial, then please start there.

So where do we start?  This is going to require a bit more work to do than just plopping a new item into our inventory so let’s get started.  In this first part, we will:

1. Create a new module that extends single player.  You should already know how to do this.
2. Create a new Creature which will be the NPC that will serve as our merchant
3. Write a small script that will spawn the NPC into the player’s camp
4. Create a small 2da file, known as a PRCSCR file, that will allow us to “hook into” the single player campaign

If you’ve followed that first tutorial mentioned earlier, then you already know how to create a module that extends single player.  Remember that there are two steps to the process.  First, when you create the module you need to set the property “Extended Module” to Single Player, then OPEN the module.  Once it is open you need to go BACK to the Manage Modules window and use the HIERARCHY button and check off Single Player.

Also, in reference to this article, we want to remove our module’s “core script” to prevent problems.  To do this, simply open the module properties and for the Script property, click the 3 dots to open the file chooser then select “(none)”.

Create a New Creature to Serve as our NPC Merchant

Creating a merchant actually involves several pieces, and the first is we need an NPC to interact with.  To do that we will create a new Creature resource.  Click Creatures on the palette, then down below right click and create a new creature.  Or you can do File -> New -> Creature.  Give the resource a proper tag, put it in whatever folder you want, and like when we did items, you want the Module to be Core Game Resources, and Owner Module to be your module.  The image below is from when we made the item, but its exactly the same, so i’m putting it here as a refresher.

Creatures have a lot of properties, but for this we won’t need to worry about many of them.  You can skip right down to Gender and choose whichever you want.  In my case, its Female.  Right below that is Group and we want to make sure this is set to _Neutral.  This is important, and by setting it to _Neutral we make sure our merchant won’t attack us, OR help in any fights.

Next is Inventory.  Right now you’ve probably noticed that our creature is naked.  You probably don’t want to leave it this way, so click the 3 dots on Inventory to open a window that lets us place items into the creatures inventory.  First you are going to want to resize this window to make it wider.  This will make it a lot easier to work with.  On the left open up _Global and you will find clothing and armor in here.  Choose whatever you want.  I went into _Global -> Clothing -> Noble -> Human Female and gave her a nice robe.  Click to select the item you want to add, then click the ADD button.  Now over on the right, if you have expanded the window, you will see “Slot” which is currently set to “Not Equipped”.  Click on this and you can change it to the appropriate slot for the item.  In my case, “Chest”.  This will equip the item on your creature.  Once you’ve equipped everything you want, click OK and your creature should now be wearing the items.

Continuing on down, give your creature a Name and then skip down to the Appearance section.  In this section you can set the Race, though I left it as Human.  If you change this you might have to go back and choose new clothes.  The next thing you want is to give your new creature a more please Head Morph.  Click the 3 dots to open a file browser and try a few until you find one you like.

The very last thing we need to worry about is all the way at the bottom called Plot.  We want to set this to be “True”.  This means the creature is important to the plot and can’t be harmed or killed.  So we’ll always know our merchant is around.

That does it for the creature, so go ahead and save and check in.

Writing a Script to Spawn our NPC

Now that we have our NPC created, we need a way to get him or her into the world.  In order to do this, we need to create a script that will spawn the NPC at a specific location, after checking to see if the NPC is already there.  So go ahead and create a new script.  For this one both module properties should be your module.

#include “wrappers_h”

void main()

{

// The first thing we want to do, before anything, is look around and see

// if we have already spawned this merchant

object oPlayer = GetMainControlled();

DisplayFloatyMessage(oPlayer, “tut_merchant_spawn”, FLOATY_MESSAGE, 16777215, 20.0);

object oMerchant = UT_GetNearestObjectByTag(oPlayer, “jwv_t_creature1”);

if (!IsObjectValid(oMerchant))

{

// If we get to this code, it means the merchant has not been placed yet

// So let’s do that

// get an object pointer to the party camp area

object oArea = GetObjectByTag(“cam100ar_camp_plains”);

// create a location for where our merchant NPC will be placed

location lMerchantLocation = Location(oArea, Vector(166.61, 124.77, -1.33), 85.4);

// Spawn the NPC

CreateObject(OBJECT_TYPE_CREATURE, R”jwv_t_creature1.utc”, lMerchantLocation);

}

}

What this script will do is first search the area around the player to see if the NPC has already been spawned. If the function returns an invalid object, then we know that nothing was found, so we then create a location object which stores the x,y,z position and angle of where we want the npc, and then spawn the npc. The call to “GetObjectByTag(“cam100ar_camp_plains”)” is to get an object handle to the player camp.

Now you might ask, “John? How did you know what numbers to punch in there for the location?” and it would be a fair question.  I didn’t just pull them out of The Fade.  Let’s take an aside on talk about how I did that.

I knew I needed to provide a location to spawn the NPC but I had know way of loading the player camp up into the editor to find coordinates.  So what I did was write myself a small debug script.  I named this script “ShowLocation” and you can see it below:

#include “utility_h”
void main()
{
object oPC = GetHero();

location lLoc = GetLocation(oPC);
vector vPos = GetPositionFromLocation(lLoc);
vector vOrientation = GetOrientationFromLocation(lLoc);
float fAngle = GetFacing(oPC);

DisplayFloatyMessage(oPC, VectorToString(vPos), FLOATY_MESSAGE, 16777215, 20.0);
DisplayFloatyMessage(oPC, “————–“, FLOATY_MESSAGE, 16777215, 20.0);
DisplayFloatyMessage(oPC, FloatToString(fAngle), FLOATY_MESSAGE, 16777215, 20.0);
}

Create the script, save it, check it in, then export it. It is small and to the point.  It just grabs an object pointer to the player, then gets his position and angle, then prints it out.  To use it you need to enable the developer console.  If you haven’t done this yet you should.  Create yourself a new shortcut to the game, make the shortcut to the daorigins.exe file, then right click that file and open the Properties.  In the target field, go to th every end of whats there, past the quotes, then insert ” -enabledeveloperconsole” (without the quotes, see screenshot).  This enables the developer console.

Then run the game with that shortcut, and when in the game press the tilde (~/`) key on your keyboard to open the console.  NOTE: for some reason on my game the console is invisible!  So I have to just type blindly.  I don’t know what causes this or if it will do the same to you.

Once you have the console open just type “runscript showlocation” to run the debug script.  So go stand where you want the NPC to be, face the direction you want, then run that  and then copy down the numbers it gives you.  Once you have the numbers, plug them into the script above for the location and angle.

Creating the PRCSCR File

Now we have the creature, and we have a script to spawn it, but currently there is nothing telling that script to actually run.  You can’t just make a script and expect it to do anything unless that script is tied into the game in some way.  When we created the item, we assigned our script to be the “module_core” script, so the game new to run the script for module events.  In this case though, how does the game know to run it?  This is where the PRCSCR file comes in.  I have no idea what that is supposed to stand for, but essentially this is a 2DA file that allows us to tell the game to run a certain script when a certain area is loaded.

Since this is a 2da file, we start by creating an Excel spreadsheet, so fire up Excel.  NOTE: This did not work for me in OpenOffice for some reason, so use Excel.  OpenOffice apparently doesn’t save .xls files quite right and some 2da files will work and some won’t.

If you are not familiar with creating 2DA files, then please take a moment and first read the tutorial I wrote on them: 2DA or not 2DA – Overriding 2DA Files. That tutorial contains important information on how 2DA files work, how to make them and how to export them.

The file is very simple, and we only need three pieces of information.  An ID, an AreaListName, and a Script.  You want to make the ID something that will hopefully be UNIQUE to you.  This is technically impossible, but if you use some sort of pattern you can make it more likely.  What I do is convert the first three letters of my nickname into numbers, then add two 0’s, then start with 01.  So for me my ID is 1710001.  Here is my worksheet:

What this says is essentially “Whenever the area cam100ar_camp_plains is loaded, run the script tut_merchant_spawn”.  You will need to make the script name match yours.  Once you have created the file, compile it into a .GDA file and place it in: Documents\Bioware\Dragon Age\AddIns\<your add in name>\core\override

The placement of the file is important.

Exporting Everything and Testing

At this point we’re done!  Make sure everything is saved, checked in, and exported without dependent resources.  Then generate your module and manifest xml files.  Lastly as mentioned in this article, go into your Dragon Age\Core\Override\Toolsetexport directory and delete everything. all the exports we need are in our module’s addin directory.

Now load up the game, and head to your camp.  Note that there are actually a few versions of your party camp.  This will only spawn at the “basic” camp.  What I mean by that is it won’t spawn in any camp that includes cutscenes or combat or anything.  For example, the very first time you visit your camp it starts with a cutscene.  The merchant will not appear there, as the script won’t run.  Just exit the camp, travel somewhere, then come back to the camp.

Included in our spawn script is a DisplayFloatyMessage which is a good way of debugging.  This will cause text to float up above your character when the script runs.