How to count banters in an NPC mod

Charriu

Hi all,

I'm looking into more NPC mods for any future playthroughs. I'm a big fan of banters and therefore would like to know before running a game with an NPC how many banters that NPC has with the original companions. How would I determine that from the mod files alone?

I already know that all the banters are to be found in the .d files and I have no problem to do a text search across all those files. I also know that if there is a 25 in the file name it is most likely for ToB. But are there definitive commands/code phrases that have to come with every banter? I looked up some tutorials and there the CHAIN command was mentioned with banters, but I think it is not required to use that, right? Or do I just look where the original companions are mentioned in the file and how often?

To give an example. Let's take the Kelsey mod. How would I find out how many banters this NPC has with Minsc or Nalia?

Thanks a lot in advance

MidnightVoyager

So I noticed nobody's answering and... Well, I'm not a modder myself for this game, but I've dabbled.

You can get a pretty good example of what a banter looks like from Khalid for BG2. The modder is very good about commenting their dialogs. In this mod, L#KHAB and L#KHA25B appear to be the files they put their banters in. They've clearly commented each one to say who it's banter with.

Charriu

That's right, but unfortunately not every modder puts in the work to document all of that and not every modder takes the time to count all the individual banters. That's why I asked if there are certain words/commands you can search for that 100% indicate a new banter and only a banter.

MidnightVoyager

I know, but if you look at the one I mentioned as an example, you can see what a banter looks like in particular. Anything I know that is in a banter could hypothetically be in any other kind of dialog, I'm afraid. You just have to look at the whole dialog and see if it looks like those banters.

To my knowledge, there is no easy way to do it.

jastey

It is possible that the banter are in a separate d file, starting with a "b". I think a lot of NPC mods are scripted that way. In there, you could search for an NPC's banter dlg name and see how many dialogue states or CHAINs with trigger conditions are there (i.e. IF ~something between the tildas~ THEN). These usually start a banter/dialogue.
For Kelsey, I see the file "bj#klsy.d". I would assume the banters for SoA are in there (bj#kls25.d is for ToB). Inside, I see dialogue states like I mentioned, for example

IF ~InParty("Mazzy")
See("Mazzy")
!StateCheck("Mazzy",STATE_SLEEPING)
Global("FWKelseyMazzy2","LOCALS",0)~ THEN BEGIN KelseyMazzy2_1
  SAY @1411
  IF ~~ THEN DO ~SetGlobal("FWKelseyMazzy2","LOCALS",1)~ EXTERN BMAZZY KelseyMazzy2_2
END

would be the start of a banter between Mazzy and Kelsey, started by Kelsey.

IF ~InParty("J#Kelsey")
See("J#Kelsey")
!StateCheck("J#Kelsey",STATE_SLEEPING)
Global("FWKelseyYoshimo2","LOCALS",0)~ THEN BEGIN KelseyYoshimo2_1
  SAY @1401
  IF ~~ THEN DO ~SetGlobal("FWKelseyYoshimo2","LOCALS",1)~ EXTERN BJ#KLSY KelseyYoshimo2_2
END
END

would be the start of a banter between Yoshimo and Kelsey, started by Yoshimo.
Please note: Kelsey is a bad example, because his lovetalks are also in that file, apparently.
I wouldn't know any easier or more straight foreward way of looking this up.

jastey

In addition to my above post. maybe installing the mod and then counting the banters in the decompiled banter files is more straight foreward for the banters started by the mod NPC (there you'll have all in one place, not scattered between mod files), but for seeing how many banters are started by other NPCs, you'd need to search for the mod NPCs banter dlg name in their banter files (someting Ni surely can do with advanced search tool).

Charriu

Thanks for all the answers. Looks like I need to do that the hard way then. Thanks.