2026-05-07T04:00:55  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> Is anyone interested in helping write dialogue for a follower mod (credit will be provided on the Nexus page). It's a mod I've been working on for a while that adds a "staffing agency" to Ebonheart. The staffing agency spawns 6 random NPCs of 3 classes mercenary, mage, and household servants that the player can hire for 250-350 gold per month. The cell regenerates it's hirelings once every in-game week so when players come &
2026-05-07T04:00:55  <OpenMW-bridge> go there will be different NPCs for hire.
2026-05-07T04:04:11  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> Examples of NPCs for hire, I just really need help with greetings/hire dialog. I suck at writing khajiits
2026-05-07T04:04:11  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1356001106211115229/1501796763684835338/image.png?ex=69fd60ba&is=69fc0f3a&hm=d24c05dc7aac3bcf85ca8e12caa3bd231181273ef735045a5883cf580ce87541&
2026-05-07T04:04:12  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1356001106211115229/1501796764125102231/image.png?ex=69fd60ba&is=69fc0f3a&hm=9cea1803b29f7f0fc2a13152932192a2fabcf02468a346b1f04866c7a1194658&
2026-05-07T05:25:47  <OpenMW-bridge> <hyamentar_09664> looks interesting!
2026-05-07T07:09:23  <OpenMW-bridge> <hyamentar_09664> what's the virtues of making an esp into an esm and what difference does it make?
2026-05-07T08:29:43  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> If it's an esm it's easy to make esps that edit it. So it's more patchable, there is most likely more to it but is my understanding.
2026-05-07T08:31:33  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> Functionally it doesn't change the mod but the way it interacts with others
2026-05-07T09:17:51  <OpenMW-bridge> <hyamentar_09664> Ah ok right
2026-05-07T12:25:03  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> Technically ESPs are patchable too it just takes a bit more work (like an extra 30 secs though once you figure out how to do it)
2026-05-07T12:29:47  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> Technically ESPs are patchable too it just takes a bit more work (like an extra 30 secs though once you figure out how to do it)
2026-05-07T13:12:37  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> There's always a way :todd:  what are you referring to? Tes3conv my beloved?
2026-05-07T13:13:46  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> I use the wyremash to convert the original esp to an esm, I then make my patches, then use wyre to change the requirement on the patch to use the esp instead of the esm
2026-05-07T13:14:36  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> Oh yeah fully replacing the original is the surest way
2026-05-07T13:16:26  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> I'm not fully replacing the original, just using wyre mash to make my patch require the original esp as a requirement
2026-05-07T13:16:37  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> Unless I misunderstood your reply
2026-05-07T13:17:17  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> That's how I did my patches for sotha sil expanded
2026-05-07T13:19:26  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> Yeah I think i get you, but you are still editing the original, right? To convert it. Or you include your converted version
2026-05-07T13:23:19  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> I see I wasn't clear in my original post, you only need to convert the original esp to an esm temporarily.   It needs to be temporarily converted so the CK will allow you to make the patch/update references.  Once you finish your patch and make the new ESP you can fully discard the converted esm and then modify your esp to use the original esp in place of the esm. So the only thing you'd need is your patch esp and they just
2026-05-07T13:23:20  <OpenMW-bridge> need to load it after the original esp.
2026-05-07T13:25:20  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> Ohh yes I see now
2026-05-07T13:25:22  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> This thread is how I learned   https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/qrj50r/making_a_compatibility_patch_moving_npcs_results/
2026-05-07T13:25:32  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> That probably explains it way better than me
2026-05-07T13:25:53  <OpenMW-bridge> <dubiousnpc> Words amirite
2026-05-07T13:26:40  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> For big mods I would always suggest using ESMs though lol, I was shocked when sotha sil expanded used an esp
2026-05-07T13:26:58  <OpenMW-bridge> <Joe> Once you learn that process it just takes a few clicks though
2026-05-07T14:23:48  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> if the end product is essentially just screenshots, why not just render what you need directly from blender?
2026-05-07T16:42:27  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Hi guys. I’m working on my first real mod, and it’s a doozy: implementing AI / LLM conversations with NPCs for dynamic interactions.  I’ve already implemented Persuasion mechanics, so you can type up your own creative insults until the NPC attacks you - or you can bribe them.  I have a question for everybody: what types of interactions would you like to see in a mod like this? I’m planning on doing things like
2026-05-07T16:42:28  <OpenMW-bridge> “bribe a guard to leave the area”, “convince an NPC to become a follower / paid mercenary”, “hey, that guy at the end of the bar called you an n’wah! Go fight him!”, gifting an item to an NPC, verbally engaging in trade (“Hey Arrille, hypothetically if I had some moon sugar, and hypothetically if we were really good friends, you’d buy it off me for 50 septims, right?”), and other actions as well. What should I try to
2026-05-07T16:42:28  <OpenMW-bridge> implement?
2026-05-07T16:42:33  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1356001106211115229/1501987613056307401/image0.jpg?ex=69fe1278&is=69fcc0f8&hm=783f4610f3bcd10817b648d0f09f0e693a34e420f5770b887cd23c01da4bb054&
2026-05-07T16:42:49  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1356001106211115229/1501987683797565511/image0.jpg?ex=69fe1289&is=69fcc109&hm=4bc488387b9641322bda814d4c039ac480a8808f795bb671d9353b7b68642f0f&
2026-05-07T16:43:34  <OpenMW-bridge> <Capo> it's spelled wrye. common mistake
2026-05-07T17:28:15  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> well, as people asked the last time someone made a prototype of this idea (https://discord.com/channels/260439894298460160/260439894298460160/1440108149968470036), will you tie this into the game's existing “dialogue result script” mechanism for making things happen after an NPC says something? for instance, there are already some unique dialogue lines for persuasion success in Morrowind.esm, such as the Bribe Success
2026-05-07T17:28:16  <OpenMW-bridge> response when you successfully bribe Sovor Trandel in the context of getting the key to Nerano Manor from him. and of course there are a million billion snippets of mwscript in the Result field of dialogue lines, because that's the only way anything ever happens as a result of dialogue. so you have this premade corpus of intended/expected outcomes from NPC conversations, which you can even access ahead of time. it's an interesting
2026-05-07T17:28:16  <OpenMW-bridge> problem
2026-05-07T17:33:50  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Yes, my intention is to use existing text in scripted conversations. The idea is that I want to hook in to available quest stages, so that if it’s appropriate at that time, the player can say the right things to an NPC to advance to the next scripted stage. For more rigid conversations, like when there are multiple red “Continue…” sections of exposition, I’ll limit the player’s input so that the events can
2026-05-07T17:33:50  <OpenMW-bridge> happen as scripted.
2026-05-07T17:37:26  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> My eventual idea is to build a script which pulls all NPC data from ESM / ESP files and runs it through an LLM pipeline to pre-compute everything there is to know about each NPC (like how they relate to other NPCs, and I’m planning on building a matrix of personality traits and quirks which will be assigned to each NPC based on their existing stats and dialogue, with random personalities being built for the less
2026-05-07T17:37:27  <OpenMW-bridge> interesting NPCs, which will be used to flavor their LLM text) and build that into a big JSON file which will be provided with my mod. That way, most of the heavy lifting can be pre-computed.
2026-05-07T17:38:03  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> Ohhh I like when people have longer ideas with a plan behind them. I wish you full success
2026-05-07T17:38:57  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Thanks! Yeah, this idea has been cooking in my brain for a couple of years, and it’s been a vaguely defined “wouldn’t it be cool if…” desire for like 20 years.
2026-05-07T17:39:15  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> yeah, this kind of thing is easy to say "wouldn't it be cool if…" but then actually implementing— lmao i was just typing this
2026-05-07T17:39:29  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> I hear you. I had always wanted to fill Castle Hestatur (a housing/castle mod) since like 2005. So I get the inspiration
2026-05-07T17:40:20  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> Do you plan your larger ideas out outside of just thoughts (like in Obsidian, notepad, etc. somewhere more tangible) or just wing it?
2026-05-07T17:41:04  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Just the fact that I can already ask an NPC for directions, or lore insight, or insult them until they hate me makes the game feel much more alive. Once I get more dynamic actions working, I think it’ll be mesmerizing.
2026-05-07T17:41:17  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Yeah, I’m a huge Obsidian fan.
2026-05-07T17:43:10  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> re inferring NPC personalities from their stats, have a look at the idle animation frequencies in their AI settings. those are sometimes (not always, but sometimes) customized to give NPCs "body language" that signals how sneaky, dangerous, attentive etc. they are
2026-05-07T17:44:38  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> because there's an idle that looks like reaching for a weapon, and one for looking around at their surroundings, and one for being lost in thought etc.
2026-05-07T17:46:25  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Interesting, I hadn’t considered that. I’ll check that out for sure.
2026-05-07T17:47:59  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> this game is packed to the gills with funny little features that first make you surprised the designers thought of them, and then make you sad that they never had time to flesh them out 😅
2026-05-07T17:52:39  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Yeah, that’s kind of why I love Morrowind so much. There are so many little details. It’s an absolute gold mine for AI context data. I can’t believe how good the NPCs already sound, and I’ve only been at this for a few hours.
2026-05-07T17:54:06  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> NPC-specific Bribe Success lines are on that funny little features list too, tbh. here is the list of NPCs who get one: - Sovor Trandel - each of the ghosts in the Cavern of the Incarnate - Canctunian Ponius that's it, that's all they used it for
2026-05-07T17:55:35  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Nice, I’ll add that to my debug list and see how it handles talking to those guys.
2026-05-07T18:02:40  <OpenMW-bridge> <daisyhasacat> Collab?
2026-05-07T18:05:00  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> Always willing. I've currently been holding it off until some of the UI stuff I MR'd goes into review and possibly sees the light of day of a merge so UIs aren't too hard to layout; but if you're ever serious - of course.  Fair warning, however, I'm a bit meticulous with planning 😅
2026-05-07T18:05:25  <OpenMW-bridge> <daisyhasacat> Oh I’m serious
2026-05-07T18:05:31  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> 😄
2026-05-07T18:06:14  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> Well, once the MRs get some attention and may possibly be merged, I'll tag you/reach back out to you again and you can tell me more about what you envisioned in it and we can come to some compromises and make it happen
2026-05-07T18:10:23  <OpenMW-bridge> <daisyhasacat> I’m good for whenever. I have a bunch of ideas from my last attempt at an overhaul.
2026-05-07T18:11:37  <OpenMW-bridge> <daisyhasacat> https://gitlab.com/modding-openmw/hestatur
2026-05-07T18:44:13  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> Okay, awesome. If you don't mind, then I'll DM you about it in a week or two probably and we can get a baseline for things and talk more
2026-05-07T18:45:45  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Man, we live in the future.
2026-05-07T18:45:46  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1356001106211115229/1502018618886717520/image.png?ex=69fe2f58&is=69fcddd8&hm=294b0f4406e11f9d67fb07c5feeae70e07060a1673f5cfb6ca6e1b39835eade7&
2026-05-07T18:46:59  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> (Kunthar went on to be slain in a cave mere moments later)
2026-05-07T18:49:20  <OpenMW-bridge> <liammellofarley> What's the LLM hook? I wonder if you built enough scaffolding around it if you could get one of those miniature 1.5 bit models to do this fast locally.
2026-05-07T18:49:58  <OpenMW-bridge> <liammellofarley> They'd probably fail to have race appropriate intonation and stuff
2026-05-07T18:50:21  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> idr if he ever explained the details, but Stefatorus said his LLM was something small enough to run locally
2026-05-07T18:50:23  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> It’s using Claude right now but it’s set up to also work with OpenAI-style APIs. I’m a local LLM guy myself, but I’m throwing a ton of context at it so I don’t think a small model would work well.
2026-05-07T18:51:54  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> It’ll probably work in a technical sense with smaller models, especially if a pre-bake a bunch of world context data (because an LLM won’t know where Gnar Mok is on the map, but it can construct a response if I provide all of that in the background).
2026-05-07T18:54:08  <OpenMW-bridge> <liammellofarley> yeah I think running it through some sort of script that can filter context provided would be necessary. Eg: NPC is here, this race, player is this race, this is the NPC bio, and then have it inject new info keyed to all NPC names and all locations names
2026-05-07T18:55:02  <OpenMW-bridge> <liammellofarley> I think if you really went crazy with that maybe bonsai could handle it feasibly but with how cheap some AI inference has gotten it's probably easier just to hook it up to Gemini 2.5 Flash or Deepseek flash and have like hours of conversations add up to like the price of a beer
2026-05-07T18:56:55  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Yeah, I’m running Qwen3.6 27b on my home server, so I’ll probably hook it up to that eventually to see how it handles it.
2026-05-07T19:00:01  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> i feel like a lot of players would just give up on installing the mod if it required them to set up accounts and API keys and payment information with whatever external LLM provider
2026-05-07T19:00:41  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Certainly. That's a "them" problem though, haha.
2026-05-07T19:03:07  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> i guess that's just another expression of the duality of morrowind players. "surely this $3 game from 2002 will run alright on my potato netbook from 2016" versus "i just spent $8000 on this gaming rig and by god i'm going to mod morrowind hard enough to get my money's worth"
2026-05-07T19:04:24  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> We live in a world of chumps and CHIMps.
2026-05-07T19:05:05  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> i have a life-threatening anaphylactic allergy to mod comments, so anything that comes with a chance of player complaints is a serious downside for me
2026-05-07T19:05:32  <OpenMW-bridge> <anarchonbury> Posted this in the wrong section. Question, does anyone have a good reference for learning how to mod dialogue in Morrowind? I last touched the creation kit when Morrowind was released. Kinda got an itch to try my hand at modding a particular NPC in Tamriel Rebuilt to have a quest line.
2026-05-07T19:09:14  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> I don't believe there was ever really a unified resource for all of this collectively, and more like spread out and sporadic locations of bits of information.
2026-05-07T19:09:29  <OpenMW-bridge> <nox7> On that note, it might be easier just to ask the questions you need and people here can get you there
2026-05-07T19:12:12  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> - https://morrowind-modding.github.io/ - https://wiki.project-tamriel.com/wiki/Category:Modding#Writing,_NPCs,_and_Quests - https://wiki.project-tamriel.com/wiki/Morrowind_Scripting_for_Dummies
2026-05-07T19:12:42  <OpenMW-bridge> <anarchonbury> Excellent ty
2026-05-07T19:13:02  <OpenMW-bridge> <anarchonbury> Will come back if I ever actually get anything together worth discussing.
2026-05-07T19:13:14  <OpenMW-bridge> <anarchonbury> Thank you both!
2026-05-07T19:13:53  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> also http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/tutorials/article/110-dialog-tutorial/
2026-05-07T19:14:16  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> oh, that link might be dead. try wayback machine
2026-05-07T19:14:43  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> there is also a tutorial, i forget where, called "Kevaar Finds a Shiny"
2026-05-07T19:27:32  <OpenMW-bridge> <liammellofarley> Everyone does have a Google account so you could run a Gemini flash model or even flash lite on AI studio and it takes like five minutes to set up an account. It's probably a bigger barrier to learn how to host a local model.
2026-05-07T20:46:54  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> what people are saying: "MGSO best mod of all time" "it has an installer exe" "i don't care if they changed the modpage name to say it's outdated" "can someone help me? how to plug in mouse" "hi openmw general channel, i finished auto-downloading the total overhaul but nothing appears in my launcher"
2026-05-07T20:47:39  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> u right tho
2026-05-07T20:48:22  <OpenMW-bridge> <liammellofarley> Include a really long .md file and tell them to upload it to an AI and ask the AI the questions. If you have an LLM based mod anyone who wants to use it can do that. Their questions about installations will get drowned out by "Great not even Morrowind is free from AI slop" comments anyways.
2026-05-07T20:49:13  <OpenMW-bridge> <.hemaris> that's true, crazytom's modpage doesn't even exist yet and i'm already breaking out in hives from how many of that comment it has
2026-05-07T23:30:29  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Haha, yeah. I think that AI skepticism is completely warranted, because it’s largely a psyop in the greater structure of the economy, but you can’t claim a tool isn’t useful for what it is just because some people misuse it. If somebody commits a murder with a claw hammer, it doesn’t mean that hammers are bad 😐 Not to get too off topic in the mod making channel. I am fortunate though in that I am largely able
2026-05-07T23:30:30  <OpenMW-bridge> to disregard uniformed negative opinions without damage to my ego. Mods are optional, and if people don’t want the mod, they don’t need to install it. I’m primarily making this for my own use anyway.
2026-05-07T23:44:55  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> Also, turns out that Arrille is a square.
2026-05-07T23:44:58  <OpenMW-bridge> <crazy.tom> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1356001106211115229/1502093916021985383/image.png?ex=69fe7579&is=69fd23f9&hm=36c612eb4b6d8bc4ae028b43a5f5893a3af20ed2798e88a8c1ee496897453f88&