Additional NPC Dialogue

[TheCaledonian]

Summary

Some additional dialogue for NPC's, for various situations and reactions.

Purpose of change

To add additional NPC dialogue as listed in the 'Help with development (List of easy jobs)

Describe the solution

I have edited the talk_tags JSON file through a text editor to include extra lines of dialogue to diversify NPC conversations and battle chatter.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could not find any feasible alternatives to editing an existing file to add extra lines of dialogue.

Testing

I tested the NPC dialogue with a new character on debug mode, and spawned various NPCs to see if they were using the new dialogue. I concluded that this does indeed work, but I had to make various edits to the JSON file to remove seperator commas on some lines which I had left in by mistake, causing the game to report the issues in the error log. Repeated testing continued in-game after any edits were made to ensure that the bugs had been fixed.

To best test this out for yourself, use the debug mode and give your head/torso at least 5000 health, as you will be dealing with angry NPCs (who are likely well armed!)

You can antagonize them by threating them, and they should should various lines/insults at you from categories present in the JSON file. You can also make the NPCs friendly too through the debug menu, as well as try other various tests to see how the passive dialogue is affected.

I also spawned enemy monsters to test the NPC reaction dialogue, and although the code works, there will be the odd unusual sentence, purely comprised of categories such as <name_b>, , <swear!>, and so on. I was aware that CDDA was occasionally prone to such oddities as this but the code itself seems to be in working order. I would encourage testing the aforementioned cases to see if you can replicate similar results, or get the game to throw and error. This would be my first contribution to the CDDA community, so I am happy to learn from more experienced contributors and assist them in making this as polished and professional as possible! If this goes over well, I would be happy to look at diversifying some of the dialogue further.

Additional context

[mlangsdorf]

You added talk_tags.json as a new file, and not a change to the file at data/json/npcs/talk_tags.json. As such, those changes are currently unreviewable. I'm not familiar enough with the github interface to be able to explain what you need to do to resubmit this correctly.

[Zireael07]

I don't know what one could do in the online interface, but from your computer, it's easy enough to fix: drag and drop (or copy and paste) the file where it should go (i.e. /data/json/npcs)...

[TheCaledonian]

Moved PR to #40353 as it looks like I have uploaded my own modified talk_tags file here instead of modifying the existing file in CDDA/Master. Sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience. :)