I was recently making a quest where the player interacted with a talking troll. Thankfully, talking trolls, chickens, dragons (obviously), and anything else is possible - it just takes a little bit of extra work. If you don't follow these steps, your creature will only be able to say Misc Tab dialogue lines - like 'Hello' or 'Goodbye'. These allow your creature to participate in scenes and player dialogue.
Note: The creature will also have no lipsync unless the creature has the appropriate data, which I don't know how to add and I hear is a lot of tedious work. I'd recommend you just settle with no lipsync.
Note: The creature will also have no lipsync unless the creature has the appropriate data, which I don't know how to add and I hear is a lot of tedious work. I'd recommend you just settle with no lipsync.
Setting Up the NPC
Setting up your NPC creature isn't too hard - in fact, it's basically identical to setting up a normal NPC. So, make your creature, checking off the appropriate boxes for them, but be sure you:
Figure 1 is an example of my NPC, a troll, who I will eventually make talk.
- Note that "Race" box. Leave it as default for now, but we'll be changing it!
- I highly recommend changing the voicetype to a custom one. To make a new voicetype, go to Character>Voicetype and Right Click>New. Name it well, and set the gender to the gender of your creature. Don't check Allow Default Dialogue, unless you have need to. Now go back and change your NPCs voicetype to your new one. Make sure you've clicked OK to the voicetype window, and then closed and reopened the NPC one to see the voicetype in the dropdown.
Figure 1 is an example of my NPC, a troll, who I will eventually make talk.
Setting Up the Race
Next, we have to create a custom race for our creature. Thankfully, we don't have to make a race from scratch - we're just modifying the race of your creature slightly to allow for dialogue, and, if you want it, headtracking.
Go to Character>Race, and search (using the Filter) for the ACTUAL race of your creature. Bethesda is fairly sensible in their naming conventions - the race of a Frost troll is TrollFrostRace, for example. Just filtering for a keyword in the race should allow you to find it relatively easily. I searched for Troll. Searching for Spider yields all the Spider races, Chicken the Chicken race, etc.
When you find your race, right click it and select Duplicate. This will give you a YourRaceNameDUPLICATE00001 or something like that. Double click this new entry to edit it. Now, change the editorID of your race to something pertaining to your mod and the race. Check the box Allow PC Dialogue - VERY IMPORTANT! This is the whole point of what we're doing. Now, if you also want the creature to headtrack you (turn their head to look at you when talking), also check Uses Headtrack Anims.
Also, change Morph Race AND Armor Race to the actual race of your creature. Mine is TrollFrostRace, because my creature is a frost troll. If you were trying to make a talking Frostbite Spider (not giant sized), it would be FrostbiteSpiderRace for both of those. (If you don't set this, your creature will be invisible.) Your race should now look something like Figure 2.
Go to Character>Race, and search (using the Filter) for the ACTUAL race of your creature. Bethesda is fairly sensible in their naming conventions - the race of a Frost troll is TrollFrostRace, for example. Just filtering for a keyword in the race should allow you to find it relatively easily. I searched for Troll. Searching for Spider yields all the Spider races, Chicken the Chicken race, etc.
When you find your race, right click it and select Duplicate. This will give you a YourRaceNameDUPLICATE00001 or something like that. Double click this new entry to edit it. Now, change the editorID of your race to something pertaining to your mod and the race. Check the box Allow PC Dialogue - VERY IMPORTANT! This is the whole point of what we're doing. Now, if you also want the creature to headtrack you (turn their head to look at you when talking), also check Uses Headtrack Anims.
Also, change Morph Race AND Armor Race to the actual race of your creature. Mine is TrollFrostRace, because my creature is a frost troll. If you were trying to make a talking Frostbite Spider (not giant sized), it would be FrostbiteSpiderRace for both of those. (If you don't set this, your creature will be invisible.) Your race should now look something like Figure 2.
Quick Note
You may want to add the keyword ActorTypeNPC to your creature (in the Keywords tab of their Actor window, right click>Add and select the keyword) so other mods will recognize that this is also a talking NPC, not just your run of the mill creature.
Final Product
In Figure 3, you can see the final product - I have my troll in a quest, and he is speaking to me.
If your creature isn't speaking to you, and the quest their dialogue is contained in is Start Game Enabled, try this.