Toggling Objects Tutorial

Introduction

This tutorial will help you make objects that were previously disabled to become enabled, such as when you complete a certain stage of a quest or eat a certain item items that were previously invisible will become visible

I had a lot of trial-and-error creating objects that appear only when you do a specific action. For instance: A trophy getting added to your Megaton Home when you get acquire and achievement, so I'm going to write a tutorial for that:

Placing the object

Place an XMarker in the area of the object you want to toggle. These can be found under World Objects > Static in the Object Window. Double click the XMarker you just placed to open the reference property window, and tick the initially disabled box. Also fill in a Reference Editor ID, we will need that later.

Now create the object you want to enable when you do a specific action. In this case we will trigger it when you get an achievement. Double click the object you just placed and scroll over to the "Enable Parent" tab. Click "Select Reference in Render Window" and select your XMarker, if you want you can do the same for other objects, those objects will also get enabled once the XMarker does.

Triggering the object

To trigger the appearance of the object(s) we're going to use a questscript. For that we first need a new quest.

1. In the Object Window, go to ActorData.
2. Press left-click in the list and press Insert or right-click in the list and select New.
3. Fill in a name and ID and make sure the Start Game Enabled box is checked.

Click the ... button next to dropdown box where you can select a script. The Edit Scripts window will pop-up. Go to Script > New... to create a new script. We're going to use the "Slayer of Beasts" achievement here, where you have to kill 300 beasts. This is the script that triggers the achievement (copied from AchievementScript):

;Slayer of Beasts
If CreaturesKilled == 0
	If GetPCMiscStat "Creatures Killed" > 299
		AddAchievement 42
		Set CreaturesKilled to 1
	endif
endif

We can modify it to enable our trophy at the same time you get the achievement. We don't need to remember that the creatures have been killed, so we'll leave that bit out:

If GetPCMiscStat "Creatures Killed" > 299
	; AddAchievement 42
	[your XMarker Reference Editor ID here].Enable
endif

Don't use the square brackets "[ ]" in your script.

We commented out the AddAchievement, as we don't need to handle that in our script, and we added a line that enables the XMarker we placed. By enabling the XMarker we also enable all objects that have the XMarker as parent; our trophy.

Finally, we can add a Scriptname and GameMode block. The GameMode block makes sure the script runs continuously, for a detailed explanation have a look at the scripting section. Because the script no longer needs to run when the trophy is enabled, we also add a StopQuest command (note that you may have to close the Quest window before the script compiler accepts your quest ID).

ScriptName EnableSlayerOfBeastsTrophyScript

Begin GameMode
	 If GetPCMiscStat "Creatures Killed" > 299
		; AddAchievement 42
	 	Set TrophyEnabled to 1
              	[your XMarker Reference Editor ID here].Enable
		StopQuest [your QuestID here]
	endif
End

Save the script and exit the Quest window to refresh the list of scripts. Reopen the quest and select the script you just saved.

And you're done! Unless you want to know about different kinds of trigger scripts.

Quest stage related trigger

Let's say you want something to enable once you complete any quest, can be official or your own, or even someone else's. Repeat placing your object and then continue here.

Go to ActorData > Quests in the Object Window and find the quest you're looking for, if you know the in-game name of the quest but not the ID scroll a little to the right until you come to the Name column. Be sure not to click the Dialogue and/or Fin versions of the quest.

Open the quest and go the the "Quest Stages" tab and click the stage you want to enable the object in. If the quest has the "Complete Quest" box ticked, that's the final stage, some multiple-choice quests have 2 stages with the complete quest box ticked, go over to the "Result Script" box, click "Edit" and put the following line there:

[XMarker Reference Editor ID here].enable

This method is fast, but will conflict with any other mods that changes the result script of that particular stage of the quest.