The Long-Awaited Sammy Fix

At last, the long-awaited Sammy fix is here! No longer will you have to be a pawn in that rat-faced boy's con game to have Otis' stash revealed! Hoorah! :mrhappy: :dance:

I know that this isn't actually that big a deal, but I'm posting it here in it's own thread so that people can post replies if they want to, understanding that many of you might be dubious. (It will also appear in CMF.)

What it does:

• Adds a second quest to address the possibility of turning Sammy in to Otis instead of playing his game. Also modifies the first quest to some degree. The new quest is #63 - Bribery for Justice.
• Adds 13 new spoken lines to Otis' dialogue, in which he discusses the various nuances of Sammy's conspiracy. (Well, sort of. )
• Players will now be able to complete the original quest or the new quest, but not both, as they run counter to one another. But players can botch both quests, so use caution. Play intelligently within your alignment or suffer the consequences! The idea was to get players to think again, at least the first time through, not just click-to-complete. The scenario may now be more complex than you think. Players remain free to complete neither quest, of course, leaving them unknown, mentioned, or accepted.

Probably the most significant thing to note here is that you will no longer be able to have a fully green quest tab for Nulb. I don't know if that's a really big deal to people or not. Aside from the fact that it was impossible to consider the original quest 'completed' by turning Sammy in (it would actually more rightly be 'botched' in that sense), using two quests allowed me to avoid using any global flags. This is something I very much wanted to avoid, as I don't entirely understand them and don't even know where I can find a list of them. Adding them willy-nilly would have been pretty foolish.

The greatest feature of this mod (aside from Sammy finally getting his) is that it actually seems to work and doesn't break anything! I've tested it every which way I can think of, and nothing seems to be the worse for wear because of it. That said, I still can't say for certain that there isn't some 'condition' I've broken somewhere along down the line, but without adding or using any global flags, it seems unlikely. Besides, I don't think the original quest had any far-reaching ramifications.

For any curious modders, the nuts and bolts stuff I've done boils down to adding a condition to both Otis and Sammy's PY files to get new dialogue strings to fire at the right times. Feel free to examine them and fix any gaffes that you may discover. The only thing I'd really like to see remain unchanged are the new Otis mp3s. Everything else is just .dlg file additions and changes for Otis and Sammy (aside from the quest log changes).

A few comments:

• I did a lot of old thread research on this topic and tried to make the new stuff comply with what the prevailing opinions seemed to be on the matter. As always, thanks to Lord_Spike for providing sound 'real-world' advice.
• Some of you may recall that Rufnredde had pledged to undertake fixing the Sammy problem. We don't really know what's up with Ruf anymore, but suffice it to say that I'd gladly throw this Sammy fix into the toilet in exchange for him coming back.
• Special thanks to Ted and his dialogue tutorials. I didn't actually read them all, but I always went there to check and see what I fucked up. Nice to be able to do that. :thumbsup:
• One final note: I don't know how you guys who do this all the time don't go crazy. Just contemplating the limited number of possibilities in this scenario was enough to make my brain feel like it was going to explode. :dizzy:

At any rate, enjoy!

(Oh yeah - should be compatible with any games that haven't already gotten to the Sammy/Otis/Nulb part of the game. Extract to your ToEE root directory.)

Long Awaited Sammy Fix

 

Good Lord, Gaear has become a fully fledged modder... :blink:

I have a few things for you to do out on the Borderlands... <unrolls parchment that snakes out the door>

Awesome work though! :thumbsup: And surprisingly enough, do it long enough, it all becomes second nature.

 

Thanks everybody. :thumbsup:

Oh BTW, I do have one complaint: Blue didn't switch inventories between the two Otises, which is just totally wrong.

[edit]

Forgot to mention - I also fixed a double line number typo in Otis' .dlg file that was probably causing Otis to skip one of his Playful NPCs lines. (edit - Actually no. It would cause a PC response to be unavailable.)

 

Thanks for all the feedback, much appreciated. :mrhappy: