[FEATURE]: NPCs Names Distributor support

[adya]

Feature Title

NPCs Names Distributor support

Motivation

Users were requesting a compatibility between QuickLoot IE and NND, specifically for a feature, where looting NPCs reveals their name. Quick Loot interface is not detected by NND and thus this revealing doesn't work.

Feature Description

Adding support for NND should be quite easy. An example of NND's API integration can be found here, but make sure to grab latest version of NND_API. In the example another mod is utilizing GetName function to retrieve distributed name for specific actor. In case of QuickLoot, you'd want to use RevealName function when appropriate (opening loot interface).

When done properly, this should make it so that with NND's Obscurity enabled, player would see something like "Bandit" when hovering crosshair over dead bandit, but once quick loot appears "Bandit" should be replaced with whatever real name NND had for that bandit. That part of API was never used previously 🙂 It should work, but in case it doesn't please let me know, so I can provide a fix on NND side.

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Note: there is one caveat though, revealing of names in different situations NND are separately controlled by options in INI config. But unfortunately, NND_API doesn't provide any way to either read those settings nor to provide a specific reason to reveal the name (e.g. looting dead NPC, NPC talking to the player, or any other). As such, I'd advise to create such option on QuickLoot's side so that users could match this behavior in default interactions handled by NND as well as QuickLoot. Actually, technically, you can try reading this option directly from NPCsNamesDistributor.ini. The option is Obscurity:bObituary in the ini and is false by default if omitted in the ini (or ini isn't there). Additionally, if QuickLoot also works for pickpocketing a Obscurity:bStealing option controls revealing names there as well and is also false by default.

Hope I've described everything 🙂 Let me know if you'll have any further questions.

Additional Context

No response

[AtomCrafty]

Thanks for all the details! I'm a bit confused about what you said regarding revealing the name once the loot menu opens, since it immediately opens as soon as a player's crosshair hovers over a container. With QuickLoot enabled, the regular interaction prompt will never be shown for applicable containers (including corpses). So I guess we just call RevealName immediately before GetName?

I'm also curious why you decided not to hook into TESObjectREFR::GetDisplayName, since that seems like it would make NND compatible with pretty much anything out of the box. At least it should get the custom names to display everywhere once they have been revealed. Am I missing an issue with that approach?

[adya]

I'm also curious why you decided not to hook into TESObjectREFR::GetDisplayName, since that seems like it would make NND compatible with pretty much anything out of the box

I do hook that, but the main point of this compatibility is not about NND names passing through to be shown on UI (I'll get to that at the end of this comment).

It's about Obscurity feature. It is similar to People Are Stangers mod, if you're familiar. The premise here is that Player doesn't know everybody's name from the get go. With NND player needs to actually interact with an NPC to get their real name. Before that NND will swap real names with something... obscure like "Bandit" or "Whiterun Guard".

The main interaction obviously being a dialogue, so once player initiates a dialogue with an NPC, NND detects it and assumes that player got NPC's name. Now, to avoid "soft locking" names, NND also supports a few other kinds of interactions: when NPC initiates a dialogue, when player pickpockets NPC and when player loots dead NPC (so player could learn names of NPCs that can't have a chat with them). Last two are handled by NND when the game opens inventory. This requires a bit of head-cannon from the player, like NPCs carrying papers with their names or something 🙂 in any case, the point is that when inventory opens, NND reveals real name if it was not known prior to that.

Now with QuickLoot, players never actually "open" NPCs inventories in a traditional sense. Meaning that even if they set NND option to reveal names when looting/stealing this won't be happening as they loot/steal through QuickLoot interface.

So I imagined that QuickLoot would call RevealName whenever it's about to show its UI, because technically it's the point when player "opens" inventory. And ideally this would be controlled by the same settings from NND's ini. If reading NND's ini from QuickLoot is too much trouble, I could potentially introduce a v3 of NND API where RevealName would also pass the reason of the reveal and NND would handle such calls according to its settings.

So, regarding GetName function, I'm not too familiar with QuickLoot UI, but assuming you have a label there that displays NPC's name, you could also provide more of a small detail compatibility as well.

This leads back to the initial question about GetDisplayName hook 🙂

NND differentiates between several contexts in which names are shown, for example, on crosshair, in dialogue, in inventory, etc. This allows customizing how names are formatted/styled in each context. For example, in inventory only the full name is shown, like not "John Doe (Whiterun Guard)" but simply "John Doe", and in context of bartering (next to the gold value of merchant) a short name is used instead (e.g. "John").

What I'm trying to say here, is that when other mods use default GetDisplayFullName function from TESObjectREFR NND falls back to "other" context (in the game this is typically used for things like notifications and console). So if you're incorporating NND API you might as well use its GetName function for actor with a suitable context, like kInventory, this way QuickLoot would respect player's setting in NND as to how they want to see NPC's name. One other example of this integration is how mods like Subtitles and Floating Subtitles both utilize NND's API to get a name in "subtitles" context 🤓

Sorry if it sounds a bit too much 😄🙈 I guess to people unfamiliar with NND this might be confusing, but once you've learned it it's simple 😇

[AtomCrafty]

Oh I see, thanks for the detailed explanation. That cleared up all of my questions :)
NND honestly sounds like a pretty cool concept. Might need to try it out for myself when I next get the chance to play.

I think the v3 API approach you suggested would be my preferred way to go about this. I'm trying to keep QuickLoot decoupled from the internals of other mods whenever possible, so I'm hesitant to read an ini file that may change its format in the future. We'd also need to include ini parsing library just for that integration if we did it that way. Then again I've broken that decoupling "rule" in the past for other mod integrations where no official API was available.

The implementation itself should be fairly straightforward then.

• Call RevealName when the loot menu is constructed
• Call GetName with kInventory in LootMenu::RefreshTitle to retrieve the revealed name

In terms of a timeline, this feature would make it into 4.0, which is currently only held up by the planned VR support. That has turned out to be trickier than expected though, so we don't have a release date set. So there is no need for you to rush the API change.

[adya]

Great 🙂 thanks! I'll try to put v3 out maybe over the next weekend, should be simple enough and would make it much easier for you.

[AtomCrafty]

@adya What's the status on this?

[adya]

Uh, never got a chance to do that 🥲 and forgot about this conversation, sorry.

[AtomCrafty]

If a v3 API exposing your ini settings is not going to happen then I'd add this as a separate option to our own config file. Players would need to edit both to keep things consistent, but I don't want to add an ini parser to the project just to read the config file from another mod.

[adya]

Hey, sorry for disappearing. I finally made the v3 API. I'll be releasing an update soon. But you can check the NND_API.h file and incorporate it into one of the future updates 😇

[AtomCrafty]

Thanks for the update. I'll look into it once I have some free time again.

[AtomCrafty]

I'm currently trying to implement the integration, but the RequestPluginAPI function in your dll returns null when called with InterfaceVersion::kV3. I'm using the latest version from Nexus. Your implementation doesn't handle this input at all.

My commit: AtomCrafty@5c47ec8

[AtomCrafty]

@adya Ping in case you missed it. My side of things is done, but I can't really test it because of the broken API. I'll close this as completed for now.

[adya]

Oh, sorry, my bad 😓 I'll fix it asap

[adya]

The fix is up! 😇 Let me know if it's all good now. And surely ping me, not sure why, but I seem to be missing notifications from GitHub.