NPC dialogue

/npc say, /npc chatter, /npc emote and /npc hologram are how an NPC performs.

Set a display name first. /npc say, waypoint lines and ambient chatter are all thrown away if the NPC has no display name. Run /npc edit 4 displayname Vess before anything on this page.

You need an admin rank that carries the NPC permission. That is the only gate. /npc works while you are dead or spectating, so you can feed an NPC lines from the free camera.

What it does

An NPC speaks in the same chat stream as a player, using its display name. Lines fade with distance, exactly as player speech does. Beyond speech, you can loop an idle line on a timer and freeze the NPC in an emote. You can also render it as a translucent blue hologram, for a character appearing by transmission.

Every command here takes an optional target first. Give an id, a targetname or part of a display name. Leave it out to use whatever your crosshair is on. Targetnames and the order they resolve in are covered in spawning and editing.

Speaking a line

Double quotes are stripped out of the message before it is sent, so there is no need to quote anything.

If the NPC has no display name, nothing is broadcast and you get this instead:

Ambient chatter

Chatter picks a line at random from your list and speaks it on a timer of 5 to 3,600 seconds. A background NPC then keeps talking without you driving it. You can give up to 16 lines, separated by a vertical bar, and the same line is never picked twice in a row. The confirmation counts the lines the NPC will actually use, so an empty gap between 2 bars is not counted.

Everything past the sixteenth line is stored but never spoken. StoryForce says so rather than letting the tail sit there unused:

Set chatter on an NPC with no display name and StoryForce accepts it but warns you that it will stay silent:

Give a target and nothing else to read back what is set:

Chatter keeps running on an NPC cast as an LLM NPC, and the timed lines never enter its conversation, so stop chatter first if the two voices should not overlap.

Playing an emote

/npc emote puts the NPC into one of the 76 emotes. A successful emote sends no reply, because the result is visible on the NPC itself.

/npc emote [target] <emote>
/npc emote 4 salute

Give a targetname rather than an id and every NPC sharing that targetname plays the emote at once. That is how you make a whole squad salute together. Emote names come from the emote list.

A name the game does not recognise is refused:

none and stop both release the pose.

Holograms

A hologram renders the NPC as a translucent blue projection, for a character appearing by remote transmission. distort adds the unstable, flickering version.

/npc hologram 4 off returns it to solid.

Things to note

• A nameless NPC cannot speak at all. /npc say tells you why, but waypoint say lines and chatter fail in silence. Set the display name first.
• Chatter is approximate. Each line lands within 25% either side of the interval you set, so a group of chattering NPCs does not sync up.
• Only the first 16 chatter lines are spoken. Anything past the sixteenth vertical bar is stored but never used, and the whole list is cut at 255 characters. StoryForce warns you when you go over.
• The chatter interval is clamped, not refused. Anything under 5 seconds becomes 5 and anything over 3,600 becomes 3,600, with no message. A 0 or a word prints the usage line instead.
• A successful /npc emote prints nothing. Silence means it worked. An error message means the emote name is wrong.
• Emote by targetname hits every match. Use the numeric id when you want one NPC out of a group.
• Hologram mode is cosmetic only. The NPC still blocks movement, still takes damage, and still walks its route.
• A hologram with no display name is anonymous, because the name above its head is the same field its speech uses.

Next

• LLM NPCs: cast an NPC as an AI character that improvises its own replies
• Routing NPCs: hang spoken lines and emotes off the waypoints of a patrol