It's not overly complex, however, there are a couple of potential problems I need to figure out how to work around or account for.

Basically, the player goes to Helgen which has been occupied by my new faction. They go in the gate and are Force-Greeted by a guard. When this happens, 2 other guards run up to the player and sort of surround them like they're getting the other guards back. After a brief conversation, I want the main guard to lead the way into the Keep taking the player to see the Boss. I would also like for the 2nd guard to follow the player to make sure they don't try any funny business. Once in the Keep, I will have a trigger scripted that starts another scene between the player, guards and Boss, and the Boss will tell the guards to resume their duties and talk to the player.

Here's the problems I can see: It would be possible for the player to simply turn around and go do other stuff for as long as they want to while the Main guard is leading the way into the Keep. And since the 2nd guard is following the player, they would perpetually have this guard running around with them. Instead of having a FollowPlayer package on the 2nd guard, I could just make it a travel package, but then I would have both guards going into the keep with the possibility the player didn't follow them at all.

I suppose that's not the end of the world and the worst that would happen would be the 2 guards went into the keep and just stood there waiting for the player to come and run through the trigger and start the next scene.

I'm just trying to account for some of the things people might do in the course of playing that can potentially break my quests. I guess if everyone would simply just do as they're supposed to and follow along this wouldn't be a problem. But we all know players do some crazy things, lol.

A few thoughts:

1) The simplest solution would be that if the player agrees to talk to the boss, you remove the player controls, drop a follow AI package on the player, and thereby force them to follow the main guard. I don't know if you want to remove that element of player control, though.

2) Alternatively, could you limit the player's opportunity to turn around and do stuff by steps like closing and locking the gate behind them? Have all the other doors be locked? And/or confiscating their weapons? Give them more incentive to follow. I don't know if that makes sense, story-wise, though. How suspicious are these people?

3) You could have a script where if the player gets too far away from the lead guard, the lead guard stops and the second guard draws his/her weapon and says something threatening.

4) How complex is the route the lead guard takes? If it's fairly straight and simple, you could perhaps have a trigger box spanning the route, and if the player leaves that trigger box, something happens--the guards issue warnings or get hostile, the scene resets so the guards stop leading/following, etc. Or just reset the scene if the player passes through the front gate again, and some variable that's assigned when the player talks to the boss isn't set.

I really like the attention to detail you're giving this project, BTW--I'm very much looking forward to playing the finished mod!

Yeah, I think that would probably be best to do. Please forgive my ignorance, but would I do that package via an alias for the player with a package in the alias package stack? I could set conditions to only be valid during that particular stage, and I think I should be able to remove player controls in the stage fragment that validates the package. I've never actually added a forced package on the player, lol. I can also look at MQ101 which does this for the first half of the opening sequence.

As for details, I'm sometimes my own worst enemy in terms of over thinking things. But hopefully, a lot of little details that I am anol about add up to a more immersive experience for the user. But it takes me 3x as long to do stuff, lol!

I feel your pain. Elemental Mastery would probably be done by now, but I'm such a stickler for visual effects, everything has to be just so... glad to see you haven't given up on Helgen Rebuilt despite the game bugs you're encountering.

I've never actually done this either, LOL; I've just seen it done, so know it is possible. What you describe is how I'd go about doing it, yes.

I would:

• Disable Player Controls (leaving looking about, switched on)
  
• Add Travel Package to Main Guard (location of BOSS)
  
• Add Follow (Main Guard) Package to Player
  
• Add Follow (Player) Package to 2nd Guard

At the end of the route, probably as the player enters the room with the boss (?) stick a Trigger-Plane and as the player walks through it, remove PACKAGES (leave controls diabled) - guards will go back to sandbox packages, OR give them new packages to go back outside - and immediately get BOSS to Force-Greet Player (then re-enable Player Controls).

I did almost exactly the same thing ... works really well ... I have some long, dark corridors that the player is led down (and can turn his head to see the guard "behind") to an eventual encounter with my scary-monster.

(It sort of reminded me of that opening Scene in HL2 ... With the Metro ride )

AWESOME! Thanks h4. I will most likely be doing all this in one or maybe two scenes, so that helps a lot.