I'm making a quest the will always be running as part of my mod so I can have my NPCs talk to each other randomly once in a while. What is the general procedure to do this? How are the Dialogues structured? How are the dialogues initialized/chosen by the game?

They aren't completely random. They need at least one condition to fire if it's not one you made for a specific quest stage or attack. steal, hello, or other canned action.

Hmm, that means I'm going to have to figure out some way to cycle things. Perhaps a quest stage based on day/time... Any ideas how Bethesda set up the semi-random ones?

Yes, that would work. I'll post the code tomorrow so you can see it. The one thing they DID do better is time based waits because my custom companion fires a different stage every 24 hours.

Can you give an example of what you're trying to do? Do you mean random conversations such as those that happen between NPCs in the Whiterun market area? Those are scenes in quests that are triggered whenever sandboxing NPCs get close enough to trigger a "hello" event in Story Manager, I believe.

I've been wondering this too. Like how in Oblivion two NPC's would walk up to eachother and go:

NPC 1: Hello
2: Did you hear about the emporer? Terrible.
1: It really was. I hope he'll be alright.
2: He's dead.
1: Oh.
2: Goodbye!
1: See you!

I'd love it if my NPC's randomly engaged in conversation. Not scripted into a scene, not triggered by hand. None of that. But I think they may have cut that functionality mostly because it was too random and stupid and ended up more like this:

1: Did you hear about the emperor?
2: I like apple pie!
1: Mudcrabs are frightening.
2: It's raining.
1: Bye.
2: Good morning.

Basically all the dialogue (at this point) is after my questline, and so I want them to do simple 'hellos' to each other, and talk about where they are and things they do, and maybe reflect on that questline. Hopefully I can make like 40-50 different dialogues they can "randomly" engage in, where the dialogue would be basically a linear conversation. All my past quests will be closed, so my aim was to create a new quest that will always be running (and hidden) to put all these dialogues in.

But the condition can be GetRandomPercent.

Yes! Just what I needed.


Next, are these little dialogues handled through scenes or just dialogue view trees? Since the player isn't involved, I'd imagine it would have to be scenes...

Scenes.

The point of dialogue is to let the player choose what to say.

Well, guess I finally get to learn how the scenes work then

Thanks!