unidentified items only for a specific character

[aikawayumi]

I understand being able to let your characters have custom responses when you "examine" an item. Though is it possible to have the actual item's name show something generic like, "paper" for papyrus or "weapon" for a thulecite club? Like making them unidentified only when using that specific character?

[ClumsyPenny]

Wagstaff's tools have a mechanic kind of like that. They have vague names when viewed by most characters except for Winona, who knows their actual name. This is handled by the function displaynamefn in the tools prefab file.

In your case, it sounds like you want this to apply to most items in the game. In that case, I'd hook into EntityScript:GetBasicDisplayName() and have some special behavior for your character there. Here's some example code I made (it goes in modmain):

local _old_getbasicdisplayname = GLOBAL.EntityScript.GetBasicDisplayName
function GLOBAL.EntityScript:GetBasicDisplayName(...)
	local name
	
	-- Make this run only if the player's prefab matches with your character
	if GLOBAL.ThePlayer and GLOBAL.ThePlayer.prefab == "yourcharacterprefab" then -- Change the prefab to match your character!!
		-- Check if the item matches any of our possible names
		name = self:HasTag("weapon") and "Weapon"
			or self.prefab == "papyrus" and "Paper"
    		-- Add new lines as needed here
			or nil
	end
	
	-- If a possible name was found, return that one
	if name ~= nil then
		return name
	end
	
	-- If all else fails, use the old behavior for displaying names
	return _old_getbasicdisplayname(self, ...)
end

Keep in mind to replace "yourcharacterprefab" with the respective character prefab name, and also remember that this runs on the client as well, so you won't have access to components and a few other things to find the item names to replace. I recommend sticking to tags (HasTag) and prefab names (.prefab), just like in my example.

Edited September 1, 2023 by ariadnesGambit

[aikawayumi]

1 hour ago, ariadnesGambit said:

-- Check if the item matches any of our possible names
		name = self:HasTag("weapon") and "Weapon"
			or self.prefab == "papyrus" and "Paper"
    		-- Add new lines as needed here
			or nil

This part kinda feels weird to me. not sure if it is lua's syntax or DST's.
i normally read this as "setting the variable "name" to spear and a string "Weapon".
so, like concatenating both spear's name and the string "weapon".

If ill be coding this, I might go with this algorithm:

if self.prefab == "papyrus" then
	name = "Paper"
end

doing so though would then probably give me a lot of elseif's so your way is actually cleaner. I think this would be similar to Java's "case"? Anyway, yea, this works and is actually simpler than having multiple if's. Thank you.

[ClumsyPenny]

4 hours ago, aikawayumi said:

This part kinda feels weird to me. not sure if it is lua's syntax or DST's.

It's Lua's syntax, using "and" and "or" like that is basically just like using "if" and "else". I think you should do whatever makes the most sense to you, after all the code needs to be readable to you first and foremost!

4 hours ago, aikawayumi said:

Anyway, yea, this works and is actually simpler than having multiple if's. Thank you.

You're welcome!