I've been testing my localisation of the game and wanted to invite Turuko and Kobort in my party but strangely only Turuko joined the group. Note that I haven't done anything with their dialogues yet, so it's not my fault. I can talk to the big guy as if he were my companion but he isn't added to the party pool. I had my PC and Spugnoir in the party. Any ideas what happened? I tried to disband and re-invite them. I talked to Turuko and what? Now Kobort's in the party and Turuko just stands there doing nothing. They joined in normally when Sugnoir was outside the party. --------------- AHA! I have the dll set to allow 6PCs in party, which means only 2NPCs. That was the problem. Hmm but I wonder if it was possible to make the slots overlap, that is to make it possible for the player to make up to 8PCs AND add NPCs if his group is smaller than 8 at the same time without having to change the number in Front-End.
Hmm... is there any way to hide characters inside the character pool? If there's a way to do it... maybe you could add all the NPCs as PCs. Hide them in the character pool so that nobody can pick them that way. Then, through the dialog, instead of having them join up normally, there's probably a way you could reference the character pool and add them to the party the same way you would there. It's in interesting concept, but if it is possible, it'll be a PITA to do. It's probably the closest you'll find to what you want.
The PC count selector in frontend patches the temple.dll (where party max size, NPC limit, AI followers limit etc...) are defined. If you patch the dll to allow more than 8 PC's/NPC's and have 9 or more PC's/NPC's in the party in game, the game will crash. You could make NPC's add themselves to the party as AI followers instead of NPC's, but they would (most likely) act only as thier strategy.tab entry tells them too (like animal companions do).
You could try using the permanant "suggestion" bug on them, or has suggestion been changed into dominate monster recently?