I've always thought that wandering through Skyrim, can seem under-populated, or runnning into the same bandit camp knowing that its only 3 bandits.
Rather than manually add new actors to the game world, which in itself would be a massive undertaking , i wanted to see whether it was possible to dynamically replicate existing actors in the world.
I already had a restarting quest to dynamically increase the health of all actors, so this was my starting point.
This quest cast a magic effect on the alias, when the quest restarted, actors with this magic effect are excluded from being placed in the quest. After several attempts, i managed to get a working prototype, the first working attempt ended up in Attack of the Clones, with cloned actors replicating cloned actors.
This is the script that i ended up using:
Scriptname DynamicAddAbilityScript Extends ReferenceAlias ReferenceAlias Property AliasRef AutoSpell Property IncreasedHealthSpell AutoBool Property OwningQuest Auto Event OnInit() RegisterForSingleUpdate(1)EndEvent Event OnUpdate() Actor QuestAlias = AliasRefGetReference() as Actor if QuestAlias == True && QuestAlias.Is3DLoaded() if OwningQuest == True ActorBase ClonedRef = (AliasRef.GetReference()).GetBaseObject() as ActorBase debug.trace("1.ClonedRef = "+ClonedRef) Form ClonedForm = ClonedRef as Form debug.trace("2.ClonedForm = "+ClonedForm) QuestAlias.PlaceAtMe(ClonedForm) endif UtilityWait(1) IncreasedHealthSpell.Cast(QuestAlias) endif EndEvent
This is by no means without issues, as i need to prevent certain actors from being cloned.
I suspect that i may need a script to clean up dead cloned actors. At no point am i thinking of releasing this as a mod.
This is more an attempt at a proof of concept, i do have concerns however whether this will cause issues such as game crashes, corrupted game saves, game save bloat.
I have looked at the SKSE Function TempClone() and whether the method that i am attempting is similar and whether the notes in the TempClone() apply in this situation.
Any opinions would be appreciated