So here is my dilemma:

I have a mod that makes major changes to multiple cells based upon specific conditions. It (currently) adds new statics to interior cells using PlaceAtMe, which, obviously, is bad from the standpoint of game bloat.

So, my question is, since PlaceAtMe items are saved in the game's save file, would it be possible to:
1. "Extract" these "new" items.
2. Place them in a new ESP file.

This obviously could be accomplished several ways, at least in my head. Once the item is placed in the cell, I would write out the necessary text to a file which would then constitute an ESP file - this would be a time-consuming and difficult task. Or, I could find something that could extract the new information from the ESS save file and try to import that into an ESP file.

So, does anyone perhaps know of a way to help me with this?

I don't. But, is there a reason you can't place them in the cell with the CS and set them as "Initially Disabled", then enable certain ones under specific conditions? The vanilla homes in Fallout 3 are set up like this. You can select a certain "theme" for your home and the related statics are enabled, while all those not related to that "theme" remain disabled. You can then choose another "theme" and the statics related to it will be enabled, while the statics from the previous theme get disabled and all others not related to either remain disabled.

No, that will not work, unfortunately. Well, it could, but it would be majorly time-consuming and would defeat the purpose of the mod.

Any method of doing it automatically would probably require writing an OBSE plugin for the task. Otherwise you could probably write a little utility to extract the data from the ess, but that would require getting the user to manually run it....

How many items are we talking about? It's probably not even worth worrying about unless the number is in the thousands.

Well, see, it is in the thousands. Let's just say it's my unique take on the whole interior-exterior thing.

If it's something where there's a fairly reasonable upper limit -say maybe a thousand or two items- you might want to just accept it as the cost of accomplishing what you want to do, warn users appropriately, and move on (assuming your testing didn't show problems with that many items - I'm not sure at what point the game starts to choke). If it's something though where the number of items can continue growing.... I can't think of any good solution with currently available resources.

Right. Well, once it has done what it has done, it won't do it any more.

I'll keep running tests and see what the overall bloat comes to at the end.

Doesn't OBSE's "deletereference" function come in handy here for cleaning things up? Or are you not looking to have the placed objects purged?

It does, in fact, and that's what I'm using.

That's the solution I found: Place the PlaceAtMe item references into an array, and once they are no longer needed, loop through the array and delete the references.