I would like to disable player controls for a short time if he drinks a potion (and add a 'gulping' sound and maybe an animation). No matter whether he does it from inventory mode or via hotkey (if from inventory the controls would be disabled after he closes the inventory obviously). What conditions do I need to find out whether the player used a potion during the last frame or a short time like 0.1 seconds? Can use Obse.

IsAlchemyItem sound interesting, but I don't know how to find out what item was the last one the player activated.

Or am I missing a simple function to achieve this?

Any potion ? - don't know about obse but if you added a script effect to the potion that sets a quest variable ?

Problem is that I need any potion, not a specific one added by my mod.

Listen for the sound of a potion being drank? GetSoundPlaying??

Sounds like a good idea, but either I'm not using the function correctly or there is a problem with it. I made a debug message, but the script never triggered. I tried the following:

if player.getsoundplaying "NPCHumanSwallow" > 0 ; NPCHumanSwallow is the sound effect ID in the CS for the 'drink potion' sound
if player.getsoundplaying "*swallow*" 150 > 0 ; tried with a radius setting and a wild card since the sound effect points to a directory with 3 different sounds
if getsoundplaying "*swallow*" > 0 ; tried without specific reference

The script is a quest script that runs at 0.1 fquestdelaytime, the sound effects have ~0.4 seconds duration so it should be enough time to return true.

Is it maybe a problem that the sound effect in the CS points to a directory with three random sound effects and not a single wav file? Is there anything wrong with the way I use the function?

IIRC, there should be a "Potions drank" misc. stat that you can track using getPCMiscStat.

Unfortunately there is only one for 'potions made'.

Erm, not sure just what the heck is going on, but, I can't even come up with the right page in the CS Wiki for getsoundplaying.........

I think the Wiki is not up to date with the latest OBSE commands. http://obse.silverlock.org/obse_command_doc.html#GetSoundPlaying is the description from the OBSS documentation.

looks like you could maybe use "*swallow" as your search parameter? instead of three individual checks? my guess is you would have to be checking in both menumode, and gamemode blocks as well?

I didn't use the three checks I posted at once in a script, I used one of them at a time and none of them worked.

Like

if getsoundplaying "*swallow*" > 0message "Potion"endif

So far I only tested with a gamemode block and potions used via hotkey while in gamemode, but if I'd get it to work correctly I'd make a menumode part of the script as well of course.

What about "if getsoundplaying "NPCHumanswallow" > 0" or "if getsoundplaying NPCHumanswallow > 0"

Maybe it was the reference messing up number one, and the extra "*" messing up number three?

Indeed, that was the problem. Without reference and radius it works like expected with

if getsoundplaying NPCHumanSwallow > 0

I feel a bit dumb now for not trying this, but thanks for the help.