Hi! I'm looking to do a couple things with the bards but can't quite fully grasp how they're set up. I'm familiar with the basic structure, and in the past have made extremely minor changes to the main bard script to make them only play instrumentals (there's a function that calls a random song from a pseudo enum, I just restricted the values to be instrumentals) but I still don't fully grasp what actually triggers them to play, and when. Any times, durations, etc. are not part of any of the AI packages, and the main bard quest script, while containing all of the functions necessary for them to play the scenes for the songs, doesn't seem to have conditions for when and why.

I know I'm just missing something.

Using Mikhail as the example in the Bannered Mare, he has an AI package, but it's just a sandbox package. There is also an xmarker, but that's a linked ref to the main quest script, which again does not control timing, and itself has no scripts or triggers on it. The main quest script (BardSongsScript.psc) looks to only contain the methods to play the songs, and handle requests, but again, nothing about triggering the songs randomly by themselves. I thought there'd be an idle marker / trigger box in the Bannered Mare that if he wandered into would kick things off, but no dice.

What I'd like to do is

• Control when and for how long they play; I want them to constantly play random songs from 6pm-1am.
• Add new songs to their repertoire (this looks to be fairly simple, new scenes for playback, alter the script to add them to the "pool", if only I could get point 1)

Any help or insight would be great. Again, I think I'm just missing something simple, but bards are rigged up in a way that most other NPCs do not appear to be. Thanks!

Lucky you! I'm implementing the bard framework based off of the vanilla one (recreating it) for Beyond Skyrim RIGHT NOW.

The way it works, is PlaySong eventually triggers a scene based on what number was randomly chosen. A number is also randomly chosen for requested songs on whether or not they should have some short intro text (i.e. "This song is dedicated to the Dragonborn, savior of Tamriel"). For instrumentals, it's a scene in BardSongsInstrumental. You should take a look at the scenes; I'm still implementing requests and am not around to Bard Instrumental ones yet. I don't know when/how they are triggered yet, I haven't looked, like I said - still doing requests right now, which are directly triggered by dialogue.

That would indeed be how you add new songs. Just be sure the new scenes have the appropriate scene fragments in the main scene script (changed by going to "Edit Data").