» Tue Oct 27, 2015 2:57 am So, in the past few days of research (I'm completely new at this!) I have learned that modding Skyrim is a lot like the sneaking game mechanic. Sure, you could just walk right in and put your scripts and changes in all of the most logical places for them to go, easy! ...But then your mod would be incompatible with any other mod that touches those same parts of the game. It's probably inevitable in some cases, but on the other hand, with a little bit of finesse and sheer determination, you might be able to sneak your content in through some crazy loophole of a back door.
Example:
Spoiler
To force myself to learn things I thought I needed to know, I decided to make a simple mod called "Immersive Chef Hat" that would do one thing: Make the player auto-equip a Chef Hat when cooking, if one is present in their inventory. I didn't want my mod to be incompatible with the numerous crafting/cooking/food/needs mods out there, so after banging my head against the wall for a couple days, here's what I did: I made a quest with a script attached that creates an MCM menu to turn Immersive Chef Hat Mode on and off. Next, I realized that any helpful events that might normally do the trick, such as OnActivate, would have to be placed in the proper context (ObjectReference or Actor, probably) and that would potentially break those other mods. So, I resigned myself to find something in Form that would work. And then I found OnAnimationEvent, which would allow me to reference any actor--in this case, my PlayerRef--and any "animation event." I didn't know what an animation event was but I soon found out it was not simply the name of the Idle animation being performed. But after reading [post='1423396-onanimationevent']this entire thread[/post], I found Verteiron's excellent Animation Catcher and used it to identify all of the exact animation events that were happening when my character started and ended cooking. The ones that looked promising were FireSpitCookingStir (at start) and idleChairGetUp (at end). So I wrote my script to fire when these events happened in order. On FireSpitCookingStir, it equips the chef hat, and if that is followed by idleChairGetUp, it unequips. Tested it in game and it worked perfectly. (Probably won't work for the DLC cooking furniture, as I don't have the DLC to find the animation events, and I haven't tested it on Cooking Pots yet).
TL;DR, I made a mod to equip a chef hat when cooking for practice, did it using OnAnimationEvent so it would be compatible with other mods. Modders, how did I do? Is there an obvious solution I overlooked?
My question is this: There are a lot of other areas of the game where Animation Events won't help. If I wanted to, say, add one dialogue option to an NPC, but not conflict with other mods that edit that same NPC, is there a way to do this? Or if I wanted to add a craftable item to a list, could I make sure other mod-added items stayed on that list too? What do you do to avoid jumping through crazy compatibility hoops like patching for 9,000 other mods?
I wish I could just find the answer on my own, by dissecting other mods and learning from them. But so far I can't get the Creator Kit or TES5Edit to let me look inside their scripts. If you could tell me how to do that, you'd be teaching me to fish! (instead of giving me a fish for today).
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I'm a total newb, but I have tremendous respect for the modders that have made this game so much more fun, and I really appreciate your help.
