Looking for guidance on UI modding

[storm312]

Hi, I'm looking for guidance from experienced modders on how to mod UI screens (workbench, hud, etc) and the pipboy and at a high level what is actually possible to do and what is not based on some of my goals.

 

My background: I'm a React web dev and am well experienced in that realm but have almost no experience with Flash and some novice experience with Creation Kit modding. Picking up ActionScript should be pretty quick for me.

 

Potential goals:

• Change sort order of inventory items
• Add new pipboy tabs that divide out items from other tabs
• Change hard-coded keybinds for menus and add keyboard/mouse event handling
• Do a complete UI overhaul (mainly thinking the workshop building UI)

 

I've scavenged around a bit and so far I've worked out the basic process to be this:

 

1. Extract the interface ba2 archives

2. Use SWF decompiler to convert to FLA project

3. Do ActionScript/FLA editing.

4. Compile back to SWF.

5. Package as a ESP plugin and load the mod.

 

When I open the pipboy_invpage.fla in Adobe Animate, all I see is a scene with some vector graphics (attached):

 

Questions I have:

1. I assume what's not visible in the screenshot is programmatically rendered (lines, text, etc)?
2. How do the scripts get initialized by the game engine?
3. What about event loops?
4. Is there any way to query the environment dynamically (like through the Fallout 4 dev console similar to the browser console when doing web dev?) or is just logging based debugging?
5. Is there a way to persist data and reload it or am I limited to an available API?
6. How do dependencies work? For example when I opened the inv page in Animate, it complained about missing fonts.
7. Are there any API docs? (probably not I'm guessing other than what's on the Creation Kit wiki)
8. Is there any way to run the pipboy or menus in isolation from the game engine, like injecting my own script context and running it in Adobe Animate? (probably not)

 

Thanks!