Is it possible to edit default game messages? ("You have captured a soul!")

[Notiophilus]

It always frustrates me that I have to check the wiki to learn what category of soul I just enslaved, so I was thinking of making a very simple (?) mod to change the default message

You have captured a soul!

to

You have captured a petty soul!

...etc.

 

Message "blablabla" creates a new notification, but is it possible to actually change the original text (or replace the original with a new message)?

 

This is probably a very nooby question, but I've never made a mod in my life and I'd like to know if what I want is even possible before launching myself into (ahaha) oblivion. :psyduck: Thanks for the help.

[Pellape]

Soul gems is something many of us tried to capture and play with in scripts but it is not as easy as it looks like really. I have spent weeks on them and failed. Someone here did manage to get something working so if your fine as it is, well that's fine but if you want to get grey hairs... Here's how to check them though.

 

As soon something ends up in your inventory, it will be shown as the Object ID, not a single game world reference, so check a stack of soul gems, is more or less impossible as that stack will have a mix of soul gems from Petty to what ever. If your inventory do not have any filled grand soul gems and gets one, then it is easy to get the correct answer when you check it but if you have 2 filled, one with lesser and one with petty in the same stack, well then it is a 50% chance you get the right answer. If you check a single soul gem reference in that game world, then it might be shown right.

[Notiophilus]

Oh damn, I really picked a fun one to start my modding career on, didn't I :dance: I hoped that the Soul Trap effect would have some kind of flag. Blech. There's no way other than checking the inventory? I suppose with GetSoulLevel you could check everything on load / after trapping a soul and get two lists like

countPetty

countLesser

etc

and then check if countPetty =! countPettyOld, etc

 

Either way it gets messy for me as I also use Soulgem Magic, which stacks souls: 4 petty souls = 1 lesser etc. I suppose if countPetty == countPettyOld - 3 that would be a sign I captured a petty soul (which was merged to a lesser), so... doable, maybe? IDEK. almost certainly it isn't but fun thought experiment eh

 

Had a dig through the wiki and found https://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=Message_Spam which lets you suppress UI messages by posting your intended message twice before the command which triggers a UI message (e.g. player.additem triggering "xxx added.")

 

ETA: Migck's Miscellaneous fixes apparently includes a tweak that does exactly what I wanted it to, but is incompatible with Soulgem Magic (scroll down to the post about "Better Soultrap Message"). So it's possible, it just won't work for me. Nonetheless, it'd be interesting to see how they did it.

 

ETA.v2: xOBSE v0021 includes an OnSoulTrap event handler... which crashes when stolen soul gems are used.

Edited September 24, 2021 by Notiophilus

[Pellape]

Yes. What you can do is to have a spell that checks the targets soul level and from that determent what to do. When it comes to gem sorting, I have it in my house mod, which fails but I also have a nice Grand to Black soul gem transmuter there.

[qwertyasdfgh]

 

ETA.v2: xOBSE v0021 includes an OnSoulTrap event handler... which crashes when stolen soul gems are used.

The crashing is fixed in xOBSE.

[RomanR]

Well, you can find this message as sSoulCapture in Gameplay->Settings menu, so editing it is certainly possible. But it's the only one for a soul capturing, so you will need some script to check soul level and change this message accordingly.