Crossmod Interactions

[Skevitj]

Three mods I make use of almost always are WMK, Underground Hideout and xCalibr (refering to it's inclusion of CRAFT). All three of these mods affect the workbench in a destructive manner, ie, you need 1 unique workbench per mod. This inevitably leads to thinking about how the implementation could be changed such that they can all work side-by-side on the same workbench, without relying on each other being present.

 

The natural extension of this idea is to apply it to lists, where (unlike the messages used in menus) there are functions which allow for various lists between mods to be concatenated.

 

The idea for this mod is hence: A "global" esm file which contains a number of commonly used lists, and possibly a number of multipurpose lists as well as quest/script based "functions" capable of managing communication between mods to populate these lists in an ordered manner. The obvious use for this is in sorters, where instead of a mod like Underground Hideout having it's own unique lists for what it can sort, it references the lists in the global esm and sorts based on those. Mods which add items would contain their own lists of items, which they could "pass" to the global functions to be concatenated onto the global lists, enabling any mod to accommodate others, without directly interacting which would lead to dependence.

 

Examples of lists in the global would be:

Small weapons, Energy weapons...

Buff chems (Mentats etc.), Food (stimpacks, Punga, etc.)...

Power armor, clothing...

Ammo classes (ballistic, energy, etc.)...

 

The second motivation for this idea was a mod request for an improved chem lab which could "blueprint" and create and trivial chem compound from any mod. With a system like this, a mod which adds chems just needs to pass it's contents list to the global function and then the chem lab mod and all others would read off the global chem list to identify the use-able chems. Items in the unmodded game would automatically be included in the lists by the global.

 

At any rate: This is more an idea I'm looking for early feedback on than a serious idea with a lot of thought gone into it, so constructive thoughts on the idea are encouraged. As far as I see it, anything which works towards increasing the level of compatibility between mods is a good thing. After this we just need the script functions to concatenate messages and we're most of the way there.