Could Use Some Help Setting Up a Quest

[ZeroCore]

I decided to try out making a quest. It doesn't do anything, per say, but I wanted to try something simple.

 

The idea was this; I'd essentially make a quest that was essentially a day counter, almost like a calendar.

 

The idea is this; when the game starts up, the quest begins and the quest's script begins taking count of the days that go by. In one of the player's homes (I'm thinking Breezehome, just for the sake of simplicity and familiarity) there would be an activator. When you go up to the activator and press it, it spits out a message box with the day count on it. I'd like the day count to persist between game sessions, so when you load up Skyrim the next time, you can go up to the counter and it will still remember all the in-game days that it has been active for.

 

Can anyone please tell me how to do something like this? I've never made a quest for Skyrim before, and I was never really that good with making quests for Morrowind or Oblivion either. If anyone could point me towards a tutorial or something, or something that could tell me how to make a quest which does this, I'd appreciate it.

 

If anyone could tell me how to do this without a quest, I'd be impressed, but still, I'd like to use a quest to make this simple day counter thing in order to get a hold of how quests and their scripts and aliases work in Skyrim.

 

Just so you know:

 

I do know what a quest alias is. It's essentially a pointer of sorts that the quest uses to identify objects in the game world, be it a player, creature, NPC, object, or so on.

I am familiar with quest stages. I did make a few quests for Morrowind and Oblivion in the past after all. Quest stages are essentially like pages in a book; they are the "steps" that the quest goes through from start to finish.

I am familiar with globals. Globals, in this case, are numeric values that the whole game can access, sort of like the ultimate public integer, float, short, long, ect... They can also be used to store numeric data in between sessions as their values are placed in your save file. They can be static and unchanging, or they can be variables and be altered.

I am running SKSE and have a somewhat decent grasp now of how to use its functions after experimenting with it for the past few days and running various test mods that I made in Skyrim.

[IsharaMeradin]

Don't think you need a quest for this as the functions to obtain time passed is readily available to the scripting engine. You simply need an activator with attached script to display what you want. To get you started, I have a mod that displays the current game time via the press of a hotkey. There is an optional file version that contains sundials which when activated display the time. It would basically be the same thing as what you want to do. You'll just be extrapolating the game time data differently than what I did.

[ZeroCore]

  On 1/24/2016 at 3:43 AM, IsharaMeradin said:

Don't think you need a quest for this as the functions to obtain time passed is readily available to the scripting engine. You simply need an activator with attached script to display what you want. To get you started, I have a mod that displays the current game time via the press of a hotkey. There is an optional file version that contains sundials which when activated display the time. It would basically be the same thing as what you want to do. You'll just be extrapolating the game time data differently than what I did.

 

I appreciate that, but I really do want to do this as a quest just so I can get the idea behind making quests down, as so far making quests for skyrim is confusing to me.