Is a mod like Sky_UI possible in Fallout 4 with the current Script extender?

[JimboUK]

 

 

I'm absolutely sure that a lot of people would get upset if I made a UI mod that completely removed the Pip-Boy :smile: but like you said, I'd be wise to do what I want to do rather than trying to please everyone else.

 

 

 

 

I wouldn't be too sure on that, the Pipboy Readius for 3/NV was hugely popular, if you go and check the imageshares for those games you'll notice that the Pipboy is rarely seen in character screenshots. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants that hideous contraption off my characters arm in FO4 as well.

[Spherikal]

I've gone through the interface files lightly but I haven't seen any indication that the logic behind the regular vs. power armor Pipboy is stored in there. From an architectural standpoint I would be extremely surprised if logic like that would be done through the UI middleware. That said, I did try to investigate potential implementations. This might be useful even though I didn't really get to the point of a full implementation:

 

After some searching around I found that the PowerArmorPerk (0001F8A9) will change the behavior of accessing the Pipboy if you add it to your character outside of power armor. To be precise: your character will no longer attempt to bring up the Pipboy and the lower horizontal element (Stimpack, Radaway, Perks, etc.) will display properly, but the other UI elements do not display at all. Presumably they would render properly but they're projected onto the Pipboy screen (which your character isn't holding up). It's still fully functional as you might expect -- using WASD or the arrow keys seems to navigate properly, etc. The perk appears to be one of the primary indicators for the game that a player is in power armor as it's used pretty heavily and seems to be what the animations are referencing to change their behavior (presuming that's what the IDLE form type is, somebody more experienced feel free to correct me).

 

The idea behind that being you might be able to spoof the player being in power armor when they try to access their Pipboy, though the obvious problem is finding whatever the engine uses to decide the player should have the power armor UI. If you're unlucky it might not be doable through Papyrus because you don't have a way to spoof it depending on what the engine is looking for. Ultimately I couldn't find anything that would change my UI or HUD -- I tried some other obvious stuff like PowerArmorRace and meddling with SystemPowerArmorQuest, though I'm currently under the impression they're leftovers from a different implementation Bethesda tried when they were doing power armor. You might have more success.

 

All that rambling aside, I'm guessing the most elegant solution is still going to be through F4SE. I don't actually imagine this would be a terribly challenging hook compared to the other cool stuff they do, but I could be 100% wrong and it could be like pulling teeth for all I know. I might see what else I can dig up because it would be legitimately nice to have a UI that isn't locked to the Pipboy.

 

As a total aside I really agree with Ethreon. The build mode UI is probably the worst of the various UIs in the game. I can live with everything else but that thing is just painful every time you want to do anything. I would assume that since everything is done through Scaleform it would be as easy as editing the SWF but if it was that easy I would think one of the many talented people on the Nexus would have already done it. Not sure.

Wow! That's some awesome work NorthWolf!!!

 

I've looked into the .swf-files myself and damn, that's a hard script language to understand. I was kind of hoping it would be similar to HTML/CSS or maybe PHP but that was very naive of me.

 

With the limited knowledge I got (can write HTML/CSS and read PHP fairly well - might even understand some Java if I put some effort into it) I'll probably wont have the expertise needed to make something remotely similar to Sky_UI. I think I'll stick to making nice icons for my items for now :)

[NorthWolf]

Wow! That's some awesome work NorthWolf!!!

 

I've looked into the .swf-files myself and damn, that's a hard script language to understand. I was kind of hoping it would be similar to HTML/CSS or maybe PHP but that was very naive of me.

 

With the limited knowledge I got (can write HTML/CSS and read PHP fairly well - might even understand some Java if I put some effort into it) I'll probably wont have the expertise needed to make something remotely similar to Sky_UI. I think I'll stick to making nice icons for my items for now :smile:

 

Thanks. I made some progress after considering this some more. I'm not really experienced modifying animations and read elsewhere that it was difficult (effectively impossible) to make new or edit existing animations, so I inaccurately assumed I'd have to figure out some hacky way to get the proper animation to play. Turns out I'm wrong: it's pretty trivial to modify the logic behind the animations (just not the animation itself), so it's possible to actually have a simple solution to the animation problem. The real hurdle is still figuring out what's actually deciding the state of the UI. I'll try to see if I can figure out how to spoof it on the player but it's a lot less obvious if it even exists. That said the more I look at this the more I'm inclined to make a guess I'll probably regret: it might not be that hard a plugin to make for F4SE. But that's just a guess (that I'll probably regret).

 

As for the SWF files, ActionScript 3.0 isn't bad to work with. The real problem is that you wouldn't just have to learn ActionScript 3.0 -- the entire UI uses the Scaleform framework AFAIK so you have to have an understanding of that in order to work with it. If you had prior experience with ActionScript 3.0 that might not be an overly difficult journey, but it'd be an especially uphill battle if you didn't have a good amount of experience in a similar object oriented language. Still, you could probably pick up ActionScript 3.0 relatively quickly if you really wanted to, so I wouldn't throw in the towel if you're really passionate about it.