SKSE

[gurleygirl]

Bethesda would have no reason to pay for someone to develop SKSE as we know it. If they were inclined to do anything like that, they'd have updated Papyrus to have those functions built in natively instead. I'm not sure why people have this idea that SKSE needs to be written as a dll injector doing things some AVs find suspicious when the company has the source code to their game and can modify it as they see fit. They certainly wouldn't need to pay the SKSE team to do the job when they have their own internal developers.

 

Valid and thanks for the insight. In which case, I have to wonder, with the popularity of SKSE and its obvious practical applications, why Bethesda did not include a SKSE-like capability in the SE upgrade and charge for it. I still think the Skyrim community of players and developers might have been better served had Bethesda done so. As is we are playing a free upgrade that, though granted is much more stable than the original Skyrim, lacks the capability enabled by SKSE. Of course my hypothetical falls under the category: If wishes were horses, the beggars would ride. :laugh:

[darthdoull]

Valid and thanks for the insight. In which case, I have to wonder, with the popularity of SKSE and its obvious practical applications, why Bethesda did not include a SKSE-like capability in the SE upgrade and charge for it. I still think the Skyrim community of players and developers might have been better served had Bethesda done so. As is we are playing a free upgrade that, though granted is much more stable than the original Skyrim, lacks the capability enabled by SKSE. Of course my hypothetical falls under the category: If wishes were horses, the beggars would ride. :laugh:

 

The hierarchy of Bethesda dilutes the idea if it were ever brought to the table. Mods/Admins might pick up the chatter then it gets passed to tech support, tech support either gets an email directly from people or takes the ticket from a Mod/Admin and ignores it or passes it to their supervisor. Then the supervisor needs to review it and see if it passes as a quality idea then they either ignore it or pass it on to quality control, then if it passes quality control as a feasible idea the supervisor passes it on to management. Then management must decide if it's viable because they need to convince their board of directors why it's a good business idea. He's got to convince the treasurer(s) why Bethesda should put money into development of a script extender. He's got to convince business leaders, some of which never played a video game in their life, how a script extender would help build their product. Then the chairman of the board would be listening to this and asking the tough questions. The board chair is one step away from reaching the CEO, in most cases the CEO probably won't even hear about it unless he reads his report on a minor board meeting regarding a simple script extender. And these people swim in an ocean of numbers and spreadsheets so they think in profit margins not if it sounds cool. And by one small miracle if it were approved, it would have to survive the next test: development hell. Development teams have projects they're working on, priority pipelines for big games in-development, development meetings, and individuals already working on specific tasks. A script extender for a re-release that was just brought to the table would be low on the to-do list. Might be even lower if they're aware of the existence of SKSE.

 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, you've got committees, programmers, social clubs and everything else governing the life expectancy of this one very simple but plausible idea. There's a reason why in most big companies like this, ideas seldom reach the right ears and get implemented into games. It would've taken community outcry and big news stories to sway the people on the top. So far we've just been posting forum threads and some very small change.org petitions. The beggars rode the horses alright, it just wasn't enough.

[Arthmoor]

And you're still thinking in terms of implementing an extender when they wouldn't want to do things that way. They'd implement it as a direct patch to Papyrus itself, which would be quite easy for the Papyrus guy to get done in light of the Creation Club.

 

SKSE as we know it now will never be an official thing. The best we could hope for are new functions in Papyrus down the road.

[darthdoull]

And you're still thinking in terms of implementing an extender when they wouldn't want to do things that way. They'd implement it as a direct patch to Papyrus itself, which would be quite easy for the Papyrus guy to get done in light of the Creation Club.

 

SKSE as we know it now will never be an official thing. The best we could hope for are new functions in Papyrus down the road.

 

Agreed, a Papyrus patch would be the most likely route. The thing is they'd still need to get it through the various quality checks and management in order to make it possible. They've already got a working product which is Papyrus as we currently know it. Management could decide, "You know, it's fine as it is. We have happy customers and we've met sales figures. I think we're doing good, we don't need any additions to this right now."

 

Another possibility is they already know about SKSE64 being developed and that increases the unlikelihood of any additions to Papyrus. You've met sales figures and fans are already making it so, there's little incentive I guess is the right word here.

[Boombro]

Will, one can always ask them, who knows? They like modding and the modders as one can easily see.

[nightscrawl]

 

Bethesda would have no reason to pay for someone to develop SKSE as we know it. If they were inclined to do anything like that, they'd have updated Papyrus to have those functions built in natively instead. I'm not sure why people have this idea that SKSE needs to be written as a dll injector doing things some AVs find suspicious when the company has the source code to their game and can modify it as they see fit. They certainly wouldn't need to pay the SKSE team to do the job when they have their own internal developers.

 

Valid and thanks for the insight. In which case, I have to wonder, with the popularity of SKSE and its obvious practical applications, why Bethesda did not include a SKSE-like capability in the SE upgrade and charge for it. I still think the Skyrim community of players and developers might have been better served had Bethesda done so. As is we are playing a free upgrade that, though granted is much more stable than the original Skyrim, lacks the capability enabled by SKSE. Of course my hypothetical falls under the category: If wishes were horses, the beggars would ride. :laugh:

 

 

Yes, exactly; it's free. PC modders (creators and users) had to pay nothing to migrate to this new version, and the authors had to pay nothing to begin supporting it. It is a huge incentive to get people to migrate to SSE and bring their mods over. There wouldn't be nearly the range of mods that we have for SSE if the PC folks who already owned the game had to pay for it.

 

SKSE is great and useful, but it's not the absolute requirement for players that people make it out to be. Not everybody needs SKSE in their game and there are some players that refuse to even try playing the game without it and their specialty mod. That is certainly their prerogative, but it isn't doom and gloom for every Skyrim player.

 

If you look at the top 10 files of all time on the Skyrim Nexus, only two require SKSE. Most of the rest of those top files have been released for SSE. There are other big ticket mods as well, like SMIM, CoT, SFO, Realistic Water Two, Ordinator, and on an on that have been ported. There are also authors that took the time to make their mods work without SKSE (I understand that this is not feasible for every mod). The SSE mods are thriving.

 

Probably one of the major differences with the mod selection between Skyrim and SSE going forward will be that the modders for certain Skyrim mods just haven't come back to make SSE pages for them. Look at the Rustic mods. Those don't need any converting at all, and Gamwich (Rustic author) doesn't even have SSE because their computer isn't up for it, but Gamwich went ahead an brought them over to the SSE Nexus for player convenience. But there are a TON of mods that will never be copied over, like some random retexture of a lantern. There are also a great many small, simple mods that only require resaving in the 64-bit CK -- I've converted a few for personal use that work just fine -- which is less than a minute of work. Many of these authors just simply aren't around anymore. Armor textures, weapon textures, clutter textures, furniture textures, one of the most popular hair textures of all time -- these all work; you simply have to find them on the Skyrim Nexus.

 

 

Not everyone would be willing to shell out extra money for a game they already own, even with a built-in SKSE. The PC modders and players are the reason they made it free the first place, as an incentive to get the modders to port over so the new console players actually have mods to use. That is the ONLY reason it's free.

[nightscrawl]

And you're still thinking in terms of implementing an extender when they wouldn't want to do things that way. They'd implement it as a direct patch to Papyrus itself, which would be quite easy for the Papyrus guy to get done in light of the Creation Club.

 

SKSE as we know it now will never be an official thing. The best we could hope for are new functions in Papyrus down the road.

 

Question about this. You say, "as we know it now." I don't know anything about advanced modding or scripting, so forgive the ignorance.

 

Let's say that the Papyrus guy went ahead and did exactly what you say. What would that mean for something like SkyUI? Would it have to be rewritten anyway because it's not "SKSE as we know it now"? And would this also affect the MCM features and all mods that depend on them? Would those things have to be rewritten regardless?

 

Either way, it doesn't sound like a small amount of work to bring something like SkyUI with its MCM features over.

[Xiderpunk]

In terms of SkyUI, I have been using Skylight UI.. which is basically SkyUI without MCM and it's great. Big improvement over SkyUI 2.2 that I was using in SSE. Whilst still in development it's working perfectly! https://github.com/rustequal/SkylightUI/blob/master/dist/SkylightUI_2_1_0056.zip

[Arthmoor]

If every single Papyrus extension that SKSE provides were to be implemented directly as native code, it's quite likely all that would need to happen for SkyUI to get ported over would be for the scripts to be recompiled.

 

Mods that have MCMs would need to then have those scripts recompiled as well.

 

That should mean nothing would need to be rewritten at all but I guess you never know.

[cdcooley]

If every single Papyrus extension that SKSE provides were to be implemented directly as native code, it's quite likely all that would need to happen for SkyUI to get ported over would be for the scripts to be recompiled.

 

Mods that have MCMs would need to then have those scripts recompiled as well.

 

That should mean nothing would need to be rewritten at all but I guess you never know.

If they re-implemented the SKSE functions directly into the game but used the same names then technically the scripts wouldn't even need to be recompiled. It would be absolutely wonderful if it happened, but I would place the chance of that at 0%. It's far more likely the SKSE team will eventually find the time to complete SKSE64.