Feasibility of adding new perk trees (sort of)?

[Yoshiquest]

I've seen plenty of mods that have wanted to add new perk trees. However, they do so by either a.) replacing an existing perk tree (creates issues with perk overhauls, and can also screw up vanilla skyrim if nothing is done to compromise for the missing tree), or b.) using a very ugly dialogue-box-based UI (very inconvenient to use).

 

I also know that it isn't possible to add perk trees directly, due to them being hard-coded.

 

However, I came up with a couple of ideas that might allow us to "add" perk trees. I'm not sure if they will work or not however, since I have little experience with Skyrim modding.

 

They are:

 

Plan A: Create a New GUI

 

Idea here is simple: If we can't add a tree directly, why not mimic the functionality? Presumably, we already have the visual assets necessary (texture of the nodes themselves, background images, sound effect, etc.), and the mechanical functions have already been done without the tree system itself. So I'm thinking that it could be possible to simply create a new GUI, that is near-identical in appearance and functionality to the vanilla tree GUI. However, I'm not sure if you even CAN add new GUIs in this way (I've only ever seen dialogue-based UIs implemented). But if a fully graphical UI COULD be created, this could be a way to do it.

 

Plan B: Tree Swapping

 

This implies more complications than the above, but the premise is as follows. I know that existing trees can be replaced by other trees. However, what if we could replace a tree dynamically? By that I mean that, when the user pushes a button, for example, then it swaps out the nodes, text, and functionality of the old vanilla trees with the new trees. Of course, the issue here is that I'm not sure if it's even possible to swap them out dynamically; for all I know they might be fixed upon booting up Skyrim. But this too could be possible.

 

 

 

Note that this is NOT a mod request, as I am not asking for someone else to make this. This is just because I'm just really curious if this could actually work or not. If either of these IS feasible, I might take a look at tackling it myself (I don't have Skyrim modding experience, but I'm a programmer by nature and learn rather quickly). The main thing is that if both of these are impossible, any further research would just be a waste of time.