LE Reference properties and Scripts

[woodbyte]

Just posted this over at the skyrim forums (link) but this feels like the proper place to put it:

 

Hi there,

 

I'm working on the "Dynamic Fires" mod with the aim of making every currently static fire in Skyrim react appropriately to fire/frost spells, torches, etc.

To do this I suppress the original models/lights by setting the models to some null asset and the lights to a black color. Then I dynamically scan for those original objects and replace them with my dynamic fires (using quest aliases). I realize this may seem like an over-complicated way to go about it, but I wanted to make uninstalling the mod as simple as possible, so changing the state of the vanilla objects was out of the question (more on this below) (edit: doing it this way also has the added benefit of supporting even fires added by other mods, as long as they use the vanilla objects)

 

Anyway, my problem is each light in the world has additional information stored in their references that overrides the base properties (radius, fade) along with data that's not present in the base light, like shadow bias. To make sure I don't change the original look and feel of the affected areas I need to be able to replicate those properties on the newly placed dynamic lights, and I can't seem to find a way to do this. Am I missing something? Is this at all possible?

 

If not: my backup plan is to remove the original light suppression and have the dynamic fires 'attach' themselves to the closest light source they can find (if one is present) and enable/disable them as needed. This of course can lead to an inconsistent game state once the mod is uninstalled, since some lights that were enabled might have been disabled by the mod. Is there a way to automatically re-enable some objects once the mod is uninstalled? Or am I reduced to having some uninstall function the user must call (by console or pretty interface) before the mod is uninstalled?

 

Yes, I may be taking user friendliness to the extreme given that its just a mod, but with the advent of the workshop many users expect a care-free subscribe/unsubscribe model, and I can understand that and hope it's possible to provide in this case.

 

Thanks for reading, and hope you can help.