LE Load Doors versus Cave Entrances

[AnubianDragon]

Something has been bothering me about Skyrim for a long while. Cave entrances are amazingly engaging, wandering headlong into the darkness as you enter or slightly blinded out into the light as you make your departure. The best thing about these entrances is the fact that walking triggers the load transition, rather than pressing a button.

 

In the reverse, however, there are the load doors, which frustrate me on several levels. First, they ruin the tense nature of dungeon crawling. I usually do not use a map while I'm spelunking, and I know the area will be transitioning immediately when I encounter a door that says "Wooden Door to Inner Depths" or something similar. Second, I constantly trigger load screens accidentally when I creep up to a door and press the button to fling it open, realizing too late that the door next to it is the real door and the one I activated was a 'load' door.

 

[i understand for functionality that ladders and trap doors need to maintain the 'activate to travel' mechanics to properly function in the game, but these are more obviously transition points in environments, whereas regular doors are indistinguishable from load doors.]

 

 

...So, to get to my point. I wonder if it would be possible to mod the 'load' door code of Skyrim so that they would function as a regular 'opening' door, with a transition space added beyond to trigger the load screen. By which I mean, reprogram the doors to open as any other and then force the player to physically walk into the opening beyond before they load into the next area, just as cave entrances function (opening up to light if the door leads to the Skyrim map, or to darkness if it leads to any interior map). I believe it was originally planned for the interior doors to function in this manner, but was removed to prevent important items from being 'kicked' into that transition space and thus becoming trapped. Since that doesn't actually concern me, I figured I'd ask.

 

 

After several attempts to locate a mod that performs this function I have come to the following two possibilities:

 

1.) I am the only person who is interested in such a thing.

 

This is actually quite likely, as transition doors have been a component of Elder Scroll games since (to my recollection) Daggerfall. If I'm the only one who's bothered by the phenomenon, I'll drop it.

 

 

2.) It would be too difficult to change the function of the doors.

 

This is also quite likely, for I fear that each door would have to be altered individually (rather than by sweeping re-coding), and some doors may not possess full opening animations (which would prevent them from opening all the way and thus prevent the player from moving past them into the 'transition space'). Since replacing EVERY load door in the whole of Skyrim is completely out of the question, this would stop the request in its tracks.

 

 

 

If, however, I am wrong on both those accounts, I hope the concept intrigues someone enough to play with the idea.

Edited December 19, 2012 by AnubianDragon

[Dudeman325]

I think you mostly nailed it with number 2. The fact alone that, afaik, you can't replace things like that dynamically, it would require a manual edit of every cell containing such a transition, which could cause strange mod conflicts when they edit the same cells, as well as a heavy workload, even if doing a single transition isn't that hard in and of itself.

 

It would be great if the game world was built from the ground up with only that transition in mind, but since it wasn't, it becomes rather time consuming to undo and redo a whole lot of stuff.

Edited December 19, 2012 by Dudeman325