Greetings

What I am trying to do is the following: When the player opens any book in the game to start reading it, I want to get a reference for either that book or it's base object.

The only way I currently know of doing this is to attach a script to a book then place my script inside an OnRead event. The problem is that, as far as I know, the OnRead event only works in scripts that are attached to a book, and only when that particular book is read. I would rather not go this route though because I want my script to fire whenever the player reads any book. To accomplish this would require attaching a script to every book in the game, causing massive conflicts for any mod that modifies books.

If anyone can help me with this, I would greatly appreciate it.

I believe the OnObjectEquipped() event is sent to the player reference when he reads a book. You could use an alias filled by the player that has a script attached that has Event OnObjectEquipped(), check to see if akBaseObject as Book, and then do what you want with the returned Base Object or Object Reference.

Thank you for the help Chesko

My apologies though but I am still new to scripting with Papyrus. What exactly do you mean by "an alias filled by the player"?

Edit: Would this have anything to do with it: http://www.creationkit.com/Quest_Alias_Tab

Yep that's the right place.

1. Make a new quest, give it a name and tick "start game enabled" (or something along those lines). Then click ok, exiting the window, so that the ck generates the rest of the quest window
2. Go back into your quest, navigate to the quest alias tab. Right-click and create a new reference alias.
3. Give it a name. Fill it with the player reference (Cell= (any), Actor= Player). This is where you'll be placing your script. If you cannot see the "ok" button, just click on the name box with your mouse, hold shift and press tab twice, then hit enter

http://www.creationkit.com/Alias some info on what an alias is

- Hypno

Thank you Hypno88. That is quite an amazing addition Bethesda made to the modders' arsenal.

As for my problem, the player alias works exactly as advertised. ATM, I've just created a script that pops up message boxes while I test things out. I've discovered a small problem though: the OnObjectEquipped event only fires when I click on a book in my inventory. Reading a book by activating one present in the game world doesn't activate this event (for obvious reasons, I suppose).

The OnObjectEquipped event limitation is workable but I would prefer being able to detect the player "activating" books as well as equipping them. I'm trying to find a solution to this problem but if someone beats me to it, that would be great. One thing I've tried is to create an alias which attaches a script with an OnRead event to all books. Either it doesn't work or I did something wrong though because I couldn't find any books with a script attached via the alias.

These are the same thing. Equip in this case just means "used by the player". This event is also sent by objects of type Potion when consumed, for instance.

The OnObjectEquipped event will fire whenever anything in the inventory of the actor with the script attached is equipped. Weapons, armour, potions, books, even miscellaneous items.

In scripting for Bethesda games, Activate and Equip means different things. Activate is when the player points the crosshair at an item in the world and presses the activate command (E by default) or when an NPC does the equivalent action. Equip is when the player opens their inventory and clicks on an item present or when an NPC does the equivalent action. So if you see some armour lying on a table that you want, you would "activate" it to bring it into your inventory then "equip" it to start wearing it.

The problem with books is that the player can read one by equipping one in their inventory as well as by activating it in the game world. In my tests, the OnObjectEquipped event only fires when I click on the book in my inventory. If I activate a book in the game world, nothing happens.

Ah, that's unfortunate. I haven't tried world object books with this function yet.

Without SKSE I'm not sure of a way. There is no event to arbitrarily detect anything (everything) that the player activates.

True. It's why reading a book is NOT stealing.

You can use the http://www.creationkit.com/OnRead_-_ObjectReference OnRead Event (in a script attached to the book, or the book alias) which does work (if I remember right) from inventory or just from reading-in-world

The OnRead event would be the ideal one for me. As I stated earlier though, I would prefer not attaching scripts directly to the game's books. There are three reasons for this:
My mod would conflict with every other mod that modifies books.
There are a lot of books which means a lot of work to attach a script to all of them
The script won't be able to work on mod-added books

If I could figure out how to create an alias that attaches my script to every book in the game, that would be great. I haven't been successful so far though.

You can use SPELLS to attach "scripts" dynamically, to npcs or to objects.

There's a tutorial right here: http://www.creationkit.com/Dynamically_Attaching_Scripts

Will then work with any book in the game-world (yours, vanilla, other-modder) ... NOTE: Works better with NPCs than objects, but does work for both ... if you can figure out how to implement for your situation

@H4vent
Your suggestion is exactly what I needed. I did previously try using an alias to attach a script to nearby books but the tutorial you linked to showed me what I did wrong.

Well, my mod is pretty much finished. I just need to do some testing then I will release it. A big thank you to the three people who helped me get the code written. Also, I think I've now more or less figured out what makes Papyrus tick compared to the old engine's scripting.

I've just uploaded the mod I was working on related to the questions I asked here. The mod is called "Mark Books as Read" and can be downloaded from either http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/20910 or the http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=84244648.

Again, a big thank you to the three people who helped to make this mod possible.

Looks interesting...congrats on the release

- Hypno