Hi,

I decided I wanted to make a vampire mod where, among some other things, vampire spells and such require 'blood' instead of mana in order to cast, and a vampire's hunger level drops when they loose too much blood, forcing them to feed in order to replenish their supply so that they can use their powers again.

I've already located most of the important existing vampire related stuff just by searching for *vamp* in the Creation Kit, but what's got me worried right now is that in order for this new blood system to work, it's pretty much essential to have a new status bar on the HUD to display the player's current/maximum quantity. At first I just naturally assumed that this would be trivial, since all I need to do is find the mechanism that's being used for the health/magicka bars and create a new copy for my new blood stat. Then I searched around the forums here and found out EXACTLY how those bars were implemented (I'd post a link but I'm not allowed to so the gist of it is, you need a flash de-compiler and have to spend lots of time searching through AS 2.0 code and if you want to make changes then you have to start messing with xml or assembly and I don't even know how these files are accessed back in the creation kit or papyrus anyway)

Now I've decided that I probably shouldn't try to attach my new bar to the existing HUD since, not only is it a major headache, but it would also (I assume) make my mod incompatable with any other mod that changes the built in HUD, since all of these HUD elements are stored in a SINGLE compressed file.

In the end I don't need to modify any of the existing ui elements, all I really want to do is tack something else on top of them, so my plan now is to just get a bar to display on the screen and "fake" it being a part of the HUD by having it appear/disappear at the exact same times as the other bars on the HUD.

The proper way to implement this would be to create a simple 2D sprite, and have it display on screen. I don't know if this is possible in the creation kit or in papyrus so I figured I'd ask before I go for an even more ugly solution. Frankly I'm a little surprised that this is turning out to be the 'tricky' part of this mod, making a picture pop up on screen should have been trivial!