Hello everyone - first off thank you for taking the time to click and read this post. I became fairly skilled at Oblivion Scripting but Skyrim has me quite confused and now I need some help in planning the best way to accomplish the following mod idea. If you don't have time to read this, please skip to the bottom.

This may be a small spolier for anyone who hasn't completed the mages guild quest line, just a fair warning.

I would like to expand on the Unbound Dremora spell. I like the idea of summoning forth a Dremora to send on missions but I am not sure how to go about doing it. The mod as I imagine it completed would work like this.

You summon a Dremora and are presented with a messagebox that asks you how powerful this particular Dremora is. Once you choose, it summons a random Dremora of the appropriate level. It can be a mage or a warrior.

Once the dremora is summoned you are presented with Options Via Dialogue with the Dremora.

You can beat the Dremora into submission, or you can bargain with it by offering a filled black soul gem. There is a chance it may not accept the Bargain, and still attack you anyway.

Once the Dremora submits it is yours until it dies, or it is good for one task if it accepts a filled black soulgem.

Options are presented via dialogue, such as become a body guard, or go and fetch a certain item.

If you send it to fetch a certain item it stores this particular dremora in a variable and a script calculates its chances of success. After 24 hours you will know whether or not it was successful, as it will either return with the item or will have died trying to get it.

just for the record, I do not expect the dremora to actually try to get the item, I was thinking of disabling it for 24 hours and having it return to the player after the task is complete.

In oblivion, I made a similar mod and used a global script to keep track of it and a spell cast activated the global script, which handled the message boxes (because spell messageboxes were weird to work with) - what is the best way to do this in skyrim? I would like the player to have the ability to send out more than 1 dremora at a time and also companion share with the dremora, and give it orders like you would a normal follower.


Any thoughts on how I should do this, or what kind of strange quirks I may run into with the Creation Kit while trying?

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If you didn't read any of that, and just want to offer quick advice, I need to know two things

How do I create message boxes with responses the player can click on? and how do I make a script wait for 1 skyrim day?


Thanks again everyone for your time!

You create a message form in the ck.
Miscellaneous >> Message
You can have up to 10 responses, but beware of the "off the screen bug" as you cannot format the output.
Search for Menu - either here or on the wiki one or two of the posts will give you an exapmple of how to setup a messagebox menu system.

As to the tracking the time, I had to refer tot the wiki several times before I got a timer working and I still don't have down enough to try to explain it.
Timing in Skyrim is NOT like it was in Oblivion. You need to read up on RegisterForUpdate / RegisterForSingleUpdate and their variants.
Good luck - I think what you want to do is quite easily done, but if you haven't become comfortable with Papyrus yet, it will take you a while.

Thank you very much for the information, it was very helpful! I wasn't able to locate a decent tutorial on how these message boxes are linked to scripts. It looks like this is going to take me awhile to figure out, never mind the timers yet! I'll continue to try and work at it. If you have any specific tutorials in mind that would be helpful, please let me know! Thanks again!

Here's the CK forum http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1358520-messages-inside-messages/page__view__findpost__p__20487050 I used to familiarize myself with setting up a messagebox menu.

AFAIK, the only tutorial about messages is this http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Papyrus_Hello_World.

I went back and forth between them for several days before I got the hang of it.

RegisterForSingleUpdateGameTime(24)

That will tell your script to wait one game day before it runs again.

And if you're looking to do something based on game world time (like after 24 hours have passed in your example) you'll want one of the GameTime versions.

; Register to be notified every in-game dayRegisterForUpdateGameTime(24); Just tell us when 5 days have passed in gameRegisterForSingleUpdateGameTime(24 * 5)

There's also the http://www.creationkit.com/Options_Menu tutorial. That the code in the post in your first link won't work as well as the function example in the tutorial, that is a While loop is more responsive and I've found a function for menus works better.

What do you mean by less responsive? I havent had any problems.when doing multi-tiered menus without while loops

Just that. The menu buttons are more responsive such that stuff in the background doesn't move around as much or at all. There's always more than one way to skin a cat.