Now that I've gotten a house under my belt and played with basic building and scripting, I'm looking out at my first longer term mod project (http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1336927-wipz-festivals-of-skyrim/page__p__20305900__hl__festival__fromsearch__1#entry20305900 - follow link for a more detailed description of the project itself - I want to keep my questions here on the technical side). I'm more of a builder than programmer, but I want to ask for advice before I get too deep into the project. I'll be adding scenes, decorations, and NPC's across all the cities, and inevitably one of my festivals will conflict with someone's house mod or merchant, or town rearrangement. I have to design with the vanilla game in mind, but I don't want potential users to get stuck with an all-or-nothing choice.

Here's what I want to do:

1) I want to have one NPC who travels between the festivals to be an anchor point. Since some of the festivals will give quests, but then the festival objects get disabled at the end of the period, I want players to be able to complete and turn in quests at their leisure, so having this one NPC be constant seems to be the best approach.

2) I want players to be able to disable those festivals that might conflict with their other mods but be able to keep those that work fine with their game.

So, how might I implement this?

The only way I can think of now is to have the NPC in an .esm, and each festival in its own esp which can add quests and dialogue to the npc in the .esm in addition to the other things they do. However, having 16 esp's with their own bsa's floating around seems a little unwieldly to me. Is there any other way to implement this that's relatively simple, both for me and for potential users?

One benefit I can see to keeping them separate esp's is I can release them as I finish them (and potentially add on them, if I really want to go nuts). But it's my understanding that you can't upload .esm's to the Workshop (that's not a HUGE problem, since I would use the Nexus, too, anyway, but I want maximum accessibility).

Any thoughts?

Best way is to put it all in one .esp, and either make separate compatibility patches for conflicts with popular mods (doing so for every mod that conflicts is unrealistic), or having an in game menu that disables/enables which cities the player wants the festivals to appear in.

I like the idea of creating an in-game menu. Am I right that you can do toggle inputs through a "debug box." I've never scripted something like that, but let me know if that's the feature that I should research. It's a key feture of what I want to do, so I'm going to need to learn it.

For a menu with several selections have a look at Message Boxes and their scripts.

Honestly, don't let the workshop's limitations stop your creativity. If your mod can't be delivered via workshop, that's the workshop's problem. Hopefully it will get more improvements as time goes on, so building based around its current limitations would be a bit foolish.

Yeah, the workshop wouldn't be the primary concern. Of more importance to me is minimizing conflicts with other mods and giving players some modular choices.

Compatibility: As written above, ignore it until someone reports it, then add/amend to cope with it (or not). We will all, almost certainly, conflict with one another. If you are paranoid about it, then a Central Controller Quest (in an esp) and an esp for each festival would work ... but would be a lot of hassle for you ... players only install the central-controller esp and an esp for each of the "festivals" they want to load.

Central Quest Giver: I have done something similar for a Quest Series I am working on. It works well (I think) and helps give disparate quests a feeling of being tied together. And, because you will move the central NPC about, it also gives the appearance of a living world (as opposed to always going back to the NPC's house to find them)


V nice idea, btw