Patch 1.6 changes the behavior of the WaterWalking Actor Value, which is a problem because I've already written and published a mod that relies on the old behavior.

In previous patches, WaterWalking would allow your character to walk across water, but they would be able to dive at any time by simply aiming the reticle down and they would gradually sink underwater if moving too slow. It was a little quirky and weird-looking (especially in third-person mode), but it worked pretty well.

In Patch 1.6, when WaterWalking is set, water is like cement. You don't sink in over time, and you can't dive by aiming your reticle downwards. Unfortunately, since my mod turns on WaterWalking permanently for a character, it makes it impossible for them to reach underwater locations.

So a couple questions:
1) Which patch has the "correct" behavior? 1.5 or 1.6? I assume one of the two is buggy, but without knowing which I can't fix my mod.
2) Why isn't the change to WaterWalking mentioned in the patch notes at all? I'll assume its because it's a bug, and not because Bethesda is breaking my mod without even giving me the common courtesy of mentioning it in the patch notes.
3) If the 1.6 behavior is a bug, is it realistic to expect it to be fixed before 1.6 is released to everybody?

Thanks.

It seems like this new behavior matches the water walking in previous games. In Morrowind, water literally became cement. You could die from fall damage on water.

In Oblivion, it felt a bit more organic (falling on water from a high altitude would get you partially submerged), but you still didn't actually sink, and diving was impossible.

I believe they're fixing the water walking effect for a new spell in Dawnguard or in an upcoming patch. Find a different solution for your mod.

I'd lean toward the same answer since it makes the behavior consistent with past games.

It's lack of an entry in the changelog is just them not communicating properly with each other is all. Or perhaps they figured it was trivial enough to let slide because there's not much to do in the water anyway.

My guess would be that they intentionally changed this in preparation for the Dawnguard DLC, where vampire lords will be able to hover over water with their wings, and therefore this is the first time they actually take a good look at what they want water walking to be like (previously I guess it was rather unimportant to them how it exactly worked since it doesn't show up often in-game anyway)

Nice catch. It does seem likely that hovering as a vampire lord gives you the water walking effect.

By the way, I think applying a permanent water walking effect is a really bad idea, even if it lets you sink. Something like that feels very intrusive, and seeing as it's a vanilla spell effect, it may not clear off after uninstalling your mod. I suggest making it a power like Night Eye that you can toggle on and off.

I had to use the trick where you set a target condition on the spell effect to get it to uninstall cleanly when the mod is uninstalled. Believe me, I've already spent months jumping through hoops to get the thing working, and now I find out that, months later, through no fault of my own, it's completely broken. I'll probably just remove WaterWalking, but it was a nice addition to the mod that I personally really liked.

What do you mean by "intrusive?"

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The instant Bethesda released Creation Kit, Skyrim became a public API. It's their responsibility to, at the bare minimum, communicate changes to the API to their developers-- not including that note in the patch notes in inexcusably amateurish. Better would be properly deprecating the old behavior, but I suppose that's a pipe-dream.

And since the entire point of mods is to create things that aren't in the base game, saying "well it's not in the patch notes because it's not used in the base game" is not an excuse.

From what I've seen of Bethesda software development practices via what they release to the public, it's a miracle they manage to create a working product at all. No unit testing. Virtually un-version-able binary file formats. Quirkly, custom-syntax scripting language (what was wrong with Lua or JavaScript?), database full of non-working legacy crud, none of it labeled as non-working legacy crud. It makes what should be a fun hobby project into... more work than my actual work!

Looking forward to how I'm sure all my other mods will break over the coming months due to random undocumented changes to the API, I'm more inclined to just take them down altogether than fix them.

Sorry for griping.

Vampires can walk on water. Might be in preparation for that.