[SKY] Skyrim dialog system overhaul - questions

[Zewp]

Hi everyone, Zewp here. Apologies if this is the wrong board to post this in, but I was directed to these forums by Tigersong after I posted this same question on TheNexusForums.

Okay, first things first, I'm going to admit I have no idea how the TES Construction Set works, having never worked with it before. I'm currently studing a BSC degree at university, which involves a module for programming in C+, so there's a tiny start, but other than that I don't have a lot of experience with coding. However, I have for a while now entertained the idea of doing a complete overhaul of the Skyrim dialog system, but I'm a bit stuck on the main aspect of my idea.

To brief you on what my mod idea is and give you a bit of background before I get to my question; I want to do an almost complete overhaul of Skyrim with the dialog being the main driving force behind it. No quests or lore will be changed and all the current dialog will still be in the overhaul, but it will all be text-based. Together with the current content, I want to flesh out the amount of dialog options and content in the game such as we had in Morrowind, where you could often have conversations with a single NPC spanning pages of written text. This will be the first stage of my mod. After this has been done, I want to start adding things to the game world itself; new quests, map markers, landmarks etc. This new content will be implemented in such a way that the only way to complete the quests, find the locations/artifacts will be through talking to NPCs and getting clues about the whereabouts of interesting characters, objectives, items etc.

In other words, the content is aimed at people who enjoy not being led around by the nose and who prefer finding things themselves.

As you can imagine, the idea for this mod is a pretty huge undertaking and if it is possible to do, it will likely take me months or maybe even years of work. I do not really think I will ever stop entirely. I might just decide to continue adding content until people either stop playing the mod or stop playing Skyrim.

But unfortunately, unless a text-based dialog system can be implemented, this mod is not possible. At least, not with the scope I have in mind. So that's where I need the help of more knowledgeable modders who might be able to tell me whether what I have in mind is possible, or perhaps even team up with someone and work together on creating the dialog system. As I said, I know very little about modding and I am not sure how much the game engine has changed from Morrowind to Skyrim, but I do not think it would be impossible seeing as Morrowind had an almost fully text-based dialog system. Someone suggested I perhaps try using pop-up message boxes, but that would defy the point of my mod a bit. I doubt anyone here is a stranger to the Morrowind dialog system, but here's a pic to show what it is I more or less want to do:

[_echo]

Well first off, greetings and welcome to TESA.

Second, that is way too ambitious of an idea for your first mod.Having a background in coding will help a lot with scripting, as there would be a lot of it in your idea, but that alone won't take you very far.

As for the text based dialogue system like morrowind, I don't think such a thing is possible given how dialogue works in the game. Maybe using special menus via SKSE scripting it could be simulated, however.

I strongly suggest putting this idea on hold, and start doing smaller things to get yourself used to how the editor works. We have several classes to get your feet wet.