SKSE32/SKSE64 Plugin DLL development

[knots1353]

I've been mulling over designs for a number of mods and have realized that one of the core bits will need an SKSE DLL for what I want.   I'd like to make this run on both Skyrim LE and SE, so I went looking into tutorials on writing SKSE Plugins for both platforms.

 

I found the Creation Kit wiki entry on this ( https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=SKSE_Plugin_Creation ) and it had some SKSE64 specific stuff and pointed me to this for skse64: ( https://github.com/Ryan-rsm-McKenzie/CommonLibSSE/wiki/Getting-Started ) but the SKSE32 stuff for Skyrim LE seems to be broken or missing.  In fact, if there are any current development tutorials for Skyrim LE SKSE Plugin DLLs out there, they elude my normally quite proficient Google-Fu. 

I know some people here are still doing Skyrim LE Plugin DLL work - I figured if anyone was likely to have good suggestions on where to start it would be here.   The actual programming isn't my concern  (I already have a preliminary code design in place based on my perusal of the SKSE32 sources...) -- it's setting up a development environment through building a basic plugin DLL, any gotchas involved in making shared code that will work on both SKSE32 and SKSE64, and recommendations on approaches for debugging and testing.

 

One thing I've gathered from various sources already - using an older version of Visual Studio,.   I was going to try VS 2015 as a workable base for both SE and LE, but if I need to, I'll install multiple versions of VS.

[knots1353]

Since I suspect other people who might be looking for this information in the future might find this thread, I figured I'd report my findings here as I go, and eventually turn this into a kind of tutorial.   After analyzing the .SLN files, I realized my idea of using VS 2015 for both LE and SE was highly optimistic.

 

It turns out that there's a tool included in Visual Studio which gives pretty definitive answers, called DUMPBIN.   If you use the command:

 

dumpbin /headers some.dll

 

... it will tell you a lot of information, of which the key bit is under Optional Header Values: the linker version.   That version, in turn, can be compared with the Version Number column in the History table of the Wikipedia page on Visual Studio to find out the actual version of visual studio used to build the dll.

 

For Oldrim/Skyrim LE - the most recent SKSE (32 bit) as of this writing was built by Visual Studio 2008.    For SKSE64 and SKSEVR, the most recent as of this writing was built by Visual Studio 2015.  The 2008 was a surprise - I guess the idea here is that SKSE is using the same compiler that Skyrim itself was using, and doesn't update beyond that.   Probably a good idea for my own DLLs to do the same.  I'll note that this probably would have been obvious if all the older SKSE plugin discussions were still readily available.

 

You can install both if you don't have VS already installed - just install the older first, then the newer.   VS 2008 should be taken from the Visual Studio 2008 Express All in one ISO here, while VS 2015 can be obtained from the Visual Studio Older Downloads page here.

 

I haven't yet had the chance to do much with this, but I've copied the SKSE 32 bit release (1.07.03), loaded the SLN into VS 2008, and built and tested the plugin_example which worked with no other configuration or build issues.   It will complain that source code control is unavailable, which is okay, and that one of the projects (steam_boot) is unavailable, but both of those issues can be ignored.  I'll post more as I go from here.