Want to make a Spouse Mod

[fifteenspades]

Posted this on the nexus, but i find the community here is more active and helpful.

 

So i am looking to start on my very first mod ever for anything. I am currently earning my programming degree and thought what better practice then to mod.

 

My first mod i want to work on is a Better Spouse mod because vanilla spouses are an insult to spouses everywhere, and then no one really has made a Spouse mod that i am looking for plus for those of us who bought Hearthfire and it was just such a letdown this would really give that boost it needs.

 

My intentions for the mod are as follows~

- Better dialogue and a LOT more

- Unique dynamic dialogue so spouses aren't just stale

- Better interaction with the player and kids if you have them

- More varied task for the spouse to do 

- A better incentive to actually visit the house/spouse such as like sleeping with them gives a bonus to X or Y for a limited time

or maybe if you don't visit them every now and then the spouse then decides to divorce you. ( maybe add a MCM option so that a person could control exactly how much time that "every now and then" is, maybe some people want a more then often and others less so ) my idea for that is that in a sense it could give you a emotional aspect to your significant other. Let's say if you want it to happen more often it would show a needy-ness of them and if you want it to happen less it could show a distant emotional feeling towards you. still working on that idea

- a system that controls what the spouse wears so they are not a Meg and just wear the same thing over and over and over~ perhaps add a way for the player to control what they wear or let the spouse randomly wear what she wants.

- A system that would let the player give the spouse X amount of $ much like when you ask your steward to buy upgrades, that would let the spouse spend the money on things either for the house, you, or even there-self / kids. this could include toys/ potions / weapons/ visual upgrades etc

- a system that would apply a random gain or loss to the amount of gold your spouse makes per day instead of a set amount

say some days she would make a nice bit then others since the economy just took a big hit they wouldn't make as much.

- and finally my last idea idk if this is possible but would be interesting to try, a way for your spouse to invite people over. so that when you come home it's not just you, your spouse and possibly kids every single day. I mean it's not like when your spouse marrys you they just lose their social life right?

 

So My question/s are What exactly would i need to start learning to make all this happen? I don't mind learning, it's just i have no idea what i would need to learn

 

Atm all i can think of are these. Also i would love to hear more ideas on how i could expand this.

 

1. Learning scripts

2. Learning animation

3. learning how to add dialogue 

 

Would it be easier to apply this to all able spouses or just make a new NPC that has these certain conditions and work from there.

[Guest kimbale]

I'll just bump this, as we really need stuff like this.

 

I think most of what you want could be made in the CK. That could give each of them a distinctive feel, but would take lots of work.

 

But if you want to track visiting times and have random events, you'll need to script. (If you already do programming you'll notice that papyrus is pretty easy. There's online reference on the CK wiki...)

 

To start, fiddle around with the CK, build some little quests and NPCs to get the dialogue and quest stuff down. After that, pick apart any mod that would fit in any way to what you want to build. Learn from what people already did, it's especially good when you deal with frameworks (like SL). Sometime you get used to all the trial and error and find your own way of doing things. You already know to ask.

 

With all the expression stuff going on i thought of having a spouse greet and look at the DB differently, depending on how long s/he was gone or anything that happened in that time. Something like: *sad looking* "Oh, welcome home honey..." Dialogue: "You look sad dear, what happened?" "Our dog died this morning - some milk drinker let his horse just trample him before i could do anything!" *teary* Dialogue options to shrug it off, talk him/her through it or just provide physical comfort... Aaahhh, that would be great!