Couple questions about spawns/moves.

[ogrotten]

I want to see if I have this straight . . . I'm looking at CobbAPIBatchMoveGroup/Rel and CobbAPIBatchSpawnComplex

The descriptions start with the word "Move". Does this mean that the entities/objrefs must already exist in the cell, or are they spawned in as new?

CobbAPIBatchSpawnComplex says:

This Papyrus class allows you to group spawns into buckets called "sets."

Am I to understand that that a "set" of objrefs could be defined, then the "task" object would spawn them in, in a group, and potentially several sets in a batch?

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Here's a smidge of backstory: Back a million years ago, there was a util for Half Life called "Rand Map". You could build a "theme" for Rand Map consisting of prebuilt geometry... rooms, halls, etc. Rand Map would then take your prebuilt geometry, and shuffle it together to create a completely randomized map. This was insanely fun to work with because of the quick turnaround from design to play.

I've been dreaming for years about such a thing for Skyrim... where I could build a bunch of prefab rooms/halls/sections, and then have the game completely randomize the contents of a cell to play.

I'm "ok" with papyrus (better with javascript/react 😁), and i'm "decent" with map design, but never had any idea until now that it was even remotely possible using papyrus or even skse

So, my question is this:
I know there would need to be more to it, but I'm talking conceptually. . . Based on what I've described above, does it sound feasible to be able to design the shapes and bounds of room-like spaces, and then use your API here to use those prebuilt spaces to create randomized levels?

Either way, thanks for writing this tool.

[shadeMe]

This mod does something similar to what you have in mind, btw.

[DavidJCobb]

The "move" tasks move existing ObjectReferences, while the "spawn" tasks spawn new ones (generally at or relative to the location of an existing ObjectReference). The use case for both is to avoid the performance impact of repeatedly making several latent function calls; they group multiple operations together into a single call.

The main purpose of the "complex" spawn task is for when you need to create a group of ObjectReferences and store them in one or more arrays, such that an ObjectReference's position in the array corresponds to some other list of data, and you need to be able to have Nones in that list. For reference, the main use case for it when I first developed it for Cobb Positioner was spawning furniture marker and furniture entry direction models in-game, where the index of each model needed to match the index of the marker it corresponded to, and where disabled seats or entry directions would therefore require Nones.

For most situations, the more normal "spawner task" objects should be sufficient for simply spawning a group of ObjectReferences from Papyrus at a time.

I'm not sure whether this would be the best approach for your mod idea, though, so I can only clarify what the APIs do.

[ogrotten]

Consider the construction of Breezehome for example, just the forms that make up the walls n floors. the part that would take literally about a minute to piece together in CK.

So it sounds like, conceptually . . .

• Breezehome forms > property > papyrus array (say breezehome[])
• CobbAPIBatchSpawnComplex to put the contents of the array into a cell.
• CobbAPIBatchMoveGroupRel to position those forms where you want them to go.

Does that sound right?