Wednesday, October 24, 2012

SkyUI 3 MCM compatability

Howdy, y'all.

I'm sorry for not releasing a new version during the past couple of months. I have been far too busy with school and work to make an update. I have not forgotten about this mod, though. If at some point I have more free time to work on it, then I will. I am not ignoring the complaints and bug reports that y'all give; rather, I simply haven't had the time to respond to you or to fix them.

That being said, with the announcement of the Mod Configuration Menu for SkyUI 3, I am going to try to take out some time from my busy schedule the next few weeks to make an MCM menu for Way of the Monk. One of the biggest complaints about this mod is the menus. They're crap. I know. Not only are they annoying to you, but they are annoying to me. To make the menus of the sort that WoM uses now often requires over 1000 lines of code, and many hours. I spent probably 100-200 hours working on the menus alone. The MCM is not only easier for the player to use, but supposedly it reduces the scripting time to a couple of hours max. Not only that, but it allows checkboxes, drop-down menus, option highlighting, sliders, and many other useful features. It is still in alpha phase, so it might change over time and y'all might not have downloaded it yet. However, once I learn the system and have taken the time to script it, I will hopefully have made Way of the Monk MCM compatable.

What does that mean for y'all? Well, first, the menus won't be so annoying. You will be able to press 'escape' to access them, rather than casting a spell or power. You will also be given more options. I will try to code into the menus new options including leveling speed. This will allow you to change how quickly you raise your Monk skills. I am not sure what the menu restriictions are, but I *might* (I stress *might*) even be able to create a menu for choosing perks. I hate the current menu system that this mod is using. It's awful. Especially when choosing perks. Many peoples' complaint is that they don't want to have to use those awful menus, and they want the process of choosing new perks to be easier. So far, that has not been possible without replacing an existing skill tree in the main leveling menu. MCM may allow me to do that.

I'm not sure exactly when I will create this menu. Likely, it will be an incremental process that may take a week or two, as I learn the MCM system and code when I get the opportunity. I may also need to wait a while for MCM to get out of alpha stage, to ensure that I don't have to rewrite part of the code. Supposedly, Gopher is going to make a tutorial on creating MCM menus, which I am also waiting for. The one downside of this is that the MCM menu will not be available for Steam Workshop users. I am going to add an optional download here on the Nexus for it. Also, I may have to change Way of the Monk to an ESM, which would make it incompatible with the Workshop.