Exciting Future Plans with xOBSE

There are a few exciting things still happening in the Oblivion world, although at a smaller pace. The probably most exciting one: With the last release, xOBSE got OnKeyEvent and OnControlEvent event handlers! Currently, they are slightly broken - the filters don't work, so they fire for every event - but that will be fixed in the next release.

Now for those that don't know why I am basically squealing with joy, imagine this: You have a mod that has a key bound to do a thing that rarely happens. Perhaps you want to change the weather, or open a box, or call your horse or something like that. It won't happen often, but if you press the key, you expect it to happen instantly.

Until now, what you had to do, was have a script check every few frames - is this key pressed? Is it? Now? Is it now? Now? And then if it is pressed handle it in a way that a longer keypress won't trigger whatever function you want multiple times. Sure, that's perhaps not so bad for one script, but then you have 20 or more, all listening for some input, ALL the damn time.

And now, with this event handler, on game restart you tell the game once: Yo, when x key is pressed, do y. That's it. The game will chill and wait, but the moment x is pressed, y happens. No permanently running scripts, no clunky check to see if the key was pressed but is no longer held. It just works.

Naturally, I'll have to update all my mods that listen for key input to that. While I am at it, I also still have to add LINK support for all my mods. I've been dragging my feet a bit, because while I absolutely admire that mod, I personally don't plan to use it. I'm a sucker for having my ini files preconfigured in my custom install packages instead of having to deal with ingame settings.

Of course, as it always is, there are a few more projects and updates in the making and time is too little, but I try!