iWant Widgets

A standardized, widget-centric library to ease the programmatic use of Skyrim's user interface(UI) using Papyrus. Allows easy access to arbitrary text and graphics display within the UI. Provides functions to control both library and Skyrim native UI elements. Removes Adobe Flash as a requirement for effective UI modification.

Design philosophy

Extend the concept of SkyUI widgets to allow easier incorporation into Skyrim mods. The library is fully functional using only tools freely available to owners of Skyrim Special Edition.

By itself, the library will produce nothing. It is intended as a support library to allow modders to easily extend their capabilities by bridging some otherwise complex technical gaps.

Plugin can be loaded anywhere.

Compatibility

No known compatibility issues.

Because Skyrim UI mods were HARD! Like really, way way too hard. For a game developer with the right tools and knowledge, they were not that hard, but they were way beyond most modder's technical and/or financial reach (as evidenced by their relative scarcity when this mod was developed). As a modder doing this as a hobby, I wanted an easy way to have fun graphics. When I found none, I set about reverse engineering those few widgets that existed, thinking I could find the pattern to allow myself and the community to easily reuse existing widgets in new projects without Flash. What looked promising at first turned into a very deep rabbit hole. Eventually I came to understand that due to the way Scaleform (Flash) works, reuse of existing SWF files with new graphics was a dead-end as they conflict with each other (I know now it's because they all live in one global namespace).

Since starting down this road, I've learned that SkyUI (and SKSE) did some great things to standardize Skyrim UI access and widgets in particular. There's a fairly robust library in SkyUI that's pretty self-documenting. Unfortunately, it's still a bit esoteric for most and, probably more importantly, dependent on commercial tools. Specifically the SkyUI model requires access to Adobe Flash creation tools which, at the time of this writing, are no longer sold by Adobe nor have been made freely available. I believe this barrier, even more than the complexity, has stunted possible mod developments in this area. You either have to be someone with access to the tool and knowledge enough to use it or engage someone who has those capabilities. This greatly elevates the level of effort to turn a simple idea into a simple mod.

As I began to develop my first public mod, iWant RND Widgets, beyond it's simple beginnings, I found that I wanted to be able to easily add widgets to other things. This seemed doable at first, not easy but doable.