Message Spam

Tes4 displays messages to the player whenever: 1) spells are added to, 2) items are added to or removed from the player. For some scripts such messages are very undesirable (e.g. for an alchemical sorters which adds/removes many items). Hence, message "spam". There are several techniques for avoiding this spam.

AddItem - aTemp Container

When adding items to the player, spam can be avoided by first adding the item to a container, and then removing the contents from the container to the player. This works because unlike addItem, RemoveAllItems is silent.

tempContainerRef.addItem deathDagger 1
tempContainerRef.removeAllItems player

If you're using Cobl, you can use cobGenXFerRef for the temporary container -- it's defined for just this sort of use.

Note: Do not wait a frame to remove the item to the player. If you do, you run the chance of running the item's script, which in rare circumstances can cause problems.

Message Queue Overloading

Simplest technique is to overload the message queue by sending the exact same message twice in a row before the offending add or remove line, i.e.

;--No messages.
message " "
message " "
addItem myItem, 1

;--OR... Covering message...
message "[You've been pickpocketed!]"
message "[You've been pickpocketed!]"
addItem myItem, 1

There's no obvious reason why this does or should work, but it does. :shrug: The message that is sent (including a blank message) will still display for the usual time, but messages that would ordinarily appear after it seem to be discarded -- i.e. they never enter the queue.

Con: The downside of this approach is that it may block more messages than you want to block. It basically nukes the queue for a second or two -- any message sent by any script or action during that period will be lost.

Con: Some UI mods add an Oblivion icon for all messages. This icon will still appear for the duration of the message - defeating the purpose of the blank message.

OBSE Commands

OBSE 0015 now provides spam free versions of functions that don't generate messages.

• AddItemNS
• RemoveItemNS
• EquipItemNS
• UnequipItemNS
• AddSpellNS
• RemoveSpellNS

Con: Requires that user have OBSE v0.15 or higher installed.

Con: The sound generated by the CS versions of these functions is also generated by these functions.

Item Activate

When adding items whose "activate" action results in being added to inventory (e.g. armor, but not books), you can use activate in a script.

someItemRef.activate player

Pro/Con: Requires that you have a ref for the item. On the plus side,this means that if you want the player to pick up a specific pre-existing, placed item, you can do that.