Scripting Tutorial: Basic Scripting Knowledge

A script is a small program that runs within the game, the Oblivion scripting language is rather simple, and experience in any other programming language brings you quite far.

As a general rule: every operation needs to be put in a new line.

You can also comment your scripting code by using the ';' everything after the semicolon will be ignored.

Scripting-Operations can be divided in two base categories, each with two sub-categories:

1. Commands

A command is a script-operation that controls what happens within the script. Commands regulate how a script is executed, but don't affect the world directly.

There are two sub-categories: administrative commands and statements:

• Administrative Commands are Scriptname, Begin...End and the Blocktypes used by Begin. Every working script requires at a Scriptname, and one Begin...End block, to assign the script to objects and control when the script is exectued.

• Statements are Set, If, Return and the variable declarations Statements aren't required for a script to work, but all but the most simple scripts require them to control how the script is executed.

2. Functions

Functions are script operations that interact with the game-world. This is by far the larger category of script operations. Every function returns a value which can be used as condition for "if"-Statements or to set variables with the "set"-statement.

There are two sub categories: passive and active functions:

• Passive functions check out for certain states within the game and return a numeric value that represents them. Examples are GetActorValue, which returns a concrete value or GetDetected which returns "1" if the target is detected and "0" when not.

• Active functions do changes to the game-world and usually return a boolean value ("1" or "0") to return if the action was successful or not. RemoveSpell for example removes a spell from the target and returns "1" if this was successful (i.e. the target had the spell in the first place). PlaceAtMe creates an object at the caller's location and returns the Reference to this object.

3. References and Variables

Functions affect the "calling object" (That on which the script is running) by default, but you can redirect them to another object by using the object's reference. When you want a script to affect the player for example, use the player's reference ("Player") and a '.' to redirect the function-call to the player instead of the calling object.

player.additem gold_001 100

To gain more flexibility, you can use variables instead of numeric values whenever a function requires such input.

short addgold
set addgold to 100
player.additem gold_001 addgold

You can only use variables in the same script or global variables, though. It is not possible to refer to a local variable of another script within a function. Only the If and Set commands can access such redirected variables.

player.additem gold_001 otherobject.addgold

This will not work, you need to use this instead:

short addgold
set addgold to otherobject.addgold
player.additem gold_001 addgold