Tes4Mod:Cobl/Projects/Menu Containers

Overview
Menu Containers will define several container menus that Cobl aware mods can use. This is an expansion and combination of the existing container menus of the Configuration spell and the Dinner Plate. 

By "container menu" is meant that when the player casts as spell or accesses or equips some object, a container is activated that contains tokens which represent option to be chosen from. The tokens are themselves misc. objects or similar. When the player chooses one by selecting it, it moves to the players inventory. A script on the objects senses this (being onAdd player) and executes its script at the time. 

There is some variation on this idea. The dinner plate also uses a container menu, but in this case, it provides food items from the source container (usually the player's inventory). Another variation is the spellmaking and enchanting menus. These simply raise the corresponding dialog when invoked.

Misc. Item Triggered
The following menus would be triggered through token misc items in the player's inventory.
+Cooking: Food Recipes. Ingred tokens.
+Construction: General construction/crafting.
Alchemical recipes: Potion tokens.
Smithing: Weapon, armor tokens.
+Configuration: Configurations that the PC can execute.
+Dinner: Food to eat. 
+Enchanting: Enchanting menu.
+Spell Making: Spell making menu.
+[Options]: Options menu. Mostly misc. item tokens.

The difference betwen the Configuration and [Options] is tha Configuration is something that the PC (player character can do) while [Options] is something that only the player can do. E.g. suppose that there's a multi-robe that the PC can configure to have one of five spells. That Configuration. OTOH, suppose that you want to be able to turn off fish spawns in OOO. That's [Options].

Spell Cast Triggered
Token spells are configurable spells. All of these could be configured as regular spells. So this would mainly be useful to avoid cluttering the spell book with lesser used spells. 
+Token Shell: Tokens cast on self.
+Token Touch: Tokens cast on touch.
+Token Strike: Tokens cast on target.
+Token Re-Shell: Repeat last token shell spell.
+Token Re-Touch: Repeat last token touch spell.
+Token Re-Target: Repeat last token target spell.

When casting the regular (non-repeat) version of the spell, then on acquiring the target, you would get the container menu which would determine which token was to be used. Casting the "re" version of the spell would skip the container menu and just repeat the last token used.

It's not clear how useful this would actually be. Might be useful for poses. 

Voting
I'm fast-tracking this one, but if someone has an objection, now is the time. --Wrye 03:29, 22 January 2008 (EST)

A poll on the Bethsoft Forums indicates a pretty diverse set of opinions about if and when the player should receive something like this. I'm planning to include facility in Cobl, but leave to mods to glue the feature into the world. --Wrye 03:29, 22 January 2008 (EST)

Status
Options and Dinner Plate were already released, but would be modified slightly by this. I've done some tests on how the menus look, and they seem okay. (See this post. --Wrye 03:29, 22 January 2008 (EST)