Duke Patrick's Savvy Save Read Me

REQUIREMENTS
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SKSE needed.

This is a Skyrim port of my popular Oblivion Safe Save mod. It is designed to produce INTELLIGENT save points, NOT TIME SAVE POINTS! Now you will not lose an hour or more of important game play because you were so immersed in the game and forgot to save!



WARNING!

Do not start this mod until you are completely out of the tutorial part of the game (Helgen and the caves of Helgen). Many kinds of mods have issues with the TES tutorials (in Oblivion as well). It is just a more complicated game environment for the scripts.


READ THE READ ME FILE and follow the directions.
I will be very slow to answer questions that are detailed in the read me file or the configuration file document. I only answer questions about the mod that are posted in my threads at:
http://forums.bethsoft.com/forum/13-the-elder-scrolls



New in REV 2.1
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Added a fail safe escape from the while loops to stop them from stacking on top of each other. BSA is no longer working for some reason. I have no idea why, and at this point in skyrim modding I do not care.
I had to switch back to loose files.


Description of what the mod does
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The mod monitors your combat and other types of game progress and calculates a Save Score based on how hard the fight was, how much you exerted yourself, how much your stats have evolved, how much content you have experienced and many other factors. Once you reach the Save Score of 1000 pts or more the mod will make a save of your game under one of eight* savegames files titled "Savvy Save". But it will ONLY do so when it is most likely safe to do so unlike other types of autosaves. This SAFE Autosave will be delayed if the game conditions could corrupt the file or result in a "moment of imminent death" save.


Some of the factors that will temporarily delay the auto save are:

Active combat
Falling
Player incapacitated
Near traps (20 feet or less)
Player health is too low.


Once these states (and other similar states) clear then the autosave is made.

The calculation logic to accomplish all this is clever but simple, so the mod is not 100% full proof. But this mod was made as a personal mod just to patch this irritating issue in my game with Autosaves.

Therefore this mod is offered AS IS for the most part.

There is only one player alias script and two tiny script fragments.

This mod does NO polling at all, scripted detections and calculations are activated efficiently using events. The logic of the functions are clever and un-complicated resulting in low overhead. For example I check all the following conditions with only one simple player function call:

In Killmove
In dialogue with another actor
Knocked down and/or Knocked out
Paralyzed
Movement controls locked
Trapped in a gap or in-between collision boxes
Trapped in a corner by a follower
In then Havok system
Stuck in an idle animation

and many many more ....all of that is checked with a simple logic test, the mod checks to see if the player is walking or running forward! If the actor is not able to walk or run and actually traveling some distance this means the actor is suffering from one of many possible issues that would make it a bad time to try to autosave.

I devised this little but powerful trick in my Oblivion mod because there were so many possible "bad" control and animation states that just could not be detected directly. And this easy but definitive test proved to work very well.

Naturally that is not the only check the mod runs to insure a safe and intelligent save. But that illustrates the unusual script design I created for this mod.



List of events that are tracked by this mod
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Locations Discovered
Dungeons Cleared
Hours Slept
Hours Waiting
Skill Increases
Skill Books Read
Training Sessions
Barters
Quests Completed
Misc Objectives Completed
Questlines Completed
Chests Looted
Spells Learned
Dragon Souls Collected
Words Of Power Learned
Words Of Power Unlocked
Shouts Learned
Shouts Unlocked
Shouts Mastered
Magic Items Made
Weapons Improved
Weapons Made
Armor Improved
Armor Made
Potions Mixed
Pockets Picked
Locks Picked
Poisons Mixed
Blessings

Each time your Gold coin holdings have gone up.
Each time you successfully harvested.
Each time you travel about 60 feet while indoors.
Each time you travel about 400 feet while outdoors.
Each time you travel thru a game load door.
Each target Killed.
Each time you kill a target that does not detect you.
(This is great for hunters or for players that love to get sniper death shots!)

The mod also tracks your use of Stamina, Magicka and Health and uses the inherent synergistic logic of the way the mod checks the data to help in analyzing when it is time to make a save based on how difficult the in game combat or other activities were.



TURN OFF THE FEEDBACK IN THE CONFIGURATION FILE ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR PLAYER SETTINGS ADJUSTED!



Please Note:
Some of this mods settings are not player settable such as when you find new locations. Finding a NEW location increases the Save Score 1000 pts, and this cannot be set by the player. This is because most players would set this to 1000 pts anyway, but setting this up in the mod to be player adjustable is more work than the results are worth. If this mod is used by enough players and there is a large demand to make more of the settings player adjustable I may consider it then.



Save File convention
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Each time the mod makes a Savvy Save it will be numbered with an index.
Each time the index gets to a player set limit a Savvy Super Save file is made and the index is set back to 1 This means you will only ever have a few of Savvy Saves in your save folder but you will still have unlimited Savvy Super Saves.



THANKS TO
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B1gBadDaddy for help with setting up the Story Manager kill event.