Welcome new users! If you're seeing stories, falling snowflakes, random sheep, or other oddities, congratulations you've installed the demo files! Most users won't need to check any items during install, just press "Install" and you're done. I've updated the installer as of 1.24 to make this a bit clearer.
If you're interested seeing what the library can do or just want to watch animation for five minutes, enjoy the demos!
However you'd like to use this mod, have fun and happy modding!
Hello DaemonPrime, could you help me please? I'm having difficulty positioning the text on the screen, it's too far up and sticking out of the screen, I'm trying to lower it in the iWantWidgets.as file on the line
var ypos = Number(inputData[4]);
however, even changing the line to
var ypos = Number(inputData[4]) + 50;
or a larger number the text still stays in the same position, I'm very new to coding and programming in general, could you give me some light?
Am I raising the right place to achieve my goal of moving the text vertically?
I am using the mod Inworld Skyrim - AI NPCs from here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98481
First question, are you working with Adobe Flash? If so, you may not need or want this mod. It's purpose is to shim Papyrus to Flash without needing Flash. Trying to edit this mod in Flash to do things in Flash will probably just be an unnecessary pain. Just do all the positioning in the Flash GUI and things will probably be much easier.
If you're not working with Flash, you're working with the wrong files. The code sample you provided is ActionScript (aka Flash code), you should be working with Papyrus calls. If you're in the not Flash camp, I'd suggest starting with the Beginner's doc (included in the install) and working through that to get a basic feel for things. For simple text placement, you shouldn't need to rewrite any of the library code (though you're certainly welcome to). setPos() in the library should allow you to easily position text (or anything else).
Thanks for responding, I was trying to edit a file called iWantWidgets.fla it is in this path: D:\Games\The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim - Special Edition\Data\Source\Flash\src\HUDWidgets\skyui\widgets\iWant
If I understand correctly, Flash GUI is a program that would help me modify the correct mod? sorry, I'm really a beginner at this. I download the Adobe Flasher Professional but i have no idea of how i do this. I am trying use chatGPT for a small help with this too
I'll submit to you that, as a beginner, starting with Flash might not be a great idea. It's old tech and while not too difficult to learn by the standards of the day, it's certainly not the easiest thing to learn when you consider it's basically dead (meaning all the support articles/help are dated) and it's primary purpose was for web content. It's use in gaming/Skyrim is pretty specialized and starting from zero it's going to be a steep learning curve to climb (even if ChatGPT might be able to help with the many undocumented parts). I had more than a few years and multiple programming languages under my belt and it was a pain and a lot trial and error to get this mod working.
If you're just trying to get some text on the screen in Skyrim, I think you'd save a lot of time and headaches by working through the included guides for this mod and writing what you need in Papyrus. Papyrus isn't terribly friendly itself to learn, but it's far easier than learning a general purpose tool like Flash that's shoehorned into a very specific configuration for this game. Papyrus is purpose built and limited in scope which tends to make learning a bit easier.
Take a look in the "documentation" directory ("D:\Games\The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim - Special Edition\Data\documentation" based on your comment). Specifically "Guide - Beginner.html" and "Guide - Intermediate.html." If you work through those documents (a few pages at most), you'll be positioning text and graphics wherever you want on the screen by the end and it will be a way easier road than learning Flash.
All that said, if you want to learn Flash, rather than just get some text on the screen in Skyrim, I'd suggest looking at some videos, books, and/or courses depending on your preferred learning style, to get some foundational understanding of it first before trying to work with it for Skyrim. Complete some of the bouncing ball examples that are usually fairly early in such material and getting text onto the Skyrim canvas should become a pretty easy task if you're doing all the work in Flash.
Ive been using this mod for a while but Ive had this issue since I installed it. Once I add the iwidgets property to the script, I can no longer open the properties. I just get this error. https://imgur.com/1QzdWGj
I've not seen that before so I'd lean toward yes. Is that from the Creation Kit?
I didn't do much in the CK with this mod. I'd lean toward that sort of error being related to a dependency not being found, but that's kind of a guess. Not sure what it might be looking for if that is the CK. I did all of my script development with Notepad++ and the CLI compiler. For my script mods, I only used the CK to build out the quests to link the scripts to the engine. Nothing wrong with the CK (well there's plenty wrong with it, but it gets the job done). Perhaps if you can provide a simple example of what you're doing something may occur to me or, one day, I might have a working environment again to repeat the process and test.
Is there any way to make text not center aligned? If I have a image that pairs with text, it will never align correctly because of the text will be shrinking from the center point instead of say the left align.
Not natively. This was a design decision as everything is based off the center point of the widget. You can however achieve the desired effect with a smaller helper call.
getXSize() will tell you how big the current text is. Halve that and offset the widgets position by that much to achieve a left justified display. Totally untested but something like this:
If it must be pixel perfect every time, you might need to play with a pixel adjustment based on the size being even or odd, but otherwise this should get the job done fairly quickly.
There are a few included, they're listed in the Artist Credits file, not sure if I called them out elsewhere in the documentation. You can also leverage the native Skyrim fonts. I don't recall anything showing them here, but a quick bit of coding can display them all or just check the credit links, as long as they're still alive samples are shown there.
sorry for the second reply, just wanted to let you know I tested out your method of left align and it works great with 1 issue. Left Align is x + offset because you want to move all the pixels from left side to the center. so right align would be x - offset. just a heads up if anyone else asks :)
Currently in the process of racking my brain around Flash and ActionScript but this looks incredible.
Are the images restricted to just tiny widgets (e.g. apple) or would it also be possible to create something even fancier, like a custom menu with buttons, text, sub widgets? Or is that a bit out of scope?
Conceptually there's no limit to how complex things could get. I considered, but never developed, an MCM-like menu solution using this library as a base. The big challenge to keep in mind as complexity increases is the Papyrus engine. It will crumble long before the Flash engine. If things start to escape the scope of Papyrus you're now into SKSE plugin territory, at which point this library no longer makes sense, just call Scaleform directly. As a practical data point, without complex Papyrus logic involved, I've used the included test scripts to push tens of thousands of widgets into the GUI in a few seconds without any impact.
If the idea is more along the lines of bigger and better artwork, there should be no problem. I have artistic skills that, on a scale of 1-10, rank in negative territory so I leveraged simple, open license objects, but anything you can turn into a bitmap can be thrown on screen easily. You could throw full screen (and larger) images in there and get some interesting effects going. I considered using full screen overlay images with transparencies for things like freezing effects from Frostfall, but never got around to writing it.
You might want to check out some of the mods that depend on this one to get a sense of what's already been accomplished. Been a while since I've looked myself but I've seen some pretty cool uses over the years. The most popular dependent mod I'm aware of, ORomance (NSFW), built a full on-screen menu system for it's functions. I've not tried the mod myself, but the header screenshots on the mod page are relatively tame and show some of the menu system in action.
Ty for the thoughtful response and the mod. What you've made here is really cool.
I did check out some of the mods using this as a requirement and yeah, ORomance caught my eye (those NSFW mods always get the most out of technology 😅)
I should also really stop putting off learning how to write SKSE plugins but I digress. Thanks again for your time.
Hey, I tried searching as best one can on Nexus comments and couldn't find anything about texture compression for widget images.
In my testing it seems that BC7 compression that should be supported by SSE doesn't load. I was able to get BC1 textures (and uncompressed) textures to load. I presume this is a SkyUI limitation rather than anything IWW is doing but does anyone have any further insight into supported compression formats?
EDIT: Thinking about the age of SkyUI, it makes sense that it would only support pre-SSE texture compression formats. I'll stick with BC1/BC3.
Crashing on new game start can be a LOT of things. iWant Widgets is very low on the list of likely sources though. It loads one quest record into the game and does nothing else by itself (other mods cause it to become active). I'd recommend reviewing general Skyrim mod troubleshooting and, when in doubt, remove things until it works then start adding things back until it breaks to narrow in on the problem(s). It's usually not that any given mod is broken, it's usually multiple mods interacting in unexpected ways.
I realized that I have seriously bad writting in english (not my first langauge), New Games works fine, loading previously saved games was the error, and I saw the .esp solution too late, anyway, the mod works great, you should considerate create a section on the description saying that, like "Known Troubles/Issues" and put the .esl/.esp solution there, it took me a while as I said, and I already deleted all my previous saves (I like to save disk space), so couldn't neither confirm if that solution works
Thanks for the mod dude, and the fast answer, you are great!
Hello, I wanted to report on the bug you flagged as "not a bug" regarding true hud plus this mod.
I wanted to start by verifying, I do indeed use TrueHUD and the issue may indeed be caused by that (widgets after some time simply disappearing) but I don't really have enough technical know how to convey the problems that stem from this. I was wondering if you could potentially talk with the TrueHUD author regarding specifics to find a correlation or maybe a push for a fix? I have yet to test this mod without TrueHUD, but at the very least I did want to report in that TrueHUD+this mod and I have a similar issue. I will leave a similar post o TrueHUD page just as a precaution too.
I appreciate the report. Much more testing and reports of the results would be needed to investigate this issue in any meaningful way.
Realistically, since the reports are the problems don't appear for some time, hours it seems, vanilla plus these two mods would need to be run for some hours to see if the problem manifests. Few people familiar with mods would be likely to play Skyrim that stripped down. So the next most realistic test bed is users who've encountered the issue, running for some hours without one mod or the other to see if the problem appears. If it does, the issue is "likely" (change to "certainly" if a new game is used) not the result of the other mod alone. Testing for several more hours with the other mod in place but not the first test mod would then rule in our it as a lone source. Keep in mind that one mod, the other mod, both mods in combination with each other, either mod in combination with anything else in the mod list, both mods in combination with anything else in the mod list, or the Skyrim engine itself could be the source of the issue.
The other practical (I'm stretching the definition here) method would be to identify a way to replicate the problem then start looking at things in a debugger. Since the problem doesn't seem to occur consistently and hours seem to be involved to generate the behavior once, The only method I see to pin this down, other than trial and error, would be to play the game through a debugging session until the problem manifests then try to work backwards to what caused it. Having done some of this for other purposes, it's not a fun or trivial exercise when you don't have source code to work with (it's not fun even with source code).
I don't think either approach above is very realistic (but perhaps those better with debugging will disagree). As a practical matter, if the above doesn't strike you as something you'd like to dive into, I'd recommend trying one mod or the other for a few hours/days/weeks of game play to see if you have the issue. If you don't you could clean save it out then try another few hours/days/weeks with the other mod to see if the issue appears. If it doesn't appear in either case, you're probably seeing the results of some interaction with the two (though, again, it could be the two plus something else). At that point (or maybe before the hours/days/weeks of testing) I'd say pick the one you get the most benefit from. Skyrim can be finicky and gets more so with each mod you add to the stack.
Based on a cursory review of the information out there, my guess is the most likely cause is down to mod load (one or many) knocking over the Scaleform engine in Skyrim. Given that it seems to take hours to reproduce, something is probably building up memory usage somewhere until some part of the GUI engine keels over.
Purely anecdotal, as I'm just one person using one machine, I played through several hundred hours with the iWant stack plus 500 or so plugin (esp/esl) mods last time I did a full run through (2-3 years ago) and did not encounter any issues with the iWant mods (at least none that I left unfixed, don't remember if I did any updates to them along the way).
Best advice I can give, if troubleshooting becomes annoying, skip the mods involved (iWant included) and move on to having fun.
Hello! I have actually on my current load order (and slight varieties of it) been able to consistently recreate the widgets disappearing!
I've noticed it usually occurs when something to do with the widget is accomplished, it will either distort the entire bar or make the widget (and another but not all sometimes) disappear, in my current examinations since the issue has been immensely common for me I've been able to at least notice that detail, additionally hiding/unhiding the widgets temporarily fixes it the problem on my end.
But usually to me it seems whenever the widget has an update thats when calamity srikes and something can potentially go awry, there is 100% something else causing a problem because on my end I have experienced it happen outside of the widget updating too I believe, but that's the only remotely close narrow down I've been able to accomplish. I had to enable numerous mods and widgets for them extensively to help draw a bigger picture of how it impacts the widgets (originally I was only running two widgets now I've bumped it up to about 5).
Just a supplemental touch from my experience, my LO is pretty heft as it is right now but at the very least I can recreate the issue almost semi intentionally now!
As you said, if things become to troublesome, I will probably just refrain from giving myself a headache but I thought I'd hand over this little extra!
Thank you for the additional details. I'll keep this report in mind if I dig back into the code. The fact that it seems to be occurring during a widget update does indicate a potential issue with iWant Status Bars. Likewise, the hide/unhide workaround points at this mod as well.
The code in iWant Status Bars is not the cleanest (see the many posts I've made here lamenting writing it while burned out). What I suspect is happening is that Papyrus is under load from the load order in use. Papyrus and Scaleform (the GUI) run asynchronously and data, for most practical purposes, is one way. Basically the Papyrus code tosses stuff over to Scaleform and hopes for the best. There's a bit more than that, but it's not a solid as a reliable call with a return value. What might be occurring is that Papyrus (as it's designed to) is pausing the Status Bars script code in the middle of something time sensitive and, when execution resumes, Scaleform has gotten out of sync with what Papyrus thinks the state is. The hide/unhide (mostly) resets the dynamic which is why it gets going again. It's just a theory, but if correct, there's not an easy fix. The real fix is buried in the rewrite I'd tell myself I'll do "someday." Given the progress the community keeps making, there might now or in the future, be better ways to interact with Scaleform to either clean up the approach currently used or use a whole new approach with the same interface.
Until something better comes along here or elsewhere, the most likely way to reduce instances of this issue would be to reduce script load.
Sure. The documentation installs with the base mod (in the "documentation" folder), no need to select the demos. The source for the demos also installs by default, so the code is available for review without selecting the demo plugins during install. The included guides were written to use the demos as companions to explain the design in steps, but following that learning path is certainly not a requirement. For a bare, just the facts approach, review API.html. It contains all the technical details of leveraging the library. If you review that document and usage is not clear, then I'd highly recommend the guided approach as it works up from the basics.
Ok. I've incorporated this mod nicely. Thank you for it. It's quite clean.
I can see that you have plans to expand the images, but that this hasn't been updated in some time. Have you abandoned hopes of adding more icons or is it still in the works?
It's not very likely. I never like to say "never," as some day the mood to mod Skyrim again might hit me, but the reality is I haven't played Skyrim in a year or two and I've only been doing maintenance updates when a significant bug is identified and easily corrected.
On the upside, the image library isn't particularly important. The concept was I'd find tons of really useful, freely distributable images and include them as an ever growing base to work with. The reality is, finding freely distributable artwork that also makes sense in the context of a general purpose widget library is not easy and kind of annoying (reading legal text is never fun). The good news is that the image library calls are just regular image load calls going to known, included image files. As a practical matter, you could look at the same sources I used in the credits document and pull workable images from there that align with whatever distribution model you have in mind.
Awesome. I figured as much but thought I'd ask. I'd throw these messages in a DM but I figure others might have the same questions.
Thanks for making the mod. It's made it actually possible for me to add UI in to mods as users request, which is a nice ability to have.
One more question and I'll leave you alone. In loadWidget, it can take a file from Data\Interface\exported. Does this need to be a dds specifically and is there any way I could load an icon from an icon library such as in T.H.I.C.C?
I think the open discussion is fine. As you said, hopefully others can benefit from these comments down the road.
loadWidget() doesn't require a .dds file though I found .dds to be most reliable. It's passing the filename through to SkyUI to load, so whatever it can handle the call can. I don't think a SWF would work (pretty certain really), though I never tested it. To leverage something like that you'd probably need Flash and/or SKSE to work with the objects more directly.
I've fully implemented this into my mod's next update and it was quite simple to incorporate. I think users will really appreciate it as much as I appreciated how simple it was.
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424 comments
If you're interested seeing what the library can do or just want to watch animation for five minutes, enjoy the demos!
However you'd like to use this mod, have fun and happy modding!
var ypos = Number(inputData[4]);
however, even changing the line to
var ypos = Number(inputData[4]) + 50;
or a larger number the text still stays in the same position, I'm very new to coding and programming in general, could you give me some light?
Am I raising the right place to achieve my goal of moving the text vertically?
I am using the mod Inworld Skyrim - AI NPCs from here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98481
If you're not working with Flash, you're working with the wrong files. The code sample you provided is ActionScript (aka Flash code), you should be working with Papyrus calls. If you're in the not Flash camp, I'd suggest starting with the Beginner's doc (included in the install) and working through that to get a basic feel for things. For simple text placement, you shouldn't need to rewrite any of the library code (though you're certainly welcome to). setPos() in the library should allow you to easily position text (or anything else).
If I understand correctly, Flash GUI is a program that would help me modify the correct mod? sorry, I'm really a beginner at this. I download the Adobe Flasher Professional but i have no idea of how i do this. I am trying use chatGPT for a small help with this too
If you're just trying to get some text on the screen in Skyrim, I think you'd save a lot of time and headaches by working through the included guides for this mod and writing what you need in Papyrus. Papyrus isn't terribly friendly itself to learn, but it's far easier than learning a general purpose tool like Flash that's shoehorned into a very specific configuration for this game. Papyrus is purpose built and limited in scope which tends to make learning a bit easier.
Take a look in the "documentation" directory ("D:\Games\The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim - Special Edition\Data\documentation" based on your comment). Specifically "Guide - Beginner.html" and "Guide - Intermediate.html." If you work through those documents (a few pages at most), you'll be positioning text and graphics wherever you want on the screen by the end and it will be a way easier road than learning Flash.
All that said, if you want to learn Flash, rather than just get some text on the screen in Skyrim, I'd suggest looking at some videos, books, and/or courses depending on your preferred learning style, to get some foundational understanding of it first before trying to work with it for Skyrim. Complete some of the bouncing ball examples that are usually fairly early in such material and getting text onto the Skyrim canvas should become a pretty easy task if you're doing all the work in Flash.
Thanks a lot for the help, now its working good xD.
Did I install it incorrectly?
I didn't do much in the CK with this mod. I'd lean toward that sort of error being related to a dependency not being found, but that's kind of a guess. Not sure what it might be looking for if that is the CK. I did all of my script development with Notepad++ and the CLI compiler. For my script mods, I only used the CK to build out the quests to link the scripts to the engine. Nothing wrong with the CK (well there's plenty wrong with it, but it gets the job done). Perhaps if you can provide a simple example of what you're doing something may occur to me or, one day, I might have a working environment again to repeat the process and test.
getXSize() will tell you how big the current text is. Halve that and offset the widgets position by that much to achieve a left justified display. Totally untested but something like this:
size = getXSize(id)
offset = size / 2
setPos(id, center_x - offset, y)
If it must be pixel perfect every time, you might need to play with a pixel adjustment based on the size being even or odd, but otherwise this should get the job done fairly quickly.
I do have 1 more question and sorry if I just missed it in the documentation, is there a list of what the fonts are and what they look like somewhere?
Left Align is x + offset because you want to move all the pixels from left side to the center. so right align would be x - offset. just a heads up if anyone else asks :)
Are the images restricted to just tiny widgets (e.g. apple) or would it also be possible to create something even fancier, like a custom menu with buttons, text, sub widgets? Or is that a bit out of scope?
If the idea is more along the lines of bigger and better artwork, there should be no problem. I have artistic skills that, on a scale of 1-10, rank in negative territory so I leveraged simple, open license objects, but anything you can turn into a bitmap can be thrown on screen easily. You could throw full screen (and larger) images in there and get some interesting effects going. I considered using full screen overlay images with transparencies for things like freezing effects from Frostfall, but never got around to writing it.
You might want to check out some of the mods that depend on this one to get a sense of what's already been accomplished. Been a while since I've looked myself but I've seen some pretty cool uses over the years. The most popular dependent mod I'm aware of, ORomance (NSFW), built a full on-screen menu system for it's functions. I've not tried the mod myself, but the header screenshots on the mod page are relatively tame and show some of the menu system in action.
I did check out some of the mods using this as a requirement and yeah, ORomance caught my eye (those NSFW mods always get the most out of technology 😅)
I should also really stop putting off learning how to write SKSE plugins but I digress. Thanks again for your time.
In my testing it seems that BC7 compression that should be supported by SSE doesn't load. I was able to get BC1 textures (and uncompressed) textures to load. I presume this is a SkyUI limitation rather than anything IWW is doing but does anyone have any further insight into supported compression formats?
EDIT: Thinking about the age of SkyUI, it makes sense that it would only support pre-SSE texture compression formats. I'll stick with BC1/BC3.
Thanks for the mod dude, and the fast answer, you are great!
I wanted to start by verifying, I do indeed use TrueHUD and the issue may indeed be caused by that (widgets after some time simply disappearing) but I don't really have enough technical know how to convey the problems that stem from this.
I was wondering if you could potentially talk with the TrueHUD author regarding specifics to find a correlation or maybe a push for a fix?
I have yet to test this mod without TrueHUD, but at the very least I did want to report in that TrueHUD+this mod and I have a similar issue. I will leave a similar post o TrueHUD page just as a precaution too.
Realistically, since the reports are the problems don't appear for some time, hours it seems, vanilla plus these two mods would need to be run for some hours to see if the problem manifests. Few people familiar with mods would be likely to play Skyrim that stripped down. So the next most realistic test bed is users who've encountered the issue, running for some hours without one mod or the other to see if the problem appears. If it does, the issue is "likely" (change to "certainly" if a new game is used) not the result of the other mod alone. Testing for several more hours with the other mod in place but not the first test mod would then rule in our it as a lone source. Keep in mind that one mod, the other mod, both mods in combination with each other, either mod in combination with anything else in the mod list, both mods in combination with anything else in the mod list, or the Skyrim engine itself could be the source of the issue.
The other practical (I'm stretching the definition here) method would be to identify a way to replicate the problem then start looking at things in a debugger. Since the problem doesn't seem to occur consistently and hours seem to be involved to generate the behavior once, The only method I see to pin this down, other than trial and error, would be to play the game through a debugging session until the problem manifests then try to work backwards to what caused it. Having done some of this for other purposes, it's not a fun or trivial exercise when you don't have source code to work with (it's not fun even with source code).
I don't think either approach above is very realistic (but perhaps those better with debugging will disagree). As a practical matter, if the above doesn't strike you as something you'd like to dive into, I'd recommend trying one mod or the other for a few hours/days/weeks of game play to see if you have the issue. If you don't you could clean save it out then try another few hours/days/weeks with the other mod to see if the issue appears. If it doesn't appear in either case, you're probably seeing the results of some interaction with the two (though, again, it could be the two plus something else). At that point (or maybe before the hours/days/weeks of testing) I'd say pick the one you get the most benefit from. Skyrim can be finicky and gets more so with each mod you add to the stack.
Based on a cursory review of the information out there, my guess is the most likely cause is down to mod load (one or many) knocking over the Scaleform engine in Skyrim. Given that it seems to take hours to reproduce, something is probably building up memory usage somewhere until some part of the GUI engine keels over.
Purely anecdotal, as I'm just one person using one machine, I played through several hundred hours with the iWant stack plus 500 or so plugin (esp/esl) mods last time I did a full run through (2-3 years ago) and did not encounter any issues with the iWant mods (at least none that I left unfixed, don't remember if I did any updates to them along the way).
Best advice I can give, if troubleshooting becomes annoying, skip the mods involved (iWant included) and move on to having fun.
I have actually on my current load order (and slight varieties of it) been able to consistently recreate the widgets disappearing!
I've noticed it usually occurs when something to do with the widget is accomplished, it will either distort the entire bar or make the widget (and another but not all sometimes) disappear, in my current examinations since the issue has been immensely common for me I've been able to at least notice that detail, additionally hiding/unhiding the widgets temporarily fixes it the problem on my end.
But usually to me it seems whenever the widget has an update thats when calamity srikes and something can potentially go awry, there is 100% something else causing a problem because on my end I have experienced it happen outside of the widget updating too I believe, but that's the only remotely close narrow down I've been able to accomplish. I had to enable numerous mods and widgets for them extensively to help draw a bigger picture of how it impacts the widgets (originally I was only running two widgets now I've bumped it up to about 5).
Just a supplemental touch from my experience, my LO is pretty heft as it is right now but at the very least I can recreate the issue almost semi intentionally now!
As you said, if things become to troublesome, I will probably just refrain from giving myself a headache but I thought I'd hand over this little extra!
The code in iWant Status Bars is not the cleanest (see the many posts I've made here lamenting writing it while burned out). What I suspect is happening is that Papyrus is under load from the load order in use. Papyrus and Scaleform (the GUI) run asynchronously and data, for most practical purposes, is one way. Basically the Papyrus code tosses stuff over to Scaleform and hopes for the best. There's a bit more than that, but it's not a solid as a reliable call with a return value. What might be occurring is that Papyrus (as it's designed to) is pausing the Status Bars script code in the middle of something time sensitive and, when execution resumes, Scaleform has gotten out of sync with what Papyrus thinks the state is. The hide/unhide (mostly) resets the dynamic which is why it gets going again. It's just a theory, but if correct, there's not an easy fix. The real fix is buried in the rewrite I'd tell myself I'll do "someday." Given the progress the community keeps making, there might now or in the future, be better ways to interact with Scaleform to either clean up the approach currently used or use a whole new approach with the same interface.
Until something better comes along here or elsewhere, the most likely way to reduce instances of this issue would be to reduce script load.
I can see that you have plans to expand the images, but that this hasn't been updated in some time. Have you abandoned hopes of adding more icons or is it still in the works?
On the upside, the image library isn't particularly important. The concept was I'd find tons of really useful, freely distributable images and include them as an ever growing base to work with. The reality is, finding freely distributable artwork that also makes sense in the context of a general purpose widget library is not easy and kind of annoying (reading legal text is never fun). The good news is that the image library calls are just regular image load calls going to known, included image files. As a practical matter, you could look at the same sources I used in the credits document and pull workable images from there that align with whatever distribution model you have in mind.
Thanks for making the mod. It's made it actually possible for me to add UI in to mods as users request, which is a nice ability to have.
One more question and I'll leave you alone. In loadWidget, it can take a file from Data\Interface\exported. Does this need to be a dds specifically and is there any way I could load an icon from an icon library such as in T.H.I.C.C?
Thanks again!
loadWidget() doesn't require a .dds file though I found .dds to be most reliable. It's passing the filename through to SkyUI to load, so whatever it can handle the call can. I don't think a SWF would work (pretty certain really), though I never tested it. To leverage something like that you'd probably need Flash and/or SKSE to work with the objects more directly.
I've fully implemented this into my mod's next update and it was quite simple to incorporate. I think users will really appreciate it as much as I appreciated how simple it was.