iWant RND

iWant RND widget

By DaemonPrime

What?

A way to add visual indications to requirements from mods based on Realistic Needs and Diseases (RND).

How about it?

design concept

Leverages the same concepts and UI hooks used in iNeed to display the RND's current need status. Deploy a lightweight script to periodically poll the RND requirement status and update the widget, while also adding code that requires the status change script to update the widget in real time. Polling is used to ensure that status information is displayed in a timely manner when no status change events are required (for example, when changing configuration).

in game

The widget will automatically start running and appear in the lower right corner of the screen as needed. Includes configuring the MCM to allow adjustment of position and other parameters.

Loading order

realisticNeedsandDiseases.esp

iWant RND Widgets.esp

compatibility

Used with iWant RND for CACO. Should generally be used with any other RND-derived mod.

Why?

Because no one has done it for me. Seriously, I checked over the years from LE to SE and didn't find a suitable solution.

I've been playing Skyrim since 2011. I've been playing the game since 2011, tinkering with it, crashing it and learning its innards. I did complete the playthrough in 2018, so that's ok.

During my travels, I quickly discovered that food is useless in the base game. I learned about RND and was hooked. Tinkering is an exercise, but overall it adds a fun element. I used it until iNeed showed up and RND went to sleep. With great new UI elements and patch-free integration, this seems to be the holy grail for what needs to be met. Even though it's a great mod and solves a lot of problems, it doesn't give me the depth of experience that RND does. After using iNeed and other alternatives, I kept going back to RND and taking text and audio updates (which I usually missed) to know when I was hungry or tired. Whenever I come back from a break in Skyrim, I'll check out the latest mods to see if there are any improvements. CrEaToXx's RND 2.0 came along and sounded like it might be the answer, but ultimately didn't solve the problem the way I wanted.

In mid-2018 I repeated my search while building another mod list. Finding nothing, I decided this time that no one was going to create exactly what I wanted. I thought there must be a reason, so I started researching how screen elements work in Skyrim. It turns out that getting the image to the display is very difficult, like too difficult. This explains why UI mods are relatively rare among the world-wide collection of Skyrim mods. To be fair, it's not bad once you understand it and have the right tools, but that can really be said for most things.

Now on to the right tools...I don't have any. It looks like you need Adobe Flash Builder installed to actually make the objects on the screen...yuck. Necessity being the mother of invention, I decided to find out how the iNeed does its job, so I took a peek inside it. With my brain wrapped loosely, I set out to understand how RND knows if you're hungry. Turns out, this was a much simpler problem, so I combined these two things in code and somehow found a working solution.

success! ! ! Sort of. To achieve this, I took apart iNeed and used UI files that I didn't have access to. I don't have the tools (or artistic ability) to create my own UI widgets. I can use the mod on a personal installation, but distribution will be canceled unless I get permission from isoku to distribute the UI files. It didn't seem right to ask for permission to use a file used specifically as a key differentiator so that the differentiator would disappear, so I never did a permission query. Likewise, there seems to be no explanation or even advice on how to extract the required files from the packaged mod. In this state, I decided to play the game and shelved any thoughts of uploading it.

After a hardware upgrade in 2020 (thanks 2600k, you've served me well), I de …