SKK is an international callsign I flew under as a professional aviator, 050 was the flight number for non commercial positioning “fun” flights. As SKK050 was already taken as a userID on some tech system many years ago, I make do with SKK50.
Games that have grabbed their unfair share of my time: Ultima 6, Close Combat, Baldurs Gate, Fallout 4, Modern Warfare 2019 (yes and WarZone), Tarkov, Valheim.
I enjoy designing repeatable gaming experiences based on procedural generation and randomisation. That is uncertainty, but not raw frustrating unpredicability. Which is why I focus on random situational spawning, avoiding one time quests or missions. Plus actor dialog is the most tedious unfun workflow ever.
Delivering those experiences with elegant conflict free engineering that uses the least possible resource and structured for active game updates is my challenge. Fallout 4-76 OpenWorld has delivered over 30 active save game compatible content updates in 3 years.
I am not a software developer or engineer by trade, profession or training, but if SKK content has helped to inform, educate or entertain you can show appreciation with tea, coffee or even beer. Mmmmm beer.
User account
SKK Solution development philosophy
Since you have read this far, you may be interested in why/how SKK mods have a good reputation for conflict free quality.
I create solutions to address issues or add new capability that are specific to my needs, so don’t need to guess at what “good” looks like. If that works for you then happy days, but as my Bartle player psychology type is in the smallest sub 10% cohort, I do not expect broad adoption or massive download volumes.
(1) No base game hacks. SKK solutions abhore modifying base game platform content as I have zero tolerance for fixing conflicts in my own games, let alone creating more of them for others. Everything is new adds and wrappers, whether Creation Engine or Harmony patches for Unity.
(2) Full disclosure. Where base game content must be modified, every change is documented and disclosed so users can make informed decisions about quality and issues. RTFM. Only 1 out of the 50 published mainstream solutions actually hacks the base game (Fallout 4 Synthetic Player alt start and game dialog).
(3) Cut content. SKK solutions create dynamic experiences with scripts working to a compute budget like the old mainframe days. Only functions that are worth the script processing time are kept, else they are cut. On average 50% of developed content is cut from a final SKK release to maintain your game performance.
On the Bethesda Creation Engine, Papyrus script processing resource is extremly limited and one bad recursive or blocking script can hoover most of it up. As an example Fallout 4 settlers auto equipping “best” armor from the local workshop is often requested. Whilst both weapons and armor auto upgrades were done and “working” several years ago, the armor element will never be released as the massive script processing overhead to iterate through worn/inventory lists for each actor blocks all other scripts in the workshop area. Publishing it would be like giving a zippo lighter with your name on it to an infant. You can learn more about these Creation Engine issues on the SKK Script Lag Detector page.
On the Unity platform scripts enjoy FixedUpdate (physics) and Update (frame) real time events. Hooking into these high freqency events to poll for conditions to trigger QOL functions through Harmony patches is high overhead non consentual intrusion.
(4) Testing. Testing. Testing. The games we try to enhance do not have comprehensive (sometimes any) platform API or SDK specifications, so we dont really know what we are doing to a game when they are hacked around or added to.
The only way to deliver a sensible level of quality is through comprehensive testing which is properly instrumented to expose issues. This is not just playing a game, it’s repeating fixed scenarios in the game whilst looking at a real time debug output log which is coughing up instrumentation data from custom debug scripts. When doing something that has never been done before (like making workshops properly hostile) 50% the time is R&D writing and running tests to validate a concept and its impact on the game, maybe 25% of the time is actual solution development and the remaining 25% is game validation testing. In toto the dev:test ratio is 1:4 or higher across several hundred hours effort.
Thats where quality solutions that involve script/code come from. Or luck.
Contact
For an RTFM moment there is an email address on the footer of every page [fx: scrolls down] which you can use to help dilute the offers of discount pharmaceuticals, mail order brides and p0rn with actual words.
Or there is the SKKMods Discord, nexusmods.com private mail, reddit private mail.