As a man who writes for a living, I have no actual useful abilities. That means that—while I keep close track of the Bethesda modding scene—I often don’t really understand what all the very smart people who work in it are actually speaking about. As far as I’m concerned, a ‘script extender’ means putting a load of white text into your screenplay to buff up the final wordcount.
So it must mean something if even I know it’s a big deal that creators from the Oblivion Remastered Modding Community have just cracked getting the game to play nicer with Lua, announcing in a giddy Reddit post that “we just figured out how to make Oblivion’s scripting engine call any function we want from a UE4SS Lua script.”
BIG NEWS: We can make Oblivion’s scripts call Lua functions! from r/oblivionmods
Let’s try to break that down into something you and I can digest. If you’re not familiar, Lua is a powerful scripting language that modders use across all sorts of games to make them do buckwild things. It’s a huge part of the Morrowind modding scene, for instance. A big reason the next release (0.49) of OpenMW is so hotly anticipated is it’s set to expand what people can do with Lua in that engine.
Oblivion Remastered is, of course, a bit more complicated than Morrowind. It’s a modern game consisting of two engines—Gamebryo and Unreal Engine 5—all wrapped up in one another. Even worse, Bethesda doesn’t officially support mods for it, unlike pretty much all of its other games, leaving modders without official tools to poke around in the game’s innards and make things work.
Which makes it feel all the more miraculous that the mad lads have actually managed to get Lua and Oblivion Remastered to speak to each other better, making the game itself trigger Lua scripts by cleverly mucking about with its notification system (the text in the top left that tells you when you contract vampirism, and so on).
On Reddit, author Time-Has-Come includes one of their own mods as an example of what’s now possible: the player casts a spell, the spell triggers a script on Oblivion’s side that flashes a notification reading “madLevitationScriptStart,” then his Lua script reads that notification, hides it, and reacts to it, triggering a levitation spell—”something that I thought was impossible just a week ago.”
The real magic of this breakthrough, explains Time-Has-Come, is that it lets modders use Lua to react to specific in-game events. Before, it was possible for Lua scripts to react to, for instance, you casting a spell, getting hit, or ending a dialogue, but it couldn’t react to specific spells, or hits, or dialogue options. Now it can.
“The possibilities are far reaching… You want a minigame or a new menu to pop up after a dialogue choice? You can do that. An alternate XP system, where you earn XP from kills and choose skills to level up? Would be difficult to make but is doable. You want to be able to get a pizza delivered to your house IRL by asking Martin Septim to do it for you? That’s well within the realm of possibilities.”
Previously, getting these two parts of the game—the Oblivion-side spellcasting and Lua-side levitation—to speak to each other wasn’t doable. Rather than a proper spell, that Levitation mod had to be a baked-in mechanic you triggered by pressing L. It was a hacky solution that didn’t feel in-keeping with the rest of the game’s magic system. Now? It works way better, and it’s the tip of the iceberg. As Time-Has-Come says, “expect some big mods coming soon… This is just one use-case. The possibilities are literally endless.”
