Skyrim - Anniversary Edition Will Disrupt Mods

Eurogamer reports that the upcoming Anniversary edition of Skyrim will disrupt many mods due to the new entry being an update of the existing Special Edition. This will apparently force modders to rewrite many function calls.

The Anniversary Edition release includes the Special Edition version of the game along with all mods available in the Creation Club and more yet to be announced.

However, as reported by PC Gamer, rather than releasing the game as its own version on Steam, the Anniversary Edition will be available as an update to the existing entry. This will have a major impact on mods using the SKSE.

"Bethesda has decided to update the compiler used to build the 64-bit version of Skyrim from Visual Studio 2015 to Visual Studio 2019," explains one of the SKSE developers on Reddit. "This changes the way that the code is generated in a way that forces mod developers to start from scratch finding functions and writing hooks.

"Plugins using the Address Library will need to be divided in to 'pre-AE' and 'post-AE' eras. Code signatures and hooks will need to be rewritten. We will all need to find functions again. The compiler's inlining behavior has changed enough that literally a hundred thousand functions have disappeared and been either inlined or deadstripped, to put it in perspective," explains the developer.

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