The DAR problem; Open Animation Replacer (Patreon)

Hey! As you're probably all aware, DAR is still not updated to the most recent Skyrim version. It has become a rather big problem, leading people to downgrade their game version, which is a temporary solution, but is not feasible in the long run. 

Imagine starting to mod a game you're not familiar with and right away you learn that you have to downgrade the game to an older version (people tell you it's fine, the patch does nothing worthwhile, but can you believe them? You're new here, after all) to make some of the mods work, while the vast majority works just fine. Doesn't that sound kinda fishy? At the same time other mods only support the most recent version, or the last few ones.

It's a mess right now, honestly.

Of course, Felisky has no obligation to update DAR. That's absolutely fine. Mod authors can move on.

What is not fine, however, is that nobody else can update it either, as it's closed source/locked permissions.

I believe an important framework like that, enabling a lot of other incredible mods, shouldn't be a black box that's pretty much unsalvageable when the author goes MIA. It's the sort of a plugin where I believe the author has some sort of responsibility to at least enable someone else to take over in case they leave, simply because of how important it is to the modscene.

I've attempted to figure out what DAR is doing a few times already, and I recently gave it another shot, with more determination, and finally succeeded in replacing an animation with another one (with a different filename, even), not referenced in any behavior. At this point it's all hardcoded, of course, not using any sort of conditions, but the hard part seems to be done.

To be clear: this is not going to be a patch to make DAR work on the most recent Skyrim version. This is going to be a new plugin, made from scratch, that aims to do the same (and a bit more) and will have to maintain backwards compatibility with DAR-structured mods. Replicating the conditions system will definitely take some time.

It will, of course, have full source available over on GitHub and will be open to pull requests with new features. That was also a problem with DAR, where I've been told by animators that they wished DAR had some additional (trivial to implement) conditions. And nothing could be done, there was no way for another programmer to spend the five minutes and add the new condition, or even really get in contact with the author.

I'm also open to suggestions - what's missing, what could be improved from DAR.

The first version will need to have feature parity with DAR, then we can move on to adding new stuff.

Simply playing a new animation, without annoying and messy behavior patches, is something that will be needed by my future Ability Framework. This use case is not really supported by DAR, trying to use DAR's system would be messy and prone to conflicts. This has been in part my motivation to make a replacement for DAR.