The Phalanx-MainFollowerModule.esp that is in my development directory is basically what I intend to put up as version 0.96. Located here:

http://www.finhosting.fi/~fallout/downloads/development/

Any testing anyone can get in on it would be welcome.

I'll be testing it, as well as waiting to see if Elminister gets into IRC, I'm going to see if I can get him to look the .esp over for me for problems, things like extra navmeshes and duplicate records that I won't know how to check for (the .esp has had a lot of navmesh edits and then subsequent edit removals).

It's meant for use with the LATEST version of Obedient Dogmeat that's here: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1631

If anyone wants to try this and tell me how it goes - - -

Issues I know about:

If you are using the 1.5 fallout patch, the player-owned camp sites and Gary's trailer area will look like crap if you fast-travel to them, or... something.. im not positive in which situations they look bad. I know about it, just have not addressed it here.

Malcolm has one unvoiced line (if you ask him about your dad).


Big list of fixes - - -


MOD CONFLICT DETECTOR - - a partial test is done the first time you run the game with this version. The full line-up of tests can be accessed via Gary.

using make-a-hole command and then using WAIT/SLEEP immedietely no longer causes unhired followers to show up at your location

PQ01 quest NPCs should not be enabling prematurely any more.

Dogmeat obeys make-a-hole group command

In fresh-start savegames, Malcolm and Jericho should hire with their weapons and ammo on their person. In pre-Phalanx savegames, the weapons are added to the player at hire-time, and ammo should be on them already. I think.

TGBlank's alternate start .esp will be uploaded to Nexus - - it provides for increased compatibility in K-9's behavior as it relates to alternate start mods.

Issue in 0.95 that may have caused conflicts with mods that change the brotherhood of steel faction is resolved.

Fisto! should no longer be affected by Phalanx-MainFollowerModule in any way.

an unintentional change to CG04 that was causing conflicts with some other mods that change quest stage result scripts has been removed.

K-9 now greets properly while in "take a break" mode.

Follow-charge observes disabled status properly. The follower attempts to do follow-charge etc, but retains confidence setting of 0, and cowers instead of fights.

Code for "caps on" has been optimized

I'll give her a whirl mate...
Anything i should be on the lookout for?

Bump for update to 0.96.

The nexus uploads aren't finished yet. The main file is still going up, and then the K-9-alternate-start file that TGBlank made will go up.


0.96 RELEASE NOTES

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Known issues:

Using the first release-version of the 1.5 game patch will cause the Malcolm and Deisha followers to have
white-colored bodies, but normal colored faces.

At the larger player-owned camp site, NPC pathfinding AI is known to stop working if you travel to it several times.
The only known fix for this, if you desire to do it, is to save your game and restart it, and this is only a temporary fix.

A game bug may cause weapons to look duped on followers, making them unable to equip weapons and fight properly.
A way to fix this for the time being is for you to open inventory with the follower and remove and replace the weapon
that appears as two in the inventory.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

New for mainline version 0.96

- - The first time the mod is loaded, it automatically runs several tests for mod conflicts.

- - Gary now has an option to do a full range of tests for mod conflicts.

- - K-9 has better surviveability than before when the player is between levels 1 - 6.

- - Dogmeat now responds to the "make-a-hole" command.


Bugfixes:

The glitch where the Megaton nuke exposion was not being displayed has been fixed.

The glitch where Roy Phillips' dialogue through the intercom at Tenpenny Tower would lock up has been fixed.

PQ01 quest related NPCs should not enable prematurely, and if they exist in any current savegames,
they should be safely disabled.

Malcolm and Jericho now obtain their weapons correctly in both pre-Phalanx savegame loads, and new games
with Phalanx loaded.

Changes to CG01 have been removed and the function implemented in another way, to improve compatibility
with alternate-start mods.

Unneccesary changes to the Brotherhood of Steel faction have been removed (aids in mod compatibility).

Unnecessary changes to CG04 quest stage result scripts have been removed (aids in mod compatibility).

Unintended changes to Fisto! have been removed.

K-9 now greets the player properly while he is in "take a break" mode.

The "Follow-charge" group command no longer causes "disabled" followers to regain their pre-disabled confidence
settings.

The code for "caps on" is optimized.

The group command "make a hole" no longer has the potential to interfere with followers who have not yet been hired.

Mainfollowermodule has been cleaned of potential game-crashing deleted objects (some landscape objects are now
set initially disabled instead).

Dialogue options involving the group commands wait-charge and follow-charge have been partially cleaned up. More
cleanup on this may come later.

Hey, how exactly are the NPCs inventories edited? I made some followers weapons unique and use non-robot ammo, and add the non-robot ammo to Jericho and Clover in T3T_WeaponTweaks. If I load these Phalanx mods after T3T_WT, what exactly will change? I'd love to use this mod and reassure T3T_WT users alike that they can safely use our mods together.

phalanx replaces follower's unique unplayable inf ammo weapons with normal vanilla versions and a bunch of ammo.

Probably does the same for Armor too then, huh?

Hmm... this can't be right... why is K-9 invisible? No exclamation, just invisible.

I think you need to extract the contents of the Phalax folder into your Data folder for it to work, if I'm not wrong.

If I may recommend just loading both mods together in FO3Edit here? After applying the filter you'll be able to see at one glance where, if any, the conflicts are and you'll be able to quickly decide if they can be resolved by load order or if they will require compatibility patches.

Phalanx followers base inventories contain:

1) - - - No ammo
2) - - - No ranged weapons
3) - - - ONE crappy melee weapon that the player can never see or remove
4) - - - Some item of default clothing/armor.
5) - - - Be aware that I never, ever use "additem" to add a weapon to a follower.

The reasons for these things are:

1) - - - There might be a condition where if there is ammo in the base definition of the follower, more ammo can spawn inside of the follower later, and that ammo can be invisible to the player. In addition to being completely wrong for the intended management of followers, it messes up the weapon-selection-based-upon-distance system. I caught a follower actually firing weapons from a pool of invisible ammo during testing, and it may have been coming from the base definition on the follower.

2) - - - There might be a condition where if there is a ranged weapon in the base definition of a follower, more weapons can spawn inside of the follower later, and those weapons can be invisible to the player.

3) - - - If they do not carry one melee weapon as set in the base definition, they will try to loot every little melee weapon they find. Crappy nailboards, little knives, it's like they collect the things. This one is not a 'might happen', it's for sure.

4) - - - Followers look bad naked. No reason in having them able to be completely stripped by the player.

5) - - - There might be a problem where using additem to put a weapon onto a follower contributes to problems with weapons being invisible in a follower's inventory.

Most of these things are listed as "might" because, well, I don't positively understand everything I saw. I know that I struggled with certain things while developing my weapon-selection-based-upon-distance system, and these are the things I did to eliminate problems.

The reason that Malcolm and Jericho actually hire with weapons on their person is that I lay the weapons on the ground in Megaton and put those followers onto find packages using the same trigger that makes Lucas Simms do that initial greet to the player. With the player in the same cell as the followers, they are able to execute the find package correctly and retrieve their weapons. With other followers, or if the player has not started a new game, I don't do that, I actually use additem on the PLAYER for those weapons. And, I additem the ammo into the followers directly.

And also, running them in this configuration makes them more happy to loot ranged weapons and ammo, which I LIKE, in the grand scheme of things. I wish I could configure them to loot on command, but that has proven to be a problem.

Well I've tested it a bit, and there's no apparent conflicts. And thanks for the explanation of inventories, Tarrant.

Well, I did what I recommended and compared the newest T3T_WeaponTweaks.esp and Phalanx-MainFollowerModule.esp that I could find.

Phalanx needs to load after T3T_WT, otherwise important changes (added AI Packages) to Jericho "Jericho" [NPC_:00000A71] and Clover "Clover" [NPC_:000156A2] get overwritten.

The only other direct conflicting record is FollowersCharonCombatKnife "Combat Knife" [WEAP:00064093].

There might be other indirect conflicts, e.g. T3T_WT changes FollowersJerichoNailBoard "Nail Board" [WEAP:00063FDC] and among other things removes the "Can't Drop" and "Non-Playable" flags.

Interestingly, when changing FollowersCloverChineseOfficerSword "Chinese Officer's Sword" [WEAP:0006415D] into "Clover's Cleaver" the "Can't Drop" and "Non-Playable" flags stay.

That sounds like a small detail but it's important. You positively want those flags on all of the followers' melee weapons, as a general policy for ALL follower development. If the follower likes the melee weapon too much (cross liked her super sledge too much) one can replace it with a weaker one to make it more of a turn-off. But one needs to leave some melee weapon on there with those flags.

I am not actually certain this applies to a creature that is done up the way Fawkes is, but on the humanoids, heck yeah.

I'll make sure to put that in place in the next version.

Alright so the main problem I'm having is RL-3 wandering off whenever I sleep/wait and then returning after a bit of waiting, and then K-9 being invisible.

Tried opening up the creature K-9 in the GECK and I got this error trying to preview it.

"MODELS: Could not find parent node extra data for 'BASE Creatures\Dog\k9.nif'."

You didn't install K9's textures, it would seem.

I've also seen Malcolm do that run-away-while-waiting deal. If I'm inside of Megaton, I think I've seen Jericho do it too. It's almost as though they are trying to obey some other package, one of their non-hired sandbox packages maybe, even though the variable conditions don't match with it. I don't have a certain explanation for it :/

I've read that there's a perk coming in Broken Steel that does this:



I haven't gotten to look at how Phalanx interacts with the broken steel .esm at this point. To be sure of anything at all, I'll have to see it in action. Some things come to mind, though.

- - - I'll need to look at what they've actually done to Dogmeat itself, if anything. The dogmeat as it was released in the vanilla game would have not been expected to survive until the player is at level 22 and is a terrible follower at higher levels due to the inability to affect its suicidal tendancies. It strikes me as odd, therefore, that this perk would be offered so late. In any case, i'm guessing that upon taking the perk, if dogmeat had already died, a new puppy would spawn somewhere.

- - - Phalanx sets Dogmeat as essential, so its possible that either:

1) this perk will do absolutely nothing with Phalanx version 0.96 loaded, or

2) a new puppy will spawn each time Dogmeat goes down in combat, or

3) i donno.

My first impression is that, considering the way Phalanx moves forward with followers, I will need to mod Broken Steel so that this perk behavior is different. One possible way to move forward is to cause the player to acquire a new puppy, and the puppy would perhaps be nameable by the player (like I pulled off in Baby Deathclaw Commander). And, it would work as an additional dog follower.

So, we'll have to see. But I wanted to bring this up, since it's a natural point of difference between Phalanx and what Broken Steel will be doing.

In a goofy way, this sounds like a lot of potential fun! LOL.

I can see a new mod named "puppies, Puppies, PUPPIES!!!" or "P^3" which allows you to create an army of Dogmeat clones.
It would obviously have to include some plastic baggies and a scooper...

So can I. hehe. But someone else can make that mod, I think.. I have already shirked my duties in making a Baby Deathclaw army, I'd need to clean up that loose end first.

I have the Phalanx Folder in the Data Folder, what should the file structure look like?

EDIT: Hahaha oh wow I'm retarded. Fixed.

Not like that. There shouldn't be a phalanx folder in your data folder at all.

I know right? I figured it out though.

As a personal suggestion, maybe you rename that 'Phalanx' folder 'Data' so others don't make public fools of themselves like I did.

Mate im on the newest 96???
runs like a charm...
no followers do this run away thing you speak of...
Malcom works flawlessly...
top [censored]:)

I could make it go Phalanx/Data/Blah but I doan wanna eliminate the first Phalanx directory name because if someone extracted it and dumped it all on like their desktop or something, I want them able to find the directory and know where it came from.

I have two questions if someone doesn't mind answering them.

Will Phalanx work with the official Fallout 3 patch or will I need to get the unofficial patch to make it work? I've also got Operation Anchorage and The Pitt, will Phalanx still work with those DLC?

My other question is that I've got the Slave Companion Mod running will Phalanx work with that mod as well? I don't expect the options from Phalanx to be available for the Slave Companion mod but I just want to know if the two will be able to run together.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.