Getting that advlt deathclaw quest done and in there has been an often-requested thing over these past weeks! And the answer is that I'm not sure when I'll have it done. I've been busy with RL business type stuff lately, and a full-length quest is gonna take time, even once I get started. the 2 mini-quests I made took quite some time.. I just donno for sure, now.

Phalanx has had Obedient-Dogmeat integrated into it, with the exception of the Dogmeat-Enemy-Tweaks .esp which has remained seperate, and ships with both the standalone Obedient Dogmeat and Phalanx. That's all there is to it.

Baby Deathclaw will not move properly into Broken Steel or Point Lookout, even if you use Phalanx' follower integration. Once you are in those areas and have the ability to fast-travel, baby deathclaw might suddenly appear with you. In Point Lookout, Baby Deathclaw should be made to wait somewhere instead of going with you when you get to the quest where you are supposed to collect seeds from the giant punga plant. That whole quest section doesn't expect to see Baby Deathclaw there, and it's best done without him.

As far as loading Baby Deathclaw with Phalanx directly, there might be a few doors that don't work right (maybe megaton, paradise falls, that sort of thing) but I'm not sure if there's really a problem (there may not be). And, baby deathclaw is uncontrolled by Phalanx' group commands.

Someone was actually looking into making a patch that integrates baby deathclaw into Phalanx but I have had no time to even look at where it got stuck (it's unfinished).

It would be a wonderful thing if the important points from Phalanx showed up in Fallout 4. I do not want to make a Phalanx for FO4 unless it was going to go out with the game's real, shipped version.

BTW: I'm considering the re-implementation of the Broken Steel "Puppies" perk to simply be getting another dog. It would be a silvery colored one, and would work the same as Phalanx' version of Dogmeat. I'ma bet that's one you'd like to see =p

U would be right!

We gotta do what you have to, so you can do what you want to in RL

Thanks again for the quick reply

Ok one semi weird thing, and one ittty bitty request.

1 weird thing -- I hired Star paladin cross, she then gave me her mini gun and laser rifle. Not sure if this is caused by Phalanx or Fook2. However, since Phalanx is the very last mod in my load order, figured I'd mention it. Well actually merged patch is last, but still! I just gave her the weapons back and no harm no foul.

1 itty bitty request -- If I rest she doesnt and remains wounded. Can there be a check that if the player rests for say 8 hours she gets a free heal? Idea being that you take turns doing sentry duty. As it stands she svcks up lots of Stims if I want to keep her in tip top shape(Not a bad money sink). Another idea would be to tell her to sleep and then you have to use the wait button for x amount of hours.. *shrugs* No idea how easy either of those options are

If you rest at camp with follower undismissed, they heal as soon as you wake up. At least that's how I do it.

That's on purpose. Several followers in Phalanx will have the weapons come about that way. Long story told in short - - I was concerned at one point that using "additem" to give followers weapons directly was contributing to a bugged inventory condition.



2 things on this - - like 3rd type was saying, all you have to do is walk into one of your owned "camp sites" and sleep with followers somewhat nearby, and they all insta-heal to full health. They don't need to be dismissed. Next thing is that, when the followers are not in combat, if you go to the "hold for medical treatment" dialogue option, there will be an option for "out-of-combat, first-aid use of stimpack". It causes 1 stimpack to heal the follower all the way up.

Here's what I picked to try next. It's a new, tiered-message-box during-combat system thingie. It seems to be working out pretty well so far. It's less annoying than using straight dialogue for these functions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBandc0_BHg

I'm expecting it to be available in the next version of Phalanx (1.04). The dialogue-based functions will still be accessible using that "talk" button, though.

This video was recorded with an odd odd mix of mods, its just how my data directory came together at the moment - it's FOOK's textures and sounds showing up without FOOK itself being loaded by the .exe, and Fellout, and Greenerworld, and the Enhanced Rain-Snow-thingie mod, and my dev version of Phalanx.

BTW I have Charon in a set of weapons that's tuned for team use, not solo work as I am making him do here. In particular, I would not put him in a plasma pistol for his close-up work if I was setting him up to do well solo. He stays faithful to the weapon's expected use, regardless of that, switching among his 3 weapons properly - Laser rifle (long-range), chinese assault rifle (mid-range), plasma pistol (close).

When he stops firing the plasma pistol for long moments, it's because he's stimming himself

The dialogue way of stimming the follower is actually more powerful, because no frames pass between each stimpack application. About .1 of a second passes for each stim with the message-box setup. It's technically possible for a follower to die between stims while you have that message-box-based medical menu up, but it's gonna be real uncommon, if it ever happens in someone's real game.

Cipscis' menubox tutorial thingie made creating this go faster than it would have otherwise. He also is tellnig me there might be a way to reduce that between-box-delay down even farther - - we'll see how that goes.

You are close to perfection, Tarrant
But what do you think about distance access to the group commands menu through hotkey, as it is realised in the Enclave Commander?

meh!

These button menu thingies are helpful, but what I really want is like, for example, on that medical menu, to have a body-display that looks like the players' does on the pip-boy, with the condition bars and everything, and you click to stim the body parts, just the same, and so on. But it's not happening. The most gigantic hole that Phalanx has is the fact that I am not able to design new XML menus and new interfaces. I cannot redesign the trade window, for example, or make a series of follower-manage-windows like Fallout 2 has. Proper interfaces, was, IN FACT, #1 on my list back in November of 2008. But then the GECK came out and over time I saw that it was impossible .



I've tried to avoid giving the player tools which cover the followers' asses when the player has done something I consider careless with them. Doing in-combat at-distance commands is IMO deep into that category. Enclave Commander is fundamentally very different from Phalanx. I expect that such a command would not be damaging its intended balance (which is, and correct me if I'm wrong, KILL ALL USING ARMIES!!!!!!! hehe). I think Enclave Commander is cool and all but it's a totally different sort of mod.

BTW, another thing I've avoided is what I think of as the lazy-player requests that I get now and then. Like, when I've already designed a behavior that works well, but someone is too lazy to bother to use it. A recent example was someone who did not want to set up the follower with the specific weapons it was expected to use. This is an integral thing to both Fallout 2 and Phalanx - you are generally expected to select and arrange your weapons directly on the follower before fights, and he will use those weapons predictably and intelligently. You CAN rearrange them during a fight of course but at that point it's situationally awkward, in both FO2 and Phalanx.

But about distance commands - - I'm intending to make some commands be giveable to followers who have a pip-boy, and the followers right around that follower would be able to respond to those group instructions, but a key point is that it will not work if the follower is in combat, and will be limited to certain geographical situations. It'll work only if: the follower + the player is in an exterior area (ANY DISTANCE), or, the follower and the player are in the same interior load area (same interior cell), or, one of them could instead be in The Black Hole or any part of that base/quaternion area. Note that camp sites are all exterior areas. Parts of that implementation will seem extremely powerful, but it'll also feel useless when it makes sense for it to feel useless. I'm also jacking the player's pip boy into the player-owned-base's intercom system, as long as the player is in an exterior world area (or the Black Hole).

That pip-boy implementation is competing with the same time that I would use for, say, creating the follower-deathclaw's full-scale quest, and several other quests I haven't talked about really but that will be cool, and... the time to finish these in-combat messagebox menus (that video show Charon only, he's only one of 10 that needs the code, yay for... scalability.. or something.. bah ).

Is there anyway to get Sylan or whatever his name back alive. My Enclave Commandos kicked his ass in the tunnel and i can't rez him. I can not do the enclave quests with him dead as I can not turn the quest in. We walked into the black hole, and he was dead within seconds.

Enclave commander killed him, what in the world....

If you saw a message saying that the Quaternion now does not trust you, there's a problem, even if you get him resurrected.

Especially if you saw that message - - do you have a savegame you can step back to? Seriously, the management quest for the Quaternion quests closes down if the game thinks you killed Sylvan. That would be by far the easiest thing to do, to fix this ..

If that's impossible, let me know and I'll think about what it might take to fix it, but it's involved, let's say that.

I can go into the black hole and no one tries to kill me, if that is what you mean. I can explore around the black hole get to two inassesable doors (of which one I can back through if i go hown the vent chute).

I can purchase from the cafe, the sentry bots don't try to kill me and I can speak with everyone but Brandon and the Mr. Gustys. They have no options other than "I have to Go", but I can do it.

Reloading isn't really an option since it was ions ago when the event happend.

I did not see a box come up telling me anything. No one in the Qaurtenteen would possibly know it happened, hell i didn't know until I saw his dead body on the ground. now his body is gone and I want the quest completed if possible.

-- I'll add that I still have the quest marker and it points to where where he was when he died. I cantcl around to look outside of the cave but his dead body was cell spawned i think and now he is in lalaland.

-- I do not have a save from around that time period. I probably never saved around than and used the auto save for when I came and went.

Now that you described exactly that - - that's not supposed to be like that. It's supposed to fail the quest on you right there. In fact I tested for this. I wonder how this happened.

In your case it may be easy - - but only because something didn't work right in Sylvan's ONDEATH block. I will edit this post in a few minutes with something to try. But I have to troubleshoot that quest pretty much right away, because that quest is supposed to clean up if Sylvan croaks in the middle of it.

Edit instructions:

In-game, click on a Phalanx NPC and get the first 2 digits of its number-looking ID.

Then, put those 2 numbers in front of this number:

0c8b78

so it's kinda like:

??0c8b78

Then type in console

prid ??0c8b78
resurrect

and tell me how it goes.

Because of how another mod took an action which would have completely trashed that quest for you, I may have to make Gary able to repair all that [censored]. Gary doing it is actually far easier than me trying to tell someone how to do it, since Gary can have all the quest IDs stored and he can manipulate the quest variables.

Ok... I am not finding my exit from the Black Hole funny at all. In fact I die so fast all i see is a fog of white and St. Peter welcoming me into the pearly gates of heaven. I asume thats by design.

I had to run the placeatme command, but everything else went fine. (I assume thats because his cell respawned).

-- The quest does not fade out like a completed quest (it says bold - not sure if that is by design).
-- Once I am finished talking with him, I can't have another conversation with him be blows me off with some general go get them saying.
-- He is also a ghoal now, I can't recall if he was before or not.

When I reloaded from a save before I went into the Black Hole and hd my commandos with me I cleaned the special ops guys up, but i took soem heavy losses.

Screenshots
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b147/airportphantom/ScreenShot3.jpg
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b147/airportphantom/ScreenShot4.jpg
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b147/airportphantom/ScreenShot5.jpg
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b147/airportphantom/ScreenShot6.jpg
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b147/airportphantom/ScreenShot7.jpg
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b147/airportphantom/ScreenShot8.jpg

Christ, I gave you incorrect directions on working with Sylvan.

Go back to that earlier save and do this, using the corrected code below:

prid ??0c8b7e
resurrect
moveto player

and look around and see if you see Sylvan there. That version of Sylvan should work the quest variables correctly, etc.

About that fight - - it shouldn't instant-kill you unless you're at half health or something (thats why I throw that extra save in there). It's supposed to be a total [censored] of a fight, though. You'll want to stim back up right away if you're taking a ton of damage right away, and then continue the fight - - and it's meant for you to have a couple followers at your side.

Let me know how it goes - - I'll be back in a few hours.

From what I can tell everything is working. I completed the tour of "my" HQ (never will use it, looks great though), and the quest was completed and faded like a completed quest does.

From a spoilers side, what happends now with E5 its opitical eye and Robet (he has nothing to say to me now). Does the Enclave follow me around more or whats their story.

I do like the plot that you get in Robets office, its a really great additon to the ending after you blow their crawler up and nuke it to kingdom come.

Is there anything I can do to ensure everything is working as advertised?

It sounds like things are working properly.

short-term spoiler:

The Enclave will actually NOT harrass you at the camp sites or follow you around, but there's some good quests I'll be putting together, some of which involve combat, and well.. I hate to write too much about what's not there yet. It's more meaningful to talk about when there's some meat to it, like, when it's at least partially done.

I totally agree with you here

You may be sure, I will newer ask about such things. Cheater's nature- this was one of the reasons why I stop using of Enclave Commander long time before Phalanx. But technically this mod have many nice ideas.

Well- I ask not about some cheat-code, but simply replacer for the method of calling my NPC-s, which are near. All another conditions may be (and must be) in place. Just not to search nearest follower in the heat of battle, but use voice-anolog instead.
-I scream (push hot-key)
-My follower hear, if near (menu appeared)

Aha, you mean a way to open dialogue with the nearest follower, if it is in range, without needing to climb up its ass?

I think I see what you mean, actually. If a follower is within speaking range, you should get access to the group-at-once commands straight-up.

hmmm, will have to think about it and see what can be done.

Yeah, that would be kind of cool. Somehow if you could make a way to VATS a friendly NPC (like a follower) and instead of firing your weapon, you'll talk to him, no matter the distance.

Anything like that will need to be distance-limited. If someone lets their followers run amok, or like runs 100 miles away from them, they shouldn't be able to direct the group like that sorta.

We'll have to see what develops in any case. I am not developing using FOSE atm so getting a keypress out of nowhere is somewhat miracle-like anyway.

Well of course, I was just saying VATS could be used to make that easier.

On the development level, being in VATS makes it harder for me, though. I can't figure out how to really DO anything while the player is in VATS mode. I need a dialogue open already, or something to be activated.

If there's some different way (assuming not using FOSE), i'd be interested in hearing it.

Well, I know there are commands for firing and reloading weapons at specific targets in VATS, I wonder if you could "talk" or activate for a certain amount of AP.

I don't even know if that's possible, just tossing ideas around.

What about of special ingestible item, which, when consumed, call appropriated menu. It will be possible to hot-key it as well as all another ingestibles and weapons
Many mods use such technic and don't use FOSE at all

Some interesting news about FOOK.

Some of the FOOK developer people have been using Phalanx for a while, and they'd like to more or less start shipping Phalanx along with FOOK itself. In their case, they want it to actually ship in a form that's merged into their own FOOK files.

I explained that other follower overhauls (there is at least one out there) won't be as compatible this way (as for example FWE recently seperated its own (non phalanx) follower module back out of its core to increase compatibility with Phalanx), but they are happy with that. They seem to have picked Phalanx's follower handling as how they want FOOK's follower handling to go.

I think that's neat. FOOK sees a whole lot of use these days. I can't complain about letting a new audience see what good followers are like. Nobody releases a mod because they are hoping nobody will use it, even if like me, they sorta design it for themselves =p .

What'll be going into FOOK is identical to what is maintained as what I call the "mainline" Phalanx. It would be the contents of "Phalanx-MainFollowerModule.esp, and also the Point Lookout and Broken Steel changes would be integrated into their compatibility module. FOOK will also get the contents of the "optional weaponchanges" .esp (its nothing more than AI parameter changes).

It doesn't do anything to explicitly make the FOOK-Phalanx version better than someone running the stand-alone Phalanx next to another game-overhaul type mod. One thing for the future though is that FOOK having Phalanx native makes a few things easier to do developmentally for FOOK-specific weapons (I think FOOK adds weapons?). Anyway, if it does, a slightly custom version of the weapon-selection system is accomodated by that sort of inclusion.

Phalanx as of the current version (1.03) is not perfectly ready for that sort of merge. After I'm done this combat-menuing I showed earlier, I'm expecting to release a 1.04, and then start the work to prepare Phalanx' mainline to be more suitable for inclusion in a mod such as FOOK. I anticipate the 1.05 version as being what will go into it. The differences in 1.05 will be:

• Gary's first-time follower reset will not be visible to the player. That whole notification etc. will be gone and the work will happen behind-the-scenes.
  
• The messagebox notifications that explain some gameplay things (such as needing to stim followers after combat + some others) will go away.
  
• The "Leader's Sense" perk is going away - - the behavior of the perk will come automatically and won't be based out of a seperate .esp as it is now.
  
• I'm probably going to eliminate the way that upon follower hire, the weapons are added to the player instead of the follower. I now think that the issue I was initially concerned about with additem being used on MOBs is being caused by something else.
  
• Malcolm's early-player integration will see some small changes. Back when I was making him, I didn't know how to do everything I actually wanted. Now I do, but I had not gone back and filled in those holes.
  
• Internally, I'm removing the items and code that are relative to the very first, now-defunct follower weapon-selection system. All this time, Gary has been able to accept those old "assignable" weapons for trade-in for proper ones. The item definitions on those things as well as Gary's handling of them will go away.
  
• I'm going to be revisting the weapon-selection system to see if I can even further increase it's detection of the follower-affecting doubled-up-inventory-weapon bug that Fallout 3 has. My system often catches it now BUT it is still not 100%. I may be able to get it closer to 100%.

As I go along I may find more that should be changed, we'll see.

If someone is using standalone Phalanx right now, there will be a procedure for moving from the standalone Phalanx to the FOOK-integrated one. I already know that Malcolm, Deisha, and K-9 will immedietely un-hire, but I'm not sure about the regular followers. Gary will have a function to help deal with it. Also, if someone happens to be using the additional game-balance-changing stuff that Phalanx ships in its zipfile right now (like the one that changes stimpacks to do 100 HP base healing), they will want to use the 1.05 version of those little .esps.

So anyway, I thought this was interesting enough to make a post about. The next 2 versions of Phalanx are pretty much planned. I'm guessing it'll be a couple weeks for 1.05, and not real long for 1.04. I completed the proof-of-concept form of the 1.04 changes on Charon last night so, after scaling to the rest of the followers, 1.04 is pretty much done.



hotkeying an item has occured to me too as being a way to jack into such a thing...

:/ but I don't really like it.

We'll see what comes of it :/