I did it because the EDE follower is reported to be a mental case and I didn't wanna be sending it out like that. I hired Arcade, Rex, and Raul though, and they seem to be proper.

If you really want it you can get it here: http://www.finhosting.fi/~fallout/downloads/development/FoNVPhalanx-.03.zip , but this thing is kinda moving fast. The version I have on my HD already has my options function built into the companion wheel for the most part, and the first option I built into it was ability to hire all followers without regard for the 2-followers-only limitation. Not saying its great for game balance but, it will let you do it, and I wanted to have that for what I'm doing.

I expect sometime tomorrow I'm going to put .04 out. I don't know if I'll have EDE looked at by that time, but the beginnings of the additional options menu that you get to from the companion wheel will be there.

Might've been mentioned in the thread or somewhere else, but what is your plan for balancing the perks that followers provide? Will every follower you have still have their perk, or will you have to choose whose perks you want activated?

Well,

Taking more than the number of followers than the game normally allows within the regular game environment is already hellaciously overpowered. I'm not necessarily recommending actually using the multifollower option I'm building into this thing unless the number of enemies in the game has been increased by a mod such as what I expect will be, like, the FoNV MMM. So its like... me trying to nit pick about how many of those follower-generated perks get passed out would be like being worried about spilling your cup of ice tea in the pool, thinking you made it more wet. I think that in the future, when the right game environment exists for multi-follower to have a semblance of balance, the perks the followers give won't make or break anything, it'll just be a part of it all.

I'll try to get a version of this out sometime today which doesn't outright break any followers, btw.

You said you intended on adding status notifications to the companion names like, Almost dead, wounded etc etc.

Are you able to take this a step further and add status effects to them such as

Wounded: plays the holding stomach animation, reduced movement and combat effectivness depending on status type.

To Almost dead: completely immobile on the floor paralyzed and useless in combat (you can still *talk* to paralyzed actors) and will run on a timer before they die, by this you can either stim them or use a doctors bag to get some reprieve, and I guess in the future your Companion recover mechanic would make a come back?

through this these companions will no longer be demi-gods but an integral and mortal aspect of your squad yes?

just a thought

I agree, it's just that I love the idea of being able to have an entirely non-combat character without having to construct my own robot army to escort me from place to place like I did in Fallout 3.

I don't have a feel for how they fight yet. I have 4 of them with me now but it's still way too soon. It'll be some time before I know.

What I did for Fallout 3 Phalanx was, when the follower started taking notable damage in a fight (I believe its 2/3 and 1/3 threshold ) I notify the player via a message at the top left of the screen. This was so that the player had a chance of noticing what was happening in time, and maybe being able to get to the follower and keep it alive. This was a way to try to bring it to be more even with Fallout 2, which was completely turn based and where it was never difficult to see if a follower was being destroyed by an enemy. Now getting your ass to the follower in time to save it was another question in Fallout 2, in Fallout 3 you get more mobility in your fights (you do not run in VATS, and in fallout 2, you ran using your action points). But in any case it did not happen in Fallout 2 that a follower could take a ton of damage and there was some question as to which one it was.

I don't know how valuable that would be for NV, like I was saying I don't have familiarity with how fights go down when things get hard. But having done the one before and seen it work out reasonably well, I would be inclined to use it again if there seems to be a need.

Tarrant, my bad, I meant I assumed you checked it out after reading my post and confirming it as a bug.

At any rate, I don't have a savegame from before I got ED-E. It's in Primm and if you don't have high enough repair or science you can fix it with 4 scrap metal, 2 sensor modules and 2 scrap electronics.

Edit: Also, I found out that if you install Phalanx then uninstall it (or not load it) it causes Boone's companion wheel to not work. Pressing E on him just brings up the talk options. If I enable the mod his companion wheel comes back. I fixed this by kicking him out of my party then bringing him back in again.

that's fine, I got EDE in my game now. In my version .esp EDE is not having any major malfunctions. I have plans to upload this later today.

Yeah Boone is wholly untested as of this sec.

Atm I have Lily, Cassidy, ED-E, Rex, Arcade, and Raul. All things considered they are working reasonably but, I'm trying to work some kinks out of this passive mode. I had it clean with one follower but making the group dynamics right is touchy. It is less straightforward than I realized when I started. It can be done but, it's one of those things that's better done with a new .exe function.

I wish that mobs with assistance set to 0 would actually not assist anyone. That would settle the whole thing. Sigh.

hmm what else.

Lily is damn creepy. The combat taunts are like, ya no... maybe I should take that one back where I found it and quietly leave it there. Before something happens.

if you had him in passive mode and dropped the .esp out of the load order, yep, exactly. I'm using script tricks to get the companion wheel to open up on something that is not set player teammate (thats what I have to do for this passive mode).

wtb assistance = 0 actually working, pst.

Are you gonna make companions "smarter" by chance?

Like right now I'm having some real problems with companions not listening to what I tell them. I.E., I give them new weapons and ammo to use, they don't use it. They use melee attacks 80% of the time, even when I have them set to Ranged mode. They just wander off.... they randomly chase down enemies, even on passive mode. This is really a pain for hardcoe mode, because they will just wander off after some enemy, and die, and then they are gone forever.

So yeah... not getting much of a response on other forums, so either it's just me having this problem, or IDK.

Ah yes, that's exactly what happened then Nothing to see here in that case lol

Just a question, are you(in future) also going to fix the flag bug where are companions not making responses on some events when they should? For example I have Cass and Boone, but it's usually only Cass who does the talking and Boone remains mute.. :brokencomputer:

Some of what you are describing will be better because I've changed some package flags, and they stick closer to you in combat, and some other things..

As for the weapon use - - I'm still in a learning phase with these followers. I'm used to fallout 3 but these followers have had changes made to their guts and I don't know them all yet. It is new, strange territory. For example I was stunned to find dialogue lines in the game where followers complain about their weapon ... weaponbroke, weaponineffective... but see, followers come with follower-only weapons which, in Fallout 3, would stay at 100% condition, and there was even some sort of code-or-glitch which would repair their playable weapons all the way for them. I can't say a thing about the NV weapon use at this point, it's all too new and also undocumented, kinda see-as-you-go deal.

I suspect that Boone is meant as the strong, silent type, and Cass is meant to be chatty (which if you played Fallout 2, you'd see her Dad, and... damn, the kid came out JUST like him. haha.).

'Strong, silent type'

You know, after hearing Myron, I just can't take Boone seriously because they both share the same voice actor Jason Marsden.

Anyways, so it's not a bug? Boone is supposed to be mute this whole time? Well all right then..

But let's say... Cass and Raul? Lily and Arcade?

Wait, you mean with the first version Phalanx loaded? In my .esp I actually think I broke some of that. They were saying certain lines far too frequently and I tried to tone it down, and now I do not hear enough of the lines. At first I wasn't sure if I'd really done that, I needed some time in-game with them, but now it seems clear.

If you mean the completely unmodded game... I'm not sure..

I'm a little new to how they are being made to give comments like this. There's some kind of cooldown which keeps kicking in and I think the method I'm using to limit comments is mingling badly with that cooldown. I will definitely see about un-breaking what I believe I broke.

If I could make a request, that would be to make Boone (he is the only companion I have have tried other than EDE) less awesome. With Boone in my party right now, there is little challenge, he kills everything.

Also, the unlimited ammo, unbreakable weapons makes the whole deterioration concept worthless, as well as scavenging/crafting ammo....

Actually, the follower weapons aren't unbreakable (though they do have unlimited ammo).

I'd like it if followers auto-looted opponents/containers in order to grab ammunition for their currently-wielded weapon. That'd be cool, as I wouldn't have to worry so much about keeping them stocked up all the time. Same with stimpaks and any other chems they might use - just limit them so they only loot if they're currently carrying less than some threshold number of items (say 300 rounds for their weapon or 5 stimpaks or something).

If you are right about that, it's a very, very nice development. So, I'm hoping you are. Because, if that unlimited-ammo weapon eventually wore down or completely out, it seems that it would push the player into providing weapons (donno bout ammo?) after a time.

It would be a little troublesome in that the player doesn't get to directly examine the follower's default weapon and see that it has a problem that way, but, I have seen follower lines in the GECK where a follower seems to be making statements about his weapon's unacceptable condition (crappy, or, broken). So it's not a showstopper I don't think.

But like I said I hope that's true. I haven't had a chance to notice at this point, my followers have hardly fired their weapons (sorta a crew of 7 atm... so a few shots out of each get the job done :/ ).

I haven't had my followers weapons get destroyed yet myself - I simply have seen reports of people complaining about their non-selectable, non-repairable weapons getting damaged, and when I examined them in the GECK they appeared to have nothing attached to them to stop them from being damaged. It's possible I missed something and those reports were in error, of course.

Tarrant, it's great to see you back for FONV. Your Phalanx mod for FO3 is utterly awesome so I'm watching this one closely, you do great quality work!


As for a poster above about Boone: Yeah, I felt like I was the useless NPC who was just a bullet sponge and pack mule when I had him along. He pwned everything within a 100m radius, many times before I even saw it myself. A more manual way to tone him down would be to make his scoped hunting rifle an actual inventory item and give him a varmint rifle or something instead (some mods allow this I think) That hunting rifle launches .308 rounds, so I think it's a pretty decent gun.

If the people who made NV read this - -

You did a wonderful, wonderful job on these followers. I think that all that's left for me to screw with is some combat [censored] and some multifollower-impacting-only garbage. Seriously. What I end up doing won't qualify as an overhaul, its just some stuff.



Hi, thanks !

I am wondering if perhaps he's better tuned for "hardmode" - - remember the game has that, and all. I'm walking around with this circus act * cough * I mean, squadlike thing - - getting this passive mode done - - its overkill to the extreme, we [censored] on the world, pretty much.

Once I finally get this darn version 1 Phalanx uploaded, maybe see what you think of Boone in Passive mode. With what I have in testing right now, he doesn't aggro until you seriously start the fight. (edit: with the exception of that faction he's at war with, and I'm not cancelling that behavior).

I tried giving Boone a service rifle. He chews through ammo real quick with his 'let's shoot everything we see' mentality If passive mode works in the future then ammo won't be so much of an issue lol

Well, passive mode seems to work fine as I have it here this second. One follower has one glitch with it, I'm trying to straighten that out now, then maybe you can try this .esp and see what you think (or, try it and see what parts of your game my [censored] breaks haha).

I am playing hardcoe and Very Hard, and Boone using his regular scoped hunting rifle is a machine of death. I dropped him just so I could feel like I was playing again...