That's great to hear, dAb.

I'm sure you won't be sorry to hear, then, that ver 4 is now well in the works and is undergoing testing.

Peter ID - Although I tend to share CDCooley's opinion on Vilja's quests not really being XP-quests, I could of course at least provide a list of quests and a "value" for them, so that a patch can be made. However, as we are working on ver 4, I would believe it wouldn't be a very good idea for anyone to make such a patch at the moment, would it?

Seems like there's plenty of opportunity for XP in just the vanilla content alone.
Too many DLCs + mods throwing XP at the player left and right = too much?

Now you got me all excited, didn't know a major update was on its way! What do you plan to improve?

Well, several things, but I think the most noteable change is that it will now be possible to romance her (which has been much requested), and there will be a little bonus-storyline unfolding if you choose this option. Note that this is extremely optional, though, as the intention has never been to make Vilja a romance companion. So, in order to romance her, you have to go to her options book and choose this option, else nothing romance-related will happen.

Some of the other changes:

- you can do sparring with her and play some games with her
- you can discuss many of the places you visit with her, and she will give you her opinions on them.
- more "awareness" - she will for instance "know" if you leave her behind and for how long *), you and she can decide what kind of items she will buy when she goes shopping.
- more interaction with other npcs - unique interaction with Companion Fergus, Ruined Tails, Mazoga, Adoring Fan (somewhat limited for Ruin and Adoring Fan, as there is a problem with how their greetings system is set up). She now can discuss local gossip with other npcs, and has often her own unique opinions to share...

There is more, of course, these are just a few teasers...


*) No need to fear - if you tell her before you leave that you are leaving, she will understand and give you a warm welcome when you return (unless, of course, you said you would be away a day and stayed away a week...)
I.e. treat her like you would a human, and you'll be fine.

How awkward

What is that supposed to mean??

It can be awkward enough sometimes voice acting regular lines.
Voicing lines for a romance must be worse.

Yes, especially when you're writing the dialog as well and not just only voice-acting it. Because of the many requests, there actually was a "romance" in the works already for ver 3, but I wasn't happy with the result, and we therefore dumped it. This time, I think I have found a solution that fits Vilja as a person a lot better, and that I don't feel at all uncomfortable with voice-acting. Note that this is *not* an "advlt-rated" mod - the "romance" has no sixual content - it's supposed to be sweet and a little funny and as much "Vilja" as possible.

Sounds very promising! I'm not very interested in romance, as the character is good as she is, but as long as it doesn't involve six I agree that it might add a lot of depth to her.

Here's a few things I'd like to see in future versions:

- make her more involved in the quests by commenting on the quest progress [i.e. every quest stage, not only at the start and at the end of a quest]. I'm aware that this would involve a lot of work
- give her a chance to refuse to follow the player, i.e. she refuses to get involved in the dark brotherhood quest and she'll wait for you at home
- celebrate the quest end! Let's go spend some of the hard earned money in a tavern and drink a toast to our successful cooperation. Hooray!
- drinking races! Let's see who gets drunk first!
- give her the opportunity to loot precious items for herself such as rings, pendants, etc
- give her the opportunity to repair herself her armor and weapons whenever she gets at a high enough level

On a side note, being a sound engineer and being very concerned on the audio quality, one thing that bugs me a little is the samples quality. I understand that your home recording equipment might need a little improvement. I might try to improve the samples a little by removing the ambient noise and tone down a bit the various clicks and crackles, I'll keep you updated.

That one could het Me in Big Trouble... :whistling:

Thank's for all the work on this Emma :thumbsup:

:) Me too, my little excursions with the Dark Brotherhood are going to result in "YOUR DINNERS IN THE DOG!"

No need to fear - if you tell her before you leave that you are leaving, she will understand and give you a warm welcome when you return (unless, of course, you said you would be away a day and stayed away a week...)
I.e. treat her like you would a human, and you'll be fine.

I should have known you would have thought of that. Thanks Emma, very much looking forward to the next installment.

Thank you for the suggestions


As for making her more involved in every quest stage, it's a matter of how the quests are set up - sometimes it isn't "fitting" or there are too many optional outcomes of a particular queststage. There are already quite a lot of quests where she does comment on many of the various quest-stages, and I continue to add these kind of things, there will be many new quest-comments in the new version.

Refusing to follow the player... well, I think many players would be totally annoyed if this happened without reasons. There are already stages in her own quests where she will refuse to follow you (as you probably noticed). It would be possible to make her refuse to come along during certain stages of other quests... but then I would have to set up an extremely extensive system where the player could tell her which case he was going to do, so that she would "know" what she was refusing. And it would be way to easy to cheat her narrow little AI by telling her you would be doing another quest. So I'm not sure this idea could be executed in a good way. (I hate it when her AI-shortcomings show up; I hate it when she appears dumb)

Lol, you CAN go and celebrate a quest-end, and sometimes she even suggests so. You do have the "Let's spend the evening out" option that you can use whenever you want to celebrate with her (Let's just talk->You and I->Let's spend the evening... etc). You do have to complete her first questline before you have this option, but I'm pretty sure you have had her around for quite some time by now.

Drinking races sounds fun, although at the moment, I'm not sure what would be the best way to implement it. I might look into this either now or later.

She can already loot, although the looting ai-packages are divided in cathegories, like weapons, armor, flora. You have to tell her to loot, though... it quickly becomes extremely annoying if a npc will loot bodies by default (been there, done that)

Repairing weapons and armor is only possible if you add an OBSE-dependancy. As there already exist the excellent http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29652 mod, which allows her and other companions to repair their own items, we have decided that it's better to let Companion Master do this work and the Vilja-mod will continue to stay clear of unnecessary dependancies.

I can surely understand that a professional sound engineer don't find Vilja's voice-files totally satifying . Xtudo has made a noise reduction version of the voice-files, have you seen this optional download? Please keep me updated on this, if you manage to improve files, I would of course be ever so happy if you let us use the improved version.