RR Companions Vault, v5 (upcoming)

So, I promised you all a list of the improvements coming in v5 last night.

I had intended to deliver, but got drug off to bed instead.

Today's a new day, though, and I'm free to post and GECK again.

As always, modding is very much an evolving process for me. Features tend to change at a moment's notice, I get flashes of inspiration or something decides to stop working without warning and has to be axed. So I can't give you 100% that these will make v5, but here's the tally as it now stands.

First and foremost, we have the improved companion system. This continues to astound me with its performance. Reminds me of Oblivion, where I could play for hours on end without my cadre ever getting lost. Unless I was dumb enough to tell them to loot. Looting didn't work any better in Oblivion than it does FO3.

The improved companion system includes more than just some following fixes. It also removes auto-looting (though the commands to loot will be left intact for the time being), removes much commented-out code in the script that wasn't doing anything but wasting space, resets the follow distance to 150 by default - plugins will be released to allow you to change this, but 150 is working too damned well not to implement fully.

The health system still acts a bit wonky now and again. Unfortunately, anything that's set to run during combat is going to be this way. The AI's hardcoded behavior is to attack nearby enemies. Sometimes the health system overrides this fully, sometimes it don't. Still, with the resets in place, it should be functioning fairly well. I haven't noticed any problems with the severely wounded player function though - thus far the only problem has been the OnCombatEnd check to see who's below 50% health. Companion self-healing appears to be working beautifully.

The Vault 1 Access Tunnels will be modified slightly. No clutter yet, but I'm going to crank the lights in the main entry tunnel back a bit. All lights in the tunnels are the same light... but as Sgt Ovakll pointed out awhile ago, they're a bit bright where I doubled up next to the Springvale exit. Looked okay in the GECK, not so much in-game. Not going to scale them back too far. They're 768 power now, I'm thinking I'll knock them back to 512 and see how it looks.

The wasteland-side of the Vault 1 Access Tunnel hatches will be upgraded to actually work correctly for companions. The problems have been caused by an oversight on my part in the navmeshing. I have tested on the Paradise Falls hatch, and once this oversight is corrected, companions follow out the hatch correctly, even in large groups.

The Vault 1 encounter zone is going to be modified to allow respawns. I realize this may cause some problems for the prisoner system, but the containers and spawn zones NOT resetting is getting on my fucking nerves. This will be a change to the encounter zone itself, and not a resetting of the active zone in the cell options, so no "compatibility fixes" will need to be made to plugins.

Once this is all done, new versions of my companions pack, RRGuards, and my alternate guards plugins will be released to mesh with the altered companion system. The v5 companion system WILL be fully backwards compatible, so if you have your own companions, and don't want to upgrade them, they'll still work. They won't work as well, and will still have the occasional stopping problem, but they will work without change.

Upgrading a companion to the new version of the system will take longer to load the plugin in the GECK than it will to make the changes. Upgrading will consist simply of opening your companion's NPC editing window, and selecting another script from the drop-down box. Full instructions will be included with the update, and I intend to write a new tutorial, once this is all done and released.