Insert Sigh Here.

So, my boredom this desolate morn of the total variety; and me having watched about all the To Aru Kagaku no Railgun I can stand for one week, I decided to fire up New Vegas, and see about unfucking my flagship mod.

I started by testing, as I usually do.

I checked Carrie for sneaking and weapon drawing/holstering - to verify that her companion script was indeed still functioning.



Well... shit. Apparently it isn't broken here, and we need deeper testing...

I grabbed Maeva and [CENSORED]; passed out some stimpaks and verified that everyone had ammo, and we made for Sloan to head into Quarry Junction. I figured if anywhere will result in frenetic, companion-assistance-required combat, it will be Deathclaw land.



Weapon drawing/sneaking; check.



Combat? That's a check.



Following over rough terrain and teleporting, check.

Jumping off a fucking cliff to stay behind their beloved master?



Check.

Now, see, this is why I loathe Bethsoft. It isn't the money-grubbing or the density of their staff surpassing depleted uranium. It's the randomness of their work. We have it confirmed by my partner Herculine that 0.5 doesn't work right with the new patch. Conversely, another player has reported that 0.5 works fine for him even on the new patch.

The 0.6 version of NCCS that I'm running is identical to 0.5, save for the new inventory containers. There were no revisions to the companion scripts made.

So why in the holy hell does it still work for me; but not for others. Further, why have I not had five hundred reports of 0.5 not working? Granted, there's a comment up from me that it's being worked on; but that's never slowed you people down before.

It could be some sort of GECK-setting in the plugin that's invisible to us, but is somehow causing problems for 0.5, but was reset in the course of developing 0.6. In that vein, as soon as I finish this post, I'm going to package up 0.6, mail it to Herculine, and see if I can impose on her to remove that variable from the issue.

On the other hand, it could easily be that Mercury is in retrograde or something. Did some of you miss your monthly sacrifice to Ganesha? He is the favored God of hackers for a reason you know - being known as the Remover of Obstacles and whatnot.

And lastly, here's me and Maeva surveying the quarry to make sure everything was sufficiently dead before we moved away from the high ground:



Yeah, I know - it doesn't have anything to do with testing, but I thought it made for a cool screenshot. I had several seconds previous killed both Deathclaw Alphas with one round each. You've gotta love 50BMG-AP. DT? What DT?

Edit, later:

Herculine has confirmed that 0.6 does not work for her.

Which is baffling. I've been playing the game off and on all morning, and aside from two times that the game locked, I haven't been encountering any significant issues. Fact is, the companions' combat behavior seems to be improved somewhat over previous versions. They cleaned up Vault 11 pretty good. Granted, that could be just the latest set of revisions to their combat styles kicking in, since I didn't test them heavily before.

As we all know, if I can't reproduce the problem to see its effects myself, I have a hell of a time fixing it.

Provided the save-game cleaning doesn't fix it, about the best I'm going to be able to do is go through and comment out the new code in a companion script or two, and have her try that.

Thankfully, my personal companion system is written with me in mind. As such, I don't have to cede to the desires of anyone else. It thus does not have the sneak menu or any of that useless crap; and is so immune to the new patch, regardless.