Our companions are stuck walking, while we're galloping along Skyrim.

I am willing to take a stab at this, but I would like to get some direction before I do. I am a web services developer, so game modding is not my area of expertise. That said, I am not against giving it a go.

How would this be possible, and where should I begin looking to create a mod like this? I know the official mod tools are not out yet, and perhaps we're all waiting on those. Is there a scripting language associated with Skyrim so that this type of logic can be added to the game?

Here is what I was thinking how it would work:

[simple version]
You mount your horse, your companion immediately becomes mounted. When you dismount, your companion is automatically dismounted.

[immersion version]
You buy your companion a horse
You and your companions horse spawn together after fast travel or waiting
When you mount up, your companion then is issued the order to mount up
When you dismount, your companion also dismounts


What do you guys think, and if you have any tips on direction for getting this started I am happy to add to the number of mod developers available to Skyrim.
(I will be looking into this on my own anyway, figure it would be good to ask to speed up the process.)

I have no idea how to go about doing this, I just wanted to wish you luck and hope you can get it figured out

A great idea, and I can't imagine why it wasn't in the vanilla version.

You'll have to wait for the Creation Kit to be released as it'll need some scripting (for the simple version) and some quest structure for the immersive. The scripting, judging by Oblivion, should be very simple - just a case of giving the companion an AI package that, when your character's state becomes 'mounted' makes the companion use their horse (or something similar, depending on Skyrim's new scripting system) - with a bit of guard logic so the companion doesn't go running halfway across the world to get to their horse .

I don't understand why they didn't have your follower just get on the back of the player's horse. That would have been the best.

I don't think it will be that hard, both male and female NPC's have been seen riding horses, so the resource already exists, what's needed is for the follower to mount the nearest horse when the player mounts theirs, I think the difficult part is getting the horse the companion is sitting on to become the follower, the companion would also need to be the owner of the horse or it will keep running away.

These are valid points. Giving ownership of the horse to the companion shouldn't be too difficult, however I'm wondering if the on-foot pathing and horse pathing can use the same code. Otherwise, getting a horse (mounted companion) to follow you might be a bit of a chore code-wise, hopefully this is not the case.

A third option would be to increase the speed in which your companion runs... this is a cheap fix however.