You know, I was thinking about something recently. Why doesn't Fallout allow you to use the mouse scroll up and down to switch weapons in your inventory. To rectify this I got to working on a mod to allow it and midway through I thought, what if I could take the companion wheel and refit it to this situation. Imagine, instead of a companion wheel, you get the weapon wheel. At the push of a button, you can instantly switch to any weapon in your inventory by selecting it from the weapon wheel. Alternatively, you can just use mouse scroll to cycle through the wheel of weapons.

Obviously, the idea here is that there'd be two versions. One that automagically detects your weapons and puts them in the wheel and another one that allows serious players to customize which weapons are in the wheel. But, after much searching, I can't find any script that calls the companion wheel nor any of the assets. This leads me to believe it's built into the game internally.

However, I wanted to make sure that there wasn't a way to 'recreate' an interface LIKE the companion wheel and modify it to suit some other purpose. Is this already present inside the New Vegas ESM contents or do I need to get to work on hacking together my own version? Barring that, is making my own version even possible in GECK using scripts?

I don't think a weapon-wheel would be entirely feasible (for starters, we can't detect the player's current weapon in a reasonable way without the script extender, and the using the mousewheel bit is right out as we can't detect keypresses) but the Companion Wheel must run scripts for each of the buttons... the companions packages are all contingent on various script variables. Either that, or there's a bunch of hardcoded variable names that the companion wheel changes, but that seems a little... off.
I thought they might have handled it as a weird Message or set of dialogue topics, but can't seem to figure out which ones they'd be either.
Other than altering the scripts on the wheel slices if that's even a doable thing, there's almost certainly no functionality to create a new menu built into the GECK beyond the recipes/messageboxes.

Not to seem demanding but if Obsidian are still reading, it'd be nice to get the details on how the Wheel does its work.

I happen to be figuring out how it works as we speak but I am not sure if what I have seen will help you use it for what you need.

What I have so far is, the companion wheel's commands are shortcuts to specific dialogue topics within the VNPCFollowers quest. The result scripts within those dialogue responses run and the dialogue line gets said by the NPC.

Some of the words on the wheel can be changed by editing the Gameplay/Settings/ gamesettings values which have the sCWheel prefix.

The follower wheel pops up whenever you activate an NPC/creature which has the "playerteammate" flag turned on. I have not found the means by which this pop-up is triggered, if it's a perk with an onactivate entry point I have not found it yet. It could also be straight-up in the executable as opposed with perk related.

Yesssssssss.
Welp, don't know 'bout him but I'm set now. Thanks, Tarrant- I'd been looking in the individual companion's quests.

W.r.t. if it's triggered by a perk, it'd require a new function to be called I'd assume (like "ShowCompanionWheel") and if so, that'll be in the functions list in the technical details thread.

This could be interesting from a mod compatibility standpoint. If for example you add a line for your robots to the "passive" commands, and another person adds one for their hot sixy naked chick, I'm not sure the game accepts both..... ?? I seem to recall it not doing so but someone would have to check. Check sometime, anyway.

If it's done through dialogue, presumably we can just use the same special topics from VNPCFollowers in our own quests and dialoge filters & priority will handle the rest.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm stupid or... what's up here.

I'm looking at Raul and I'm seeing where the "passive" command switches a variable in his script (its a toggle) and that script does not even call an .evp. But nothing seems to HAPPEN aside from that script wise. No packages use this or are added to the NPC.

If someone's looking through the .exe functions, keep an eye out for something like that. It would be triggered off of the NPCRef.FollowerSwitchAggressive variable, which can be 0 or 1.

I'm going to go in game and try to see if the switch actually does um, anything at all. I mean after seeing this), I have to wonder.

I've tested Raul's behavior and I believe this command does nothing to him which resembles the text description of the command.

I cannot record videos right now cause fraps is crashing my game, but it's easy to demonstrate if you know what to do.

I briefly looked at the other followers and the setup seems the same.

I wonder what happened. I guess I'll let them know, and make a fix. * wonders *

Well, that would explain why my companions keep running around gunning everything even though they're on Passive, I suppose:p (I'd still love to be able to switch between three different companion modes - attack any enemy you see, attack only if the player is currently in combat and stop attacking when the player has stopped firing/being fired upon for 10 seconds or so/under no circumstances fire back - but from this I really doubt that'd be possible )

Question: Would it be possible to change the Companion Wheel 'give follower a stimpak' command to 'repair ED-E' or something when used on ED-E? I don't want to give a robot stimpaks in order to heal him.

Probably. Assuming that part is a dialogue command then yes. I KNOW from a bug I encountered that there are dialogue options for things like follow and other stuff. Someone else mentioned that here too.

Still, assuming I can find any mention of said companion wheel and trace it back to something then we should be able to at least port it to a FOSE plugin. Alternatively, maybe we won't even have to do that (probably will).

The whole 3 states thing though? Oh yeah, that should be easy enough to do with GECK.

I have a lot of experience with making followers do special combat behaviors, so I'll answer - -




That is not a bug for dialogue control - - the control abilities which you see in the Companion Wheel exists in 2 places, that's all. You can use the wheel, or, you can go into dialogue with the follower and change options there.

There's an explanation of how the Companion Wheel works in the first posts of this thread, check there.

The 3 states you describe are not doable unless you are really experienced with follower brains. There is more than meets the eye to it. I happen to have that of experience, and you can expect to see something like this in the near future (couple days I guess). For me it is just porting a small bit of function from my FO3 follower overhaul mod (FO3Phalanx) to this new game. Just some.




As far as 3 modes go - - it's possible to do many different things with this. I'm probably going to make a mod which makes a number of them. The behavior of "aggressive" while you are wandering through the wasteland will be toned down just a bit to where it is less of a nuisance. "passive" will require you to take damage before followers will intervene. I've already done these things in the first version game, so it is straightforward for me to put it into NV. Just keep an eye out for that mod I guess, once again it should be in a few days, kinda when I get to it.

Stimpacks actually heal that robot? Interesting. As far as them releasing it that way, there are some gameplay issues with changing that, primarily that repair is expected to be in some way tied to the repair skill of the player. It snowballs a little. In the context of a mod: it's an easy change to require you to have "scrap metal" or similar, and it's also possible to have the HP scale based upon repair.

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Something isn't working quite right with NPC's willingness to attack one another, and, in at least some cases all of my result script code on dialogue doesn't seem to be running, and onactivate block code on this follower may not be running for me. It's getting pretty weird!

As I wrote in the other thread about this topic. OnActivate on a simple NPC in the playerfaction works. Maybe it helps.

Ya, I noticed some weird attacking behavior when I was testing Arcade and his response to the Passive/Aggressive stuff. He wasn't attacking on the principles I've come to understand how a teammate in FO3 would attack anyway. I've also had a weird moment of red-blipped creatures staring at us and Arcade staring back at them and me waiting on all of them to attack and nobody doing anything. It was all very weird.