Followers in a line? Why?

[TranceFireFlow]

So my posse of followers are always in a straight single file line behind me and it really breaks emersion. I am not a mod creator but I was wondering if someone out there can make a mod to fix this so that the walk as a real group.

[JimboUK]

There was a companion for FO3 that made an effort to stay next to the player character but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, I remember it working but her efforts to stay by your side caused her to constantly be changing position which made her look more than a little erratic. I think if you had a number of followers all doing it you'd be surrounded by chaos, especially in third person where they'll pass too close to the player and cause the camera to jump around.

[madmongo]

How followers line up and follow you isn't something that you have control over. That's part of the game itself. You just set the NPC's AI to follow the player and the game takes care of the rest. The only thing you have control over is the follow distance. You can't make them group.

 

You can kinda fake it out by giving your NPCs some sort of invisible object to follow instead of having them follow the player. Then you just need to do a little math in a script to move the invisible object around relative to the player. As JimboIUK notes though, this can be a bit erratic. For example, if you have one NPC off to the player's right side and another off to the player's left side, as soon as the player turns a corner, the NPCs are going to move in a very odd fashion so that they can end up off to the player's left and right sides again.

 

You also have to set this up for every NPC.

 

If anyone wants to set this up yourself, your script is going to need to get the player's angle (you can use the GetAngleZ function), then decide what angle and distance you want your NPC to go to relative to the player. Then you can calculate your NPC's x and y offsets from the player's position using the following formulas:

x = distance * sin (angle)y = distance * cos (angle)

As JimboUK said, if you have a lot of NPCs, even if you have them all following different invisible points so they don't try to bunch up, any time the player turns it's going to be complete chaos.

 

You can avoid a lot of the weird camera jumps by setting the NPC's follow distance farther away from the player.

[laclongquan]

From playing experience, following in a line make for less buggy situations than surrounded. You have one dog, one bot, one human follower. if they surround you, in and out at entry zone can be very crowded.