Tasheni Followers concept explained - your suggestions are welcome

[Tasheni]

Tell me your thoughts about it or better, try the mod and tell me after that how it works :smile:

 

Tasheni Follower's User Manual

Tasheni Followers own their own unique concept of acting and allow the player to
have partially an influence on their behaviour. My intend was to get
them easily managed ingame without using configurable menues, which I
personally find very unnatural and gamebreaking despite some features can't take place without them in other great mods.
They are meant to act as a group together and assist the player in his/hers adventures.
I avoided scripts as much as possible to achieve this. Script fragments
are mainly used for standards like open inventory, to change the
value of global variables, evaluate package stack, start some scenes
or increase a quest stage. I tried to use mainly things that are
already there. Important scripts are the followers main dialogue quest
scripts, the playermonitor script for mounting and the script for
Vala's control ring.

So while this is a followers mod and not a quest mod I started to
implement three short quests mainly to introduce actors that will
play a role in later chapters. Each follower has it's own past and
future and needs to deal with it through quests that are not
developed right now and not implemented. It's a part for the future.
This manual will help you to get the most out of them.

Dialogue menu:
There are two tiers of dialogue: Player dialogue will show up once always
at the first tier. Behind the line „I have orders“ or „can we
have a word“ or similar are the controls like „wait here“ or
wait and look around“, open inventory, favours, etc.
This concept allows you to see immediately if new dialogue is available
without scrolling through the whole dialogue menu.
I used hellos and blocking topics very sparsely, because hellos are
annoying if you want to reach the orders menu and blocking topics
often cut off the dialogue. So you need to click on them to see if
new dialogue is available. I'm not very satisfied with it and will
try to find a better solution.

Wait and dismiss:
There's no time limitation when you let the followers or the player horse
wait somewhere, they will wait forever if you forget them. But if you
dismiss them, you can't recruit them again. It's safe to let them
stay somewhere if you decide to go alone or with other followers.
Dismiss and recruiting again would need to implement other dialogue
and you never know what the player has done meanwhile and I don't
want to repeat the dialogue lines like there had nothing happened.
This may change in the future but is not on top of my todo list. I
don't know how much I can stress my voice actors as they have a full
daily timetable.
If you dismiss the followers they go back to their daily routines,
their quests stop and the summon spells will be removed and
you can't recruit them again.

Actor behaviour:
Sandbox packages:
I focused a lot on actor behaviour as it expresses living, aware people
and not just marionettes. But it must be contollable to a certain
point by the player.
Followers will automatically go sandboxing if you are in taverns, stores,
temples, partially farms and player homes.
They start sandboxing if you tell them to wait and relax or look around.
They start sandboxing if you sit, lean or lay down somewhere or use a
crafting table.
And they start sandboxing if you unequip your weapons and spells because
they think it's freetime.
For the first three scenarios they end sandboxing if you change your
state or leave the home, store, tavern, etc.

The latter is special: It allows you to let them sandbox everywhere you like.
That's a great feature if you play in worldspaces where the
appropriate keyword that is needed for sandbox conditions does not
exist, in the wilderness or in new worldspaces.
And this sandbox triggers scenes, that play otherwise only at certain
places in Skyrim, mostly in taverns or playerhomes.
This sandbox is stopped if you equip weapons or spells. If they play idle
animations at this time it will take a moment until the game
recognizes the change. But it works like a charm. Sometimes you can
improve this by just drawing your fists or weapon or spell to trigger the follow package.

What is it also good for:
It's not really clever to take all six followers into each house. If you
want to go inside somewhere without them, just unequip weapons and
spells what can be easily be done through a shortcut. They will stay
where they are and you have them out of the way. So you need not to
go through the dialogue menu to ask them to wait. Of course it will
not make sense if you need to go inside a cave or dungeon, because
you will need your weapons there.

Tip:Let some of them wait at a point you use as a base for undertakings
and take only two or three with you if you need to crawl through
tight areas. You can use the summon spells to summon the other ones
if you decide not to go back there. So you have a control over what
fighting power you need for a certain task or if you do it better
alone or with only little help. If a quest prevent followers to
follow into a certain cell you can summon them, if you need their
help.

Riding:
I included a script that let the followers mount and dismount very fast
if player mounts or unmounts. The horses are teleported to their
owner for mounting. Sometimes fast mounting works not for all of them
but at least for four – can't say why that is, perhaps because of
my weak machine or a bug in the game engine. But don't worry about
it: Don't wait, just ride away. They will mount and catch up. Especially if
you ask Ramgar to lead you to a certain location you should not wait for
your followers to mount, because Ramgar will leave very fast in most cases and not wait for you.

Playerhorse:
Vala is to a certain point an intelligent acting horse. Her control ring
is a left hand ring so you can equip other rings together with it. If
you put it on a key, you can easily switch between her state: Either
a companion you can talk to and who will fight with you, or a horse
you can ride. In the companion state, you can let her wait somewhere,
as long as you whish. In my testings she will then not teleport with
you if you fast travel. As a horse she follows you, she runs away if
it comes to fighting and will follow you again after that so you need
not to search for her or summon her.
Vala has her own inventory you can reach if she's in companion state.
There's no limit I know of for carrying stuff and it is safe to use.

Followerhorses:
They follow their owner, as long as player rides another horse than Vala.
If they don't, tell the follower to call it. You can tell the
followers to send their horse away, they vanish immediately – it's
a little bit sudden and will be improved in the future but this is
not on top of my todo list. If you want the horses to follow their
owner, you can ask them to summon them.
If player uses Vala as a player horse, the follower horses follow Vala
and not their owner. With the exception you have told the followers
to send their horses away. Then they run away immediately after being
teleported and followers have a hard time to mount.
If you are at a place you won't let the horses follow, just dismount,
use the ring to change Vala into a companion and
tell Vala to wait. All horses will wait near Vala and sandbox.

Why following Vala and not their owners:
If it comes to a fight and you hop off the horse, Vala takes all horses
out of the way. If it comes to a fight and your followers are faster
then you, they hop off their mounts while you stay in the saddle, the
horses don't run away and followers can easily mount again after
killing the enemies. Otherwise horses would stoop away and it would
take more time to catch them again or would need another script to
teleport horses again – this solution is far better. This way it
works only with Vala!

Looting(experimental):
I tested a lot of variations that prevents the followers from properly
following and didn't satisfy me. At least I decided to use dialogue
for allowing the followers to loot. It's only available if you talk
to Chiomara right now, because there was no time to go further. If
you tell her she's allowed to loot, ALL followers will loot, each of
them different things. It will happen at clearable locations. They
stop looting immediately if you draw your weapon or start sneaking or running!
and will catch up to you. So if you don't like that they wander off,
you can simply move with a drawn weapon or spell, sneak, or tell
Chiomara to stop looting.

Weapons:
Ruby and Tom have their own special weapons. You can give them others than
these and if they have more power, they will use it. They will also
use staffs, if they have looted some. But they are meant to use their
own unique weapons. Because these weapons tell a story that will
slowly be uncovered through dialogue ( the beginning is
achievable in version 0-4-0), they simply belong to them. They are part
of her background and questlines so you should not take them out of
their inventory, that would be immersion breaking. I forgot to set
them to not being playable. In future I will make a recipe so you can craft
them at the forge. I also need to find a solution to prevent Ruby,
Tom and Ramgar from using staffs. Just take out of their inventory what you don't like to be used by them.

Wardrobe:
I decided against an implementation of a wardrobe system. I do not even
tell my spouse what to wear, and I did not create fashion dolls. What
about stronger armor? The armor that come with them should be strong
enough for most situations. I have no idea how this works in higher
levels because I never played higher levels. But they are essential,
so what?
You can give them stronger armor but they wear it over their own and
clipping will occur.
They change clothes automatically at player homes, three times a week. If
you go out they switch back to armor. I experienced issues, sometimes
a mesh didn't show up at player home. This can be fixed mostly with
going out and in again, or summon them through their spell or go to
sleep until next day. Switching to armor always works! I guess that
the sandbox package prevent sometimes the script to run smooth for
all. A timer could resolve this, I will experiment with it.


Sandbox packages:
I tried to support natural behaviour and doing actions while sandboxing
that fits for the character. Unfortunately animations are poorly
supported with this game engine and they are very limited if it should
make sense. I put a lot of usable animations into the sandbox
packages, but that causes very weird behaviour and I noticed that the
game picks only two of them instead of five or six randomly actions,
with or without timer, that made no difference. So I decided to use
only two idle animations for each package. At most locations there
are also idle markers that will be used by them, so I have to be
satisfied with it.

Banter scenes:
I decided to use the Story Manager to trigger scenes instead of
triggering all through scripts. Banter scenes play mostly at player
homes or in taverns. Some scenes are playing in Whiterun: Eldrid
interacts with the inhabitants before you recruit her.
Sometimes more than one scene will play at once, so you may have problems to
understand what they say. But it's natural behaviour that people
together just talk and not wait for all others to be quiet. I'm not
done with it yet and will think for a better solution.
Scenes will repeat all 24 hours ( that's the most time distance you can give
them). I tried to spread them to different locations so you need to
travel to the taverns in Skyrim or go into player homes if you want
to hear all. Some are repeated at more than one location and some
play while travelling.
The intro scene between Chiomara and Tom plays after he's saying
„alright“ and you don't know why he's doing this. If the scene
starts, wait until it's finished. They have packages to go in front
of each other and will not follow you until it's finished. This scene
will play only once – so you might want to hear it.
You can stop each scene if you talk to one of the involved actors.
Unfortunately that happens also if you bump into the actor.
If you unequip your weapons and spells, you can force a lot of the
scenes to play again. It may take a little time until they start
and I experienced that sometimes nothing happens but suddenly a scene
starts after you have left the cell. I guess that happens because
most of the scenes are change location events and fire if you change
the cell. Sometimes a lot of scenes starts one after another.
This is a nice feature if you are camping in the
wilderness somewhere or play in new worldspaces.

Romancing and marriage:
True heroes have no spouse! Same goes for adopting children. Well,
romancing, marriage and adopt children for me is the most boring
thing that Skyrim has to offer. I tried it once with another mod
installed that advances marriage and I looked at vanilla stuff via
video. It feels like playing Sims. My followers are not marriable.
This is a thing I want to use very carefully. So you will feel more
familiar with Eldrid or Chiomara when dialogue advances. Could be a
slightly shift to romance. But for now they will stay friends and
only friends. Maybe that I will advance this in future, but I do not
know how much time I can put into the mod and I prefer to advance the
questlines rather than to merry one of my followers. Despite my
followers have of course families that play later on partially a role
(not necessary becoming ingame actors) they have now a new family:
Themselves and you, if you like.

Troubleshooting:
First and most important thing: Fast travel, waiting for many hours
(I guess more than eight) will break the timetable of the AI. And don't
teleport if you have the horses with you! They follow you everywhere!

If followers don't show up in Whiterun before you have recruited them,
leave the cell and go back again, than they should be there.
They have a daily schedule at different locations, partially outside Whiterun, so search for them.

If followers don't follow draw fists, spells or weapons, they should catch up immediately.
If that doesn't help, what happens rarely and mostly if the bugged
navmesh prevent them from following you properly, summon them.

If followers start fighting against each other, just ignore it. Mostly it occurs
if Chiomara uses her fireball spells and hits another follower.
If it annoys you too much, disable the follower
who's aggressing and enable him again. They should stop if you change
the cell. They can't hurt each other too much because they are
essential.
This is a widely known bug in game and I did a lot to prevent that
behaviour. It occurs very rarely.

Followers don't appear after fast travel:
An animation or sandbox package prevent them from being teleported. Wait
three hours or summon them. Or go inside a dungeon and start fighting
– they should appear and help you. If that doesn't help, summon
them.

Quest giver:
Rikja the Huntress will find you and offer two options: Go hunting with her or lead to Ramgar of Stony Creek if he's not already recruited.
If you decide first to go to Hunter's Rest, Rikja will leave after you are there. You can follow her and speak to her again (click again, if she only greets you). Then the Hunting Quest will be available.

If you decide to hunt first, she asks you after finishing if she should lead you to Ramgar. So you can do both quests either way.
Rikja has a mapmarker so you can follow her easily. During the Hunting Quest Skjora is leading - and hunting at the same time. You can try to be faster than her with a bow and gather a lot of pelts.[\spoiler]

Talk to Raganhar of Stony Creek, he will give you a short quest.

Edited June 28, 2018 by Tasheni