[MOD] Undivided: Keeping NPCs Around
Aquadrizzt
Member Posts: 1,065
Undivided is a mod that changes Vhailor and Ignus to be followers rather than party members. Thus, this mod allows players to have all seven companions present as they progress through the game.
The newest version of this mod is available on GitHub.
To make Vhailor and Ignuus work as followers, the following functionality changes have been made:
- If Vhailor or Ignus would be killed in combat, they instead "plays dead" for the remainder of combat, lying on the ground and not being controllable until combat has been concluded.
- Followers cannot carry or use any equipment other than their default gear.
- Followers will not be available to fight by your side in the Fortress of Regrets.
- Followers do not respond to the "run vs. walk" system, meaning that Vhailor will always walk everywhere, making him significantly slower than any party members who are running.
- Followers can interject, but will not banter or comment on party deaths.
- When selecting a weapon for followers, the image of their weapon does not show up in the weapon selection quickbar, but is visible if you right click the apparently empty slot.
As with all of my mods, if you have any ideas, comments, or criticism, please do not hesitate to post in this thread.
The newest version of this mod is available on GitHub.
Features
This mod is being actively developed, and will be expanded as my free time permits. This mod currently allows Vhailor and Ignus to adventure with the party as followers without using party member slots. Followers will still interject and be identified as a member of the party for script/dialog purposes and will progress in levels along with The Nameless One.To make Vhailor and Ignuus work as followers, the following functionality changes have been made:
- If Vhailor or Ignus would be killed in combat, they instead "plays dead" for the remainder of combat, lying on the ground and not being controllable until combat has been concluded.
- Followers cannot carry or use any equipment other than their default gear.
- Followers will not be available to fight by your side in the Fortress of Regrets.
Upcoming Changes
As of this release, I am quite happy with the state of this mod, other than minor balance/AI tweaks. If you have ideas for things you would like to see in this mod, please let me know in the comments.Technical Limitations
I am aware of the following issues and would welcome suggestions for how to handle them:- Followers do not respond to the "run vs. walk" system, meaning that Vhailor will always walk everywhere, making him significantly slower than any party members who are running.
- Followers can interject, but will not banter or comment on party deaths.
- When selecting a weapon for followers, the image of their weapon does not show up in the weapon selection quickbar, but is visible if you right click the apparently empty slot.
Feedback
If you encounter any bugs while using this mod, please let me know.As with all of my mods, if you have any ideas, comments, or criticism, please do not hesitate to post in this thread.
Post edited by Aquadrizzt on
15
Comments
One question though, if you aren't maxed out on companions, can you keep Morte and/or Nordom in your party as party members and use the party interface with them until you are?
I do not believe there are any progression breaking bugs associated with this.However, I also have not playtested it beyond making sure that the mechanics present work properly. Proceed with caution.Also, allowing Morte/Nordom to switch between party member and follower might introduce some... instability that I'd rather not address quite yet. That's not to say it is entirely off the table, but it certainly isn't a priority right now.
EDIT: The Morte kidnapping scene currently doesn't fire properly (because the game teleports the party into the Lower Ward, but doesn't bother with followers) and will cause you to get stuck. I'm working on a fix right now.
To my knowledge, there are no longer any explicitly gamebreaking bugs, although there are still some issues that need to ironed out (e.g. Morte doesn't always exit the Pillar of Skulls upon pulling him out, Morte and Nordom will join you in the Player Maze, etc.)
These both have major spoilers, caveat lector:
The Pillar of Skulls will still allow you to give it Morte, in exchange for information. However, the game can't seem to return Morte to active play when you should have successfully pulled him out.
The Fortress of Regrets simply does not know how to handle the fact that you could have more than 5 companions with you upon entry; this is only really an issue with how the Final Battle scripts/dialog plays out. I am working on making sure that it can allow you up to 6 companions in the Final Battle (because Vhailor/Ignus turn on you), should it come to that.
And to be honest I don't know if you can install it mid game. You might be able to but I generally don't test my mods for midgame installs because they can usually break catastrophically...
I’m testing it in a clean 3.1.3.0 game, with no luck.
If I install both components, the game crashes when I start a new game or load a save.
If I install only Morte component, it works perfectly, at least the game starts when I start a new game or load a save.
If I install only Nordon, the game crashes when loading or starting a new game.
If I Install both components and later remove Nordon, the game starts normally again.
I download the mod yesterday, 07/12, so I don’t think it’s an old bugged version.
Any thoughts?
UPDATE. Only Morte works correctly, Nordon causes the game to crash upon loading.
UPDATE after further testing, Nordon actually works and doesn't cause the save to crash if present in the same cell.
I don't know why Nordom causes such issues when Morte doesn't; I'll try to give the code I used for Nordom a pass when I have a spare moment (soon™ because of grad school.)
One final strange bug I'm noticing, for some odd reason; cell spaces become incredibly difficult to ( enter / exit ) with both components enabled. It becomes nearly impossible to activate town gates for fast travel with the 8 party following the player. Do you have any tips
The cell transitions issue is because followers don't "gather" when you click a zone transition. You have to manually make Nordom/Morte stand within the area of the zone transition. I have no idea if there is a way to fix this that doesn't require a boat load of scripting, but this entire mod is a bit of a hack so I'll see what turns up when I do an editing pass.
If you're looking to make a total-party mod, you're probably way better off just making the party count go up by two and adding a slider to the party faces screen to be able to scroll them or something. Quite a number of things in the Modron Maze are Nordom equipment, and Morte doesn't have automaticaly scaling teeth (especially not enchanted ones, it's rather a big deal). The effort is admirable, the intention is... understandable, although the game plays best with 4 companions (more than that and you're way too strong), but this isn't a very good way to do what you're looking to do.
If this mod makes Morte unable to use Litany of Curses, then it does more damage to a playthrough than making Ignus or Vhailor a follower would. It's not that you can't play without Morte entirely, you can and I have multiple times, but the difference is enormous.
There are other things you lose mechanically, as Nordom is supposed to be the lore guy and equipping him with different lens does different things for him. Over half of the point of the Modron Maze is farming equipment for Nordom, if he doesn't have an inventory you did a lot of damage to plenty of game content.
And this isn't even getting into story reasons. TNO has no idea Morte is a "follower". That's a huge plot twist to a new player, even bigger than Dak'kon because you find out he can't leave you much later. And he isn't even bound by anything but his regret, he's not lawful, in the last conversation before the end area he even explains that he's not following you for any magical reasons but his own free will and feelings of guilt.
Just sayning, might be fun for some people, IDK, but it's wong on so many levels. With access to Litany of Curses being the pirmary thing. There's simply no way to recommend a mod which cuts access to it, unless that mod's primary motivation was "Litany of Curses is the most unbalanced ability in an infinity game, ever, and it was only put there to make combat trivial, so this mod removes it for that exact reason," but that mod would then probably need a different AI for all or most enemies.
I'm trying to come up with a Baldurs Gate analogy of removing access to LoC, and it's very difficult because there isn't anything nearly quite as stupidly gamebreaking / gamedefining as that ability in BG. It's like if somebody made a mod which removed all trap detection from the game, in a sense, just way worse. Like if somebody removed all healing apart from resting?
I do have a rather good Dota analogy for you to consider.
The other guy who can taunt does it in a very short range / microscopic area of effect, and only he gets a huge armor buff. It lasts only a few seconds. There's also a guy who can do the reverse, cause people in a small area to attack a target. Both abilities have hefty cooldowns.
Morte has a lvl 0, long range, low cooldown, effectively-forever-lasting taunt on top of being ridiculously tanky, and the taunt not only disables anyone he casts it at forever, it also debuffs them harder than most if not all debuff spells in PST do. This is one of the most ridiculous abilites in the history of gaming.
EDIT: And one unobvious small thing abut the Litany of Curses is that when enemy morale breaks and they run for it, it's very tedious work chasing them down because there are no ranged weapons in the game until rather late. If LoC had no other use but this I'd understand anyone who wouldn't put in a mod which made it unavailable etc etc.
Everybody else needs their inventory and skill/spell bar. Of them the only one who'd qualify as a follower is Ignus, and he's even less well integrated into the game than Vhailor, so for him the only real issue is one of spellcasting, and possibly equipping rings and bracelets.
But they have no specific equipment, and, really, nothing that can't be replicated, while Morte and Nordom very much do. There are 2 assassination quests which require LoC AFAIK, and there's many interactions whose sole reason is to buff LoC, so if the mod disables it it's quite disatrous. There's also teeth, lens and bolts to be gathered for Morte and Nordom.
EDIT: Oh, and I've also made several things related to followers official requests lately, to improve things with monster summoning items and Lim-Lims.
- Sorting out the ability of followers in general to run
- Sorting out the ability to give orders to followers unrelated to ones you give the rest of the party (this makes them effectively unusable in general, especially when combined with point 1)
- Sorting out the area leaving issues with followers (in case of the Lim-Lim to pick the thing back up whenever you leave the area and place it in your hand slot)
- Several others
So if the developers take a look at that stuff, and they should to make the Lim-Lim and the summoning items usable in a sensible way, this might help the maker of this mod out a lot. However, making Morte and Nordom followers is still something I would not recommend doing, or recommend anyone doing to their game. Vhailor - sure, even Ignus, yeah, sure, but not Morte and Nordom. Noble intentions, nice work put in, but horribly misguided, I'm afraid.This is literally impossible outside of GemRB. I believe it was CamDawg who said that, while looking through the code, "the number of times the 6 player party cap is hard-coded is staggering". I still think that it is a missed opportunity to have to skip out on 2 NPCs each run, hence the mod.
To my knowledge, the zone transition with followers works fine (other than that players are required to manually bring the followers close to the map transition, because they won't automatically run there).
The choice of Morte and Nordom was an arbitrary choice among the Fighters. It could certainly be configured in different ways. And you raise a fair point that Vhailor is much less mechanically involved than either of the other two.
I was working on a way to give Morte/Nordom their items and have them equip them, but it wasn't working when I tried it last (with code copied from follower mods for other IE games), so I gave up on it and pursued other things like ensuring that the Morte abduction sequence still runs.
When I have some time, I'll come around and do a pass and see what I can improve. It does work (in some sense of the word), but it isn't as seamless as I would like.
As with all of my mods, caveat utilitor.
Making Nordom a follower is quite a bit more unfortunate than it might look at first glance. Ignus only really needs to be able to converse with TNO, other than that he has more or less no interactions with anything, and him dissapearing from the party in the fortress of regrets only matters for an evil TNO. There's well respected guides on PST which recommend just dumping Ignus right after having a conversation with him anyway.
He'd probably be a bit useless as a follower without the ability to cast spells, apart from the fact that he's a ranged attacker and that alone is a very nice thing to have. There's also fine enough story reasons for him to be a follower - you made him, and now he haunts you because he's your responsibility which just won't go away. If you're up for a challenge, make him a follower instead of Nordom, just make him randomly cast spells in addition to his ranged attacks.
That would make a fun mod, and it could be recommended to people.
I don't know why I overlooked Vhailor... he has literally no abilities and his base weapon is better than almost all other axes one can find in-game. I could use the trick I'm using with Morte to upgrade his weapon over time, but he appears so late in the game that it's not worth it.
Ignus could be interesting as a follower. I'm not sure if you could make him cast spells manually, but if I coded his AI properly, you wouldn't care. That actually might be thematically appropriate that you can't control his casting... insane pyromanics don't need your lectures about not burning down the Hive after all.
When I have a chunk of time, I'll definitely try this stuff out.
The Player's Maze is giving me no small amount of grief though...
Update: I found the Vhailor files, got a few things fixed up, and am currently working on the functionality for Vhailor to not follow TNO into certain protagonist-only areas.
Update2: I believe Vhailor now (mostly) behaves with respect to protagonist only areas and the endgame area. I have not encountered the game-breaking crash that entry into the final area used to cause. The Player's Maze still interacts weirdly with him; once that is fixed, I'll release a preliminary version of Vhailor.
Just a reminder that Vhailor is procured rather late into the game, so if you haven't finished the game before, be sure to savor it; you only get one first play-through.
I'm on the fence about whether to give him more spell casts per day as his level increases. An extra mage that doesn't require a party slot (especially a mage with a full amount of spells) might be kind of unbalanced, so for now he just has his 4/3/2/1 spell casts of an assortment of his custom spells. Let me know if you disagree with this choice and I can assess.
As always, get the latest release from the GitHub repo linked in the top post, and happy planeshopping.