Reginald_001

Note that this all might change as I test and develop!

Ivy's skills depend on her skill level, both frequency and eventually damages. She starts out with 2 special attacks: Force Push (Ivy pushes enemies away, the fall and need to get up) and Telefrag (Ivy teleports into enemy). More attacks can be unlocked by the following (and will likely be expanded upon at a later time): Zap! Attack Ivy teleports to enemy then zaps them with an electrical shock. - Science Perk Rank 1 - Robotics Expert Rank 1 - Having both of these unlocks the quest: Find the 'NX-2C Zapper Upgrade' Holotape. Find the holotape and install the upgrade into Ivy. Boom Bitch! Attack Ivy teleports to enemy then drops a grenade, or plants it on their enemy. - Explosives Expert Perk Rank 1 - Robotics Expert Rank 1 - Having both of these unlocks the quest: Find the 'NX-2C Exploder Upgrade' Holotape. - USES AMMUNITION Find the holotape and install the upgrade into Ivy, equip her with frag grenades. Beam Me Up Scotty Attack Ivy stays with player, but teleports the enemy to 100mrs above the ground, then lets them drop, the drop does damage. - Science Perk Rank 2 - Robotics Expert Rank 1 - Having both of these unlocks the quest: Find the 'NX-2C Teleport Upgrade' Holotape. Find the holotape and install the upgrade into Ivy.

It's customizable in the way that you can open in XEdit. But the damage leveling is built the same as the vanilla NPC's. They level up all the way to L50 as well in this manner. But Ivy is overpowered to begin with. She is not for use in such a setup. I expect once the ESM is out anyone can make a quick ESP hack to balance her out for anything they want (Frost, etc..). Yes. In fact.. there's some moments where I need to disable her warp (e.g. when the player is flying a vertibird)... It's pretty heart breaking to see Ivy warping to you in mid air, fall to the ground, warp again to you mid air, rinse and repeat..

As it is now, all of her moves are instakills and most of the effects are just visual, so the best option in survival modes is to simply disable this function in the holotape. I am thinking about making these attacks real, meaning that a real explosion with damage is placed. Right now other NPC's are pushed but not damaged by the blast force. I can look into making the damages dependent on skill level, meaning that if survival mode is chosen, her attacks will be severely nerfed. But then I'd rather simply make such an option customizable in her advanced holotape (which is lore breaking anyway and shouldn't be used under normal circumstances).

The lines and setup are in there, only needs to be filled.

I need at least 8! 2-4 letter one-liners. But more something like this, at least 4 different lines for each type of attack (grenade 'boom bitch', pulse/force 'Hello there!' (reference to Obi Wan), telefrag 'Quaked!' (Quake 1 reference), electrical 'Zapped baby!' etc..etc...

Oh definitely! I'll likely replace the regular combat dialogue when special attacks are happening (she's now still saying stuff in between) and she needs a (short) one liner, after returning to the player to reset her idles any way!

Video of Ivy's Execution and Grenade attacks. Work in progress! Working on keeping actors put during the attack and will likely remove the frenzy attack as it's not working out (I don't use that in a syringe either, it's too specific of a skil and looks very useless when there's less than 3 enemies). Still working on timings of each individual attack to make it go smoother. I'm also working on making the explosions have a greater push force, so you can see bodies flying.. Also, I'm intentionally a very very bad shot so I can test Ivy's attack routines. She's also employing them far more often than she would in a regular game, where it would likely only happen once or twice during an intense gunfight. Grenade Attacks 2.mp4

The effect is pretty overpowered so I'm leveling it with the player. For instance, the cooldown for attacks is limited by the player level, starting at 12 seconds for players lower than level 10. Ending at 6 seconds for players higher than level 50. I don't know how VATS works. So I've never looked into it. But I like the autonomy of the system as it is. It makes for surprising gameplay so I don't think I will explore that option. The frenzy attacks are fucking chillingly awesome. Ivy teleports in, the combattant is stunned, she whispers something, then she teleports out and the enemy goes into a wild frenzy attack... real Hannibal Lecter stuff! I've abandoned the stabbing attack. I can't get the animations to line up and it looks awkward. The techy attacks are far cooler anyway. There are now 4 types of attack: - Electrical (This is her initial special attack type and is always available, no perks needed). - Grenade attack (Players need the explosive experts perk) - Frenzy Attack (Players need intelligence higher than 8.) - Force Push Attack (Players need to have finished the Lorenzo quests at which Ivy can examine his force gun and implement the technology in her own systems). As I've hacked these attacks into dialogue spoken script during the attacks, I can add many conditionals and I can very easily expand the system in the future to allow for new attacks. For instance, I am working on the Synth attack where Ivy can hack Gen 1 synths, for which players will need to have the Robotics Expert perk, etc...

Does it copy out what it deletes to some other directory, so you can restore afterwards?

Really hit a sweet spot with modding Ivy. That's what a couple of free days does. Things are now happening as I want them to happen and quickly too. I am currently working on implementing the following attacks for human and synths (gen1 and gen2) characters: - Electrify (done) Ivy teleports to enemy, gives them an electric shock. - Stab (working on alignment... might abandon the idea if I can't get the combat target to play the correct anim). Ivy teleports to enemy, stabs them to death. - Death from Above When outside, Ivy teleports her enemy to 100 meters above ground. It will go into ragdoll anim, then fall screaming to their death, much like a Giant attack from Skyrim. - Execution (done) Ivy teleports to enemy, then executes them with a shot to the head. - Explosive Plant If Ivy has explosives in her inventory, she will teleport to her combat target, plant an explosive, then teleport out before it explodes. - Power Dive / Force Push (done) Ivy teleports to the combat target, then does a 'super hero landing' after which a force pushes all combatants in the area away. She teleports back to the player so they can pick out targets as they are trying to get up from the ground. Videos of all of these in action are coming soon. Note to self: Ivy keeps losing her combat targets half way through the script, then she loses her dialogue targets for coupled anims. So I'm going to work with a keyword. Attach it to the actor that's her initial combat target, take it out of combat (freeze it essentially) have Ivy and them do their thing, then remove the keyword. Another note to self: Starting Quest B from Quest A's Init Event stops the script in Quest A from running while Quest B is running.

I'll make sure that she is something to look forward to, for when you get back! Development Log Today I'm basically tweaking the shit out of a lot of things. It's a whole lot of me recruiting Ivy over and over again, to take her into combat, to then tweak things that I find don't work well. Ran into another situation where Ivy can interject herself (when you pick a flower while she is speaking about an encountered dead body) so I'm fixing things like that. I have decided to NERF her overall weapon damage and weapon skills. The reason behind this is that she really is a fucking terminator at this point... and I've had it happen that I'd wander into a raider area and she'd just wipe the floor with them, teleporting about, within 10 seconds.. killing 8 raiders.. fucking crazy. So I'm tweaking things a lot. I have also disabled her special attacks when the combattarget is the player, because well.. she'll kill you within 2 seconds after trying to pickpocket an NX-2C controller holotape off her.. Another thing that happened, and is a big reason why I decided to nerf her weapon damage, was that she'd often have a headshot in by the time she got around to a special attack. Which just won't do for dramatic and cinematic effect. You can configure her combat styles in her holotape, for instance the frequency of special attacks, etc. And if you're into deep tweaking then you can adjust globals for minimum/maximum special attack distances, etc.. Additional: Players will be able to upgrade Ivy's special attack features, reducing the cooldown period, and increasing the range, through 3 fetch quests, where Ivy will ask the player to fetch an upgrade holotape, after reaching a certain stage of her development. This means that you can increase Ivy's special attack skills as you travel with her. I am also thinking of adding additional special attacks, such as a telefrag attack, where Ivy teleports into an enemy to explode it from the inside, etc..etc..

y'know it IS going to take a while (3 months at least) before we release right? It will be somewhere IN the summer, if not by the end of it. I can't even go without my daily fix of at least an hour of Commonwealth (!) To be fair. I had no deadlines or budgets while working on Ivy. No sane game developer would spend the amount of resources and time on a follower like this and be in business long enough to talk about it. Ivy is a labor of love, in which I've tried to examine psychology and human behavior, under extreme circumstances from a Jungian and Freudian mixed perspective. Likely the developers and writers got strict budgets in terms of (no more than <n> lines of dialogue) and lots of other restrictions that I wouldn't agree to work under. The reason that Ivy 'works' is because there's 'more' to her, and a lot of that 'more' has been put there carefully and planned out. Little lines and remarks to make her personality take a hold. In that way, even more so in the new build, this takes queues from life: In the beginning it's more of an 'in love' phase, after which a deeper bond forms.

Having said that.. Ivy will soon have the ability to hack enemy Synths (not coursers) and some Robots (not sentries) so they fight on her side for a short time.. and some other abilities as well during combat.. Working today on tweaking her special kill moves, working on filtering enemy types (so she doesn't try a kill move on a Behemoth or Mirelurk Queen etc..) and to tweak the frequency (she shouldn't spam the ability as it's quite overpower). So today is spent fighting a lot of raiders in god mode, to see how her combat routines work and what can be tweaked or balanced. Also, unrelated, while testing out her 'redeem' quest I found out another 'legal' option of recruiting her without a voucher. The trick is to pickpocket the NX-2C controller holotape from her. Thing is, I haven't been able to yet but I guess with high enough pickpocket- and sneak perks you could be able to do it.

Well the answer to that is kind of spoilerish, but without spoiling too much, her teleport systems are independent of the Institute's. Ivy actually comments on her ability to teleport at several moments in the new build, hinting to more background on her abilities, bestowed to her by Dr. Stein.