Pandemic Piper: Starting a PACE

I often joke that I'm primarily motivated by boredom.  You know how it is: you're sitting there, watching COPS or Ghost Adventures or some other background noise bit of nonsense, and it suddenly occurs to you: I'm freaking bored.  And then most normal people change the channel or go read a book or take a walk.

I'm a writer and coder, so when I get bored, my brain starts looking for a stupid problem to solve somewhere, and it keeps bugging me until I at least attempt to solve it.

Since I started developing PANPC (Pack Attack NPC Edition) as a 30-line quick prototype Fallout 4 mod in 2018, one question I've gotten many times is, what can I do to improve the AI in the vanilla FO4 companions?  Because yeah, they kinda suck, and their issues really become apparent once all the other NPCs suddenly know how to shoot straight.  

I've experimented many times with companions.  They're buried under vanilla game systems and mechanics that normal NPCs don't have to deal with, and the experiments didn't always produce the most satisfying results for me.  I eventually pulled the experimental companion code out of PANPC, filed it under "maybe some other day", and got on with a new focus on controlling the scope of a quickly growing and increasingly complex PANPC system.  

And then, in the fall of 2020, as a plague raged and economies sank and madmen pursued thrones and the seven bowls of God's wrath were poured out upon the earth, Patreon supporters Cryss and Ebby began poking me again about this companion thing, and it turned out that I was the right kind of bored to think about it again.

That's all a roundabout way of saying that I'm now developing PACE - Pack Attack Companion Edition - as a partner mod to PANPC, and we're far enough now into an alpha proof of concept that I'm fairly sure it's going to work. 

The alpha currently replaces Piper Wright's combat AI with a more robust and.. er.. more proactive attitude when it comes to dangerous cohabitants of the Boston Commonwealth.  She's reckless, on target, and generally a pain in the ass, but she certainly makes life a little more interesting for sure.

(As progress continues, status updates will be posted here for patrons only, and patrons at the Supporter tier and above will get early access to developmental prototypes and other dev perks as I dream them up.)