One of the hardest things about making a custom-voiced follower is creating the custom follower framework that the follower uses. The interesting thing is that most of us doing this now learned how to do it from some tutorial or another (in my case Joseph Russel’s youtube tutorial) and have since expanded upon what we learned and created our features and ideas.
The fact remains that every time we create a custom-voiced follower, we are doing most of the same work over and over. Not only that, but when we add features to one follower, we may add different features to another. The end result is wasted opportunity for followers to use all the features you have created over time, as some of them don’t have each other’s features. Terrible sentence, but at least you know it wasn’t written by AI. 😂
I was watching Tron Ares the other night and it gave me an idea. Why not have one framework that controls all my custom-voiced followers? You might think, well Heath, why not just use Nether’s Follower Framework? There are two good reasons. His framework is for vanilla voiced followers using the vanilla system and the features I’ve created for my custom-voiced followers were not designed for vanilla voiced followers and were coded in a specific way for a custom framework.
So I have created a Master Control Framework. The first follower that will use it will be Vixi Talax Remastered. Any future custom-voiced followers will also use this framework. This allows me to make features just one time inside the MCF and then any follower added to the framework gets those features. Also, if I upgrade the framework with new features, I can easily add them to the existing followers that use that framework without having to write custom code for each follower to use the features.
I’ve already created the first functional version of the MCF. I did it while working on Vixi Talax Remastered - so no time was wasted! Now, I’m adding features to the framework that I would have added to Vixi. The first version of the framework will have:
Support for up to 30 Custom-Voiced Followers (I can max it out later to 128 if I so choose)
Sandboxing when waiting which can be toggled on and off (stay put or sandbox while you wait)
Horse Riding - each follower has their own custom horse! The horse is in the follower’s plugin and the framework to manage horse riding is in the MCF.
Outfit Management - To start it will support an adventuring outfit and a sleep outfit.
Home Assignment - Assign a home to your followers.
Consistent features across all followers in the framework
Friendly Fire Protection
Features that might be available at release or in future updates:
Combat Styles
Healing
MCM to Manage settings
Hairstyle System (like the one Vayne Remastered uses)
and more!
I imagine I’m less than a month away from releasing Vixi Talax and this new MCF. I hope you’re as excited about it as I am!
Heath aka ColdSun