tl;dr

• I found it very hard to get into reverse engineering (RE), mostly because I couldn’t find many practical references or tutorials for Fallout 4 VR.
• Recently, while working on adding VR support and a few features to Extended Dialogue Interface (XDI), I needed to find how Fallout 4 decides when the player is far enough away from an NPC to exit a dialogue.
• This post walks through the actual steps I used: starting from a known game setting, following references in IDA, understanding the decompiled code, and finally identifying the correct function to hook.
• The technique in one line: start from a string you can name, follow it to the data that owns it, then follow the data to the code that reads it.

I’m sure anyone with real RE experience will find this fairly simple and crude, but when I started I would have loved to find something like this. Something written is better than nothing.