Lots of little things learned, and a new area almost finished

Been over a week since I was able to update here, as real world stuff didn't leave much time for working on the module. I managed to do a little work on it here and there, and was able to get in a lot more time on it than I expected this weekend (since I expected to have little to no time at all).

I've done as much as I can on cutscene area and the first area until CEP 2.0 comes out. I think I finally got the camera problem solved: I used SetCameraFacing instead of SetCameraMode to set the camera angle where I wanted it to be. Why the former worked and not the latter I don't know. Everything is pretty much done in the first scene except one of the transititions (since I haven't yet made the area it's transitioning too). I wasn't able to 100% resolve the disappearing peasants problem. I tried a suggestion from someone in the forum, but it produced a weird effect wherein half the peasants would disappear when they were supposed to, but the other half would sort of jump into the center of the trigger and then just stay there. So I went back to the old method, and that's that. I also set down two map pins and learned how make them appear during a conversation.

The player can go into two directions - north or northwest - from the first area, and I decided to work on the latter first. In this scene, the player comes upon two hobgoblins arguing over the body of a soldier. After dispatching the hobgoblins, the player can talk to the solider, who is on the verge of death. The soldier gives him his wedding ring and asks it to return it to his wife, then dies. The player can take his armor and weapons and stuff afterwards. In putting the area together, I learned how to make NPCs talk to each other and how to trigger their conversation. I learned how to do alignment shifts in a conversation, and how to use an invisible object to simulate the player talking to the nearly dead soldier. In short: a script "kills" the soldier as soon as it spawns, and since a PC can't interact with a corpse, I put an invisible object in front of the soldier, so that when it falls it lands under it. PC's can interact with an invisible object, and so that's where the conversation takes place (Ghostdreamer spelled this all out, so I can't take credit for figuring it out myself).

For the most part everything worked, but there were a few glitches. The dumbest one had to do with the conversation: in order to make two NPC's talk, you have to put blank lines for the PC between their lines. However, I forgot that when you add a line it says "," so when I tested it the first time, that kept popping up in the conversation. Some of the other problems are more difficult. For one, I can't get through the whole conversation because the hobgoblins keep spotting the PC and attacking it. Also, I noticed that they keep talking a little longer even while rushing the PC, which looks odd. Also, there are some problems with the soldier. The invisible object should destroy itself at the end of the conversation, but it doesn't, so when the PC tries to loot the body, they get the invisible object's inventory instead, which means they get a second copy of the ring. Meanwhile, the PC can't get at the soldier's inventory at all.

Nonetheless, whereas it seemed like it took forever to put the first area together, I got through this one very quickly (though the first one was more complex). I feel like I'm making progress here. Of course, these are very simple areas, and I've been skipping over the placeables for now, but still, I think my skills are improving.