In Limbo

Put in a couple of hours on the module this afternoon. It was pretty much all building: I built a fourth area with two houses in it, and then built areas for the two houses. I made this somewhat easier by downloading this collection of prefabs. This is ideal for my module, since It's going to require a bunch of mostly generic home interiors, and creating them all would end up sucking up a lot of time. Still, it wasn't perfect, though this is mainly due to the limitations of the toolset: I quickly discovered that I could only manipulate the tiles so much. Once more, one of the prefabs combines areas in a way that I'd really like to duplicate, but can't figure out how to accomplish, despite messing around with the toolset for about an hour. Other than that, I set up some transitions and did a bunch of other minor things. I tested everything, and found that most everything worked. The hobgoblins now both display the arguing animation like I wanted. OTOH, I still can't figure out how to make the corpse lootable. Also, it took some fiddling around to get the merchant's conversation to work right. First, I forgot to set a variable check at an important point, and then after I set it, it still didn't work quite right until I realized that I had "<=" in the code instead of "<" when checking the value. Finally, I also removed a custom tileset I was using; I only had it in the cutscene, and didn't forsee using it elsewhere, and that wasn't enough to justify keeping it.

Unfortunately, there are further setbacks in the release of CEP 2.0. Specifically, the team got fed up at all the abuse they were taking on the forums, so they basically said "fine, we just won't do it then." Having taken my share of abuse when I was working on Shadowfist, I sympathize, especially since most of the vitriol directed at them was petty and stupid and whiny and just plain mean. Unfortunately, this leaves my own project in limbo, because I don't know if the project is dead for good, or if the people working on it are just blowing off some steam. Until I know for sure, I'm very limited in my building. I don't want to use any of the current CEP stuff in case 2.0 still comes out. OTOH, if it doesn't, then I'm going to have to start learning how to merge the custom content I want with the current version of the CEP. The whole situation is really disheartening.