Frustrations... Again

Well, I finally got my computer back from the repair shop today, and I'm glad, because I've been going through withdrawal after not having it for a month. I've been working on my fiancée's computer, but I've found it's extremely difficult to do anything productive on a computer not my own. Unfortunately, it'll be a while before I can actually use my computer. See, HP wiped my hard drive, which I expected. The problem is that they installed Windows XP Media Center Edition, rather than Windows Vista Ultimate, which is what I had. So now I get to spend several hours getting the computer back in order and everything set the way it needs to be before I can get anything productive done.

Further frustrations are in my scripting work for Casa. The XP system has some bugs that need to be worked out, but the biggest problem is a design flaw: it requires creatures to have a particular death script set on them. Now, that's fine for any custom creatures. But CEP creatures and those from the standard palette can't have their scripts changed, and that means creating a custom copy of those creatures. While I plan to pretty much use all custom creatures myself, thus negating this issue, Casa doesn't, which means he needs me to rewrite the default death script to use my scripts instead. Simple enough. But then it occurs to me that this problem could pop up all over the place. What about when I write a spawn system? The creatures will need custom spawn scripts. And what if I have a standard creature that needs one custom death script and another that needs two? I can't have the same script run two different things. So I'm basically rewriting all the default creature scripts to use my HCR2 1.6 creature events, and putting the original BioWare code into their own scripts, which he can set to be called if he wants. The problem is, it's insanely tedious, especially since I'm having to write documentation on each one (something everyone should do in their scripts but, lamentably, few do). Add to that the difficulty in working on someone else's computer and you see some of my problem. The good news is that I'm almost done. Hopefully this weekend the scripts will be fixed and I can go back to bug testing the XP system.

Speaking of the XP system, if anyone wants to help me test it (not sure how many folks there are who read this), please shoot me an email (squatting_monk at yahoo.com) or comment and I'll send you a sample module. I plan on posting it on the Vault when all the kinks are worked out, both in an HCR2 version and in a stand-alone version.