[rant]

I am an artist. That's pretty much what I do. I create worlds. I do it in fiction, and I do it in mods. After spending several long hours today trying to figure out how to get the kinks out of generating LOD for my custom worldspace I had a sudden realization: for the past 4 years, I haven't been an artist at all; I've been involved in a titanic struggle with bugs. Not real bugs (thank god) but digital bugs, bugs that often cannot be killed, but only worked around.

Since February of 2008, here's what I've been fighting (feel free to nod your head sagely):

- the very first day I sat down to mod Oblivion, I had to figure out how to create a heightmap without the CS crashing; then how to fix the holes it made in the terrain (0 0, 0 31 spikes, anyone?)
- shortly after that, I had to figure out how to get my custom birthsigns to work...turns out, you couldn't add new ones reliably, and had to overwrite vanilla ones; then I had to figure out how to get the bloody icons to show up in the character sheet (not a bug, just lousy documentation and a bizarro naming requirement)
- then I had to figure out how to get my changes to 'stick' in the region editor, which always had a buggy interface
- then there was that pesky problem with LOD trees in Oblivion (that never got sorted out)
- getting custom meshes into the CS wasn't too hard...as long as you didn't want them to do anything fancy: creating a custom creature was a friggin' nightmare the first time I did it (thanks, Kilza)
- and I still remember the day when I finally got a multi-material collision mesh working for a custom tile--oh happy day!--long hours hunched over nifskope assembling tiles like Frankenstein creating his monster...all because we never could figure out how the freakin' MOPP collision was set up
- of course, there was that huge animation bug (sunken in the ground, rotated oddly): that one didn't take nearly as long to figure out as I was afraid it would (probably less than a week)...still not sure I got it right, but at least my animations appeared to be working
- then I moved on to creating custom grass (all those hours of Nifskoping paid off)...good, not too bad
- of course, creating custom trees required you to decrypt speedtree files (actually got a spiky thing in game without it crashing)...don't think I could get it working with the billboards and LOD, though
- by now, FO3 had come out, but I was pretty wiped out...I did figure out how to get the LOD to work (similar nightmare to Skyrim)...except for two things: the object texture atlas bug (was making progress on that), and those god-freakin-damned LOD trees! gods I hate those things!
- how could I forget about the water bug! having to start all of your worldspaces at 10,500 units is teh best!
- + I don't know how many little bugs...tiny bugs that you can crush in an hour, or at most, a day.

Of course, I had to learn a lot of other stuff, too (creating models, textures, animations, scripting, etc.), no one said that it would be easy, but the thing that really, really grinds my gears is that in the last 4 years when all I wanted to do was make a nice little custom world with some interesting characters, a good story, and unique settings and creatures, I spent > 50% of that time squashing bugs. Not: writing dialogue, cluttering dungeons, creating cool creatures and tilesets...no, bug-killing.

I could have had the bloody thing done by now.

I am no longer an artist. When I woke up today it was to the discovery that I had turned into a highly specialized pest control agent.

[/rant]

There. I feel a whole lot better.