I’m giving up on the CKII thing.

I hit a roadblock which isn’t a show-stopper: the topology used by the game is an 8 bit-per-pixel indexed bitmap, and .NET prefers to edit 32 bit-per-pixel bitmaps. The conversion between the two is well-understood, so that’s not the end of the world.

However, I’ve just interviewed for a couple of jobs in a row which didn’t care about my degree and wanted to see specific experience with the frameworks they use. Now that’s understandable, perhaps even commendable… except that it puts me in kind of a rough spot. There are zero jobs for CKII modders.

You could argue that showing the persistence to finish a nontrivial project is important, and you’d certainly be right about that. (I’ll finish the next one, promise.) But I think my efforts are probably better spent working on a well-documented problem domain that’s obviously relevant to business needs than on a trial-and-error effort to make a glorified toy.

Furthermore, there’s apparently something with the new patch where it’ll crash if your mod doesn’t do rivers and adjacencies between islands properly. There are the problems associated with creating dynamic and interesting characters. There was the sudden realization that I can’t just leave the ocean provinces at the same size as the land provinces, and that the vanilla game seems to have each land province border one ocean province: how would I go about drawing workable ocean provinces dynamically? Simply squishing them together into kingdoms wouldn’t work, because any given county might border two ocean kingdoms, and then it’d crash.

I’m gonna go write a web app.