Those among you who have been in our Discord chat[discord.gg] in the past days most likely know that Alarcarr has officially thrown in the towel, modding-wise. (Or this particular mod at the very least.) This brings up a few problems, either innately or through the abrupt nature of his departure.

Most of these problems boil down to 'something has to change on the Workshop'. Under the circumstances, I'm fairly positive Alar isn't going to keep pushing out updates, and I'm quite probably the worst person to try to ask him for anything right now. (I don't think we're on friendly terms anymore - but then, I might be misreading his last messages and actions.)


Anyone not using the Steam Workshop can skip this section. ModDB will continue working as always.

We're going to switch to a new download somewhere in the near future - preferably sooner rather than later, so you might see a 1.1.0 beta build or a duplicate 1.0.2 crop up on the Workshop within the coming weeks or days.

The details are a bit foggier, I'm afraid:

• The new download will lose all forum/comment history from this one. I'll copy over the currently pinned threads (except maybe this one), but that's basically it.
  
• We may be losing the name. As far as I remember, no two Workshop items can share the same name - even if they could, it would cause confusion with the current, soon-to-be-defunct build.
  
  Alar might perhaps be persuaded to rename and relabel this download as non-functional, but like I said earlier, this cannot be counted on.
  
• I have no idea when we'll start the migration, much less when we'll finish it.

I think I speak for all of us when I say we're as clueless as you. Still, I can throw out a few educated guesses:

• Less new art. Alar was more or less the only one creating stuff in that department, aside from my occasional repurposing of SE5 or vanilla assets.
  
• IllyiaSvara seems to have decided to take Alar's seat balance-wise. The good news is she's pretty active in the feedback department and has a few ideas of her own, much like Alar in his earlier days. The bad news is that 'seems' is all I can say without putting words in her mouth. I'm not really sure what her plans are. :P
  
• Faster release schedule, maybe? This may sound a bit counter-intuitive, as we've lost someone... but it also seems plausible. I, for one, was partly dragged into dormancy by a lack of activity from Alar and Darloth, and an inability to wrap up anything they were working on, either due to lack of feedback from players and modders alike, or for fear that my interference would be counter-productive.
  
  With their projects being either taken over or canceled outright, and with Illyia providing at least one of the forms of activity that stirs me out of my hibernation, it's possible that things will go along a lot faster.
  
• Conversely, the balancing may conceivably go to hell - one of Alar's reasons for leaving is apparently that he wanted to do a lot of things to fix the mod (whether it needed fixing is a topic in its own right) but didn't want to get dragged into a discussion with uneducated old me every time he did something. (Unfortunately, as I have an opinion on almost anything game-related, I can understand why his perception of my actions is in conflict with my previously stated intention of "I'll help out, but this is still your mod". Especially after the point where I got attached to some of it like the new races/story. :/)
  
• There is perhaps going to be an additional delay in 1.1.0's development/release as we focus on sorting this all out.
  
• The wiki over on GitHub is now open for non-contributors to edit at their leisure. I wonder why this was disabled, anyway... :o